3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

Much has been made, in recent years, of the “customer experience,” that collection of experiences that together make up an overall customer journey from the first contact with marketing to the return trip and every little thing in between. Making the best customer experience helps improve the likelihood of return business, even when those customers are other businesses.

B2B buyers have just as much in the way of research tools as B2C customers do, and if anything, more reason to use these tools. While B2C customers may want to buy a certain thing right away, B2B customers are likely planning much larger purchases, sometimes over much longer intervals, and therefore have more reason to be careful about where these companies are committing resources. That in turn means that customer experience expectations are higher than ever; companies want results, and want a high-quality experience. An Accenture (News - Alert) study says that customer experience is set to be a bigger part of corporate operations in 74 percent of cases by just 2018.

So what do businesses do here? While the concept of “best customer experience” varies from customer to customer, there are certain things that are fairly universal, and help produce a better customer experience. Customer experience is not a zero-sum game, meaning you either have a great one or you never ever buy from that place again. Everyone likely has an example here of a customer experience that was merely marginal, and nothing stops that customer from going back.

Some basic points help advance a better customer service overall: making the customer come first, a common cliché, but one better executed by quick responses to problems—75 percent of customers now expect service within five minutes of making contact online—is one great way to move forward. Focusing on the journey, not on one particular part of it—looking at the entire process from marketing to after-sales service—is another. Enlisting the whole of the business to focus on the experience is another; don't just expect the call center to be super-friendly, but rather look at the human resources parts, the accounting parts, and see where there can be customer-facing improvements made. Finally, remember that the whole process requires time to execute; a better customer experience can happen immediately, but the best customer experience takes a lot of improvements stacked together and continually readjusted to produce the best.

In the end, it's all about—as Eliyahu Goldratt put it in his book The Goal—a “process of continuous improvement.” The little things done today improve a customer experience, and the big things done over months or years make it better still. Customer experience is an ongoing matter for the entire company, and those who do the best job of it are likely to come out the best on the other side.