It’s never been more important for organisations to deliver great customer experience – 56% of customers say they’ll stop doing business with a company after a bad digital interaction. Despite this, making the necessary changes to improve customer experience often gets put off, with prevailing attitudes being that the necessary solutions are too expensive, take too long to implement, and aren’t necessarily worth it.
Now, I’ve recently been reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and it struck me that his philosophy is exactly the way to overcome these obstacles and easily dip your toe into delivering a better customer experience.
The concept is simple: “Small Changes. Remarkable results.”
That’s to say that, rather than running head-on into a major solution change, you should instead make tiny changes, or Atomic Habits, all of which incrementally add up over time:
“Atomic:
- An extremely small amount of a thing; the single irreducible unit of a larger system.
- The source of immense energy or power.”
“Habit:
- A routine or practice performed regularly; an automatic response to a specific situation.”
Adopting the Atomic Habits approach means that improving customer experiences doesn’t need to be a huge commitment – you can achieve the same results through continuous tiny changes which target the needs of your customers. The effort taken is less, but the impact can be so much more.
In this blog, we’ll take you through why it’s critical to keep your customers engaged now more than ever, and how looking to “big bang” improvements may be counterproductive when the same results could be achieved more easily through the aggregation of marginal gains.
Retail has set the pace, now it’s time for other industries to catch up
The nature of retail has changed drastically in a short space of time – the retailers that came out on top during the pandemic were the ones which could adapt quickly to the new retail environment and keep customers engaged, without relying on their physical stores.
The two engines that have driven that change are technology, and the adoption of a customer-centric approach. And that commitment means that customers now judge all organisations to the same standards set by their retail experiences.
For a typical customer, it doesn’t matter what sector the organisation they’re talking to is in – they want the same level of customer experience – or better – than what they’d receive in retail. It can be helpful to think of the customer as Veruca Salt, the character from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – they want it all, they want it now, and if they don’t get it, they’re going to find another business which can offer what they’re looking for.
The advancement of customer experience in retail has fuelled that expectation – if your customer can get shoes delivered the next day, or resolve an issue with a damaged product over whatever communication channel best suits them, then they expect that of every organisation they interact with – and those that don’t deliver are going to draw negative attention from customers – or, in the words of Veruca Salt, if they don’t get the things they’re after, they’re going to scream.
Retail has had an advantage here – not just from being early adopters, but because many retailers are owner-managed, private institutions, with a lot of ability to pivot and respond to customer need quickly, even if it requires major investments to pull off.
This means major changes to engagement can be implemented from the top-down to improve customer experience in retail – but not every sector has that ability, and even if they can, it’s often unproductive to look for a “big bang” improvement to fix all your problems at once.
The case for Atomic Habits, or iterative improvements
Traditional contact centre solutions have, for a long time, been the “big bang” solution organisations look to for improving customer experience – but they often fall short. Traditional solutions frequently require significant investment in time and cash to adapt for the specific needs of your business or when changes in the market occur. They’re often limited to particular communication channels and run on proprietary software code, which leads to vendor lock-in and can create a drag on budget and time when modifications need to be made.
Instead, when improving the customer experience your business offers, you can take a page from the book of David Brailsford, former GB cycling head honcho, and focus on the aggregation of marginal gains.
Just like British Cycling success, the major developments that have driven retail forward were often achieved incrementally, getting tested and refined over time according to business-customer feedback loops.
To catch up, a modern and flexible contact centre solution could be your chance to level-up with retail and wow your customers with a new experience. That’s where Twilio Flex comes in: as the world’s most flexible contact centre solution, you don’t need to restructure your technology stack or buy new tools every time you want to improve the experience you deliver to your customers. Built on open standards and highly programmable, Twilio Flex makes it possible to create exceptional omnichannel customer engagement and have a foundation to keep innovating your experience thereafter.
Even better – you’ll stay ahead of the Veruca Salts of the world!
How can Ciptex help?
Ciptex are no strangers to helping organisations deliver great customer experiences. Through our RACE framework, we can help you establish a proven Twilio Flex solution that’s tailored to your business and help you customise and integrate the platform to meet the needs of both customers, and your people.
We’ve delivered RACE solutions to a wide range of sectors, and have helped our past customers deliver world-class customer engagement, in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.
If you’d like to know more about delivering great customer experience, why not get in touch to see how Ciptex RACE can help you?
