5-Minute Read
Seamless Customer Experience (noun): Marketing-generated term to describe the ideal customer journey
80% of customers consider their experience with a company as important as its products (Salesforce). 75% will stop doing business with a company after a negative experience with that company (VHT). Yet only 49% say companies provide a good customer experience (PWC).
Best-in-class companies working to remain on the right side of this 49% create a seamless customer experience. For simple eCommerce operations, chatbots and responsive email campaigns can do the trick. But, for larger businesses with buyers investing tens of thousands of dollars into solutions, there’s a larger burden of responsibility.
This guide covers the definition, benefits, and creation of a seamless customer experience, as well as highlights the tech-forward solutions that make achieving this North Star more realistic.
Defining a Seamless Customer Experience
The customer experience is the culmination of every interaction a customer has with a brand. It is considered seamless when there are no barriers to communication, answers, and action. It’s the simplest way customers go from a want—to a need—to a solution.
Addressing the Importance
There are more options for customers than ever, and sites like G2.com give businesses the full picture of competition while giving buyers direct comparisons. A seamless customer experience differentiates your business in the marketplace. While sales benefits the most with ROI from a seamless customer experience, customer retention and referrals also play a key role.
Understanding the Customer Experience
With a solidified understanding, businesses can begin to predict the desires of their buyers and simultaneously get them the materials they need to close business faster.
Build a seamless customer experience by understanding these key factors:
- What collateral are you sending & when?
- What are the key pain points of the buyer committee?
- How many meetings can you expect before “next steps”?
- How long is their decision-making process?
Many of these are questions are covered in the discovery process, but for the questions that feel too forward or impolite, businesses use their CRM to pull averages of:
- Total # of emails sent
- Total # of collateral sent
- Total meetings scheduled
- Sales cycle length
Using variables like industry, company size, region, and more can provide specific insights to hone in on a given customer.
Human Connection
For ordering paper towels or groceries, digital solutions like Alexa work great. But no one starts a $50,000 investment in their business with the phrase “Hey Siri”. Large deals require a larger amount of trust—there’s no way around it. People need to connect and interact on a personal level for deals that offer the biggest potential.
If a salesperson can meet in-person, that’s fantastic. However, if they are limited to the Virtual Sales world, there’s a myriad of solutions for creating personal connections:
CRM
This is a great tool for remembering what went on in a call. Take diligent notes for use in further conversations and convert at higher rates.
Custom Video Messages
For a truly personalized touch, add on to a message, email, presentation, etc. Apps like BombBomb lead the industry as a solution for easily creating and tracking personalized videos. They’re better if they’re not perfect—the less scripted it sounds, the more personal it feels.
Recording Virtual Conferences
Video conference software like Google and Zoom lets you record in real- time, and can help dig out useful information and anecdotes to recall. Best-in-class sales teams use programs like Gong or CallRail to record and produce transcripts and sales enablement insights into what works best—and can use recordings for onboarding and training.
Speed
According to a Zendesk study, 89% of buyers ranked speed of response the top factor in their customer experience. The Harvard Business Review found that responding to requests within the first hour can 7x the chances of success. To attain those numbers, businesses need to respond within the hour to their prospective customers for any request:
- Calls/scheduling
- Custom collateral
- Updating materials/notes
Responses that don’t require new collateral or content are easy to expedite with a priority level change or editing email notification settings. For sending collateral or content, however, staying within one hour for a send deadline can be stressful. To mitigate that, businesses can use Content Management systems like Hubspot CMS, or sales enablement platforms like Bynder to quickly and easily store/find collateral for any occasion.
Efficiency & Convenience
PWC’s extensive research of the global expectations of customer experience point to efficiency and convenience as the two most important factors when making a buying decision. 60% and 50% respectively say that they would pay more for them. An ideal, seamless, efficient, and convenient line of communication is built on giving customers:
- One number to call
- One email chain/scheduling platform
- One Virtual Conferencing solution
- One living, searchable home for all collateral and materials
The shortest road from point of contact to onboarding is a straight line. Customers want their vendors to be easy to reach and make the process as simple as possible.
Forward-thinking sellers automate their updates to materials and presentations reflecting their customer’s questions. Additionally, elite sales + marketing operations utilize the data from past customers in their CRM to predict the collateral needs of their buyers.
The key is for sellers to keep their links simple and their messages organized. The most effective way to quickly and effectively empower your sellers is with a central presentation or cloud-based hub for all of your collateral and content needs.
Revenue Growth At Every Stage
The most straight-forward reason to invest in a seamless customer experience: revenue growth across teams. It can expedite sales cycles while generating loyalty. Loyalty drives renewals as well as referrals. Additionally, keeping existing customers is drastically less expensive than finding new ones.
When transitioning to customer care, ensure your processes are seamless and quick. By focusing on consistency in these areas, businesses have a greater chance of success:
- Branded materials, presentations, onboarding guides
- Messaging, nomenclature, goals
- Email/phone correspondence frequency and response
- Human connection
The easiest way to assure this is to equip Customer Care teams with the same tools that Sales and Marketing teams use like CRM, CMS, Sales Enablement, etc,.
- Personalized video messages help introduce new members of the team.
- Syncing communications in apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams chats keeps everyone on the same page.
- Recording calls with sales enablement tools, utilizing CRM for data, notes, insights, and average onboarding time, as well as CMS-based searches for materials, can expedite response time.
Technology that can enhance all aspects of a customer’s journey makes for a seamless experience. The solutions to increase efficiency, consistency, speed, and connection are already available, and easier to use than ever.
