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Three recession-proofing strategies to enhance customer satisfaction

As successful and resilient enterprises know, customer service maintains the relationships that are the lifeblood of a business. When periods of economic uncertainty like the one we’re in now arise, customer interactions and support take on heightened importance. 

According to research by McKinsey, over 70% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. It’s reinforced by analyses like this study from Salesforce, which reports that nearly 90% of buyers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.

In today’s shifting environment, customer satisfaction and positive customer experiences are paramount to sustaining and growing your business and the bottom line — and a very real competitive differentiator day-to-day. 

Enhancing customer satisfaction is one of four key focus areas discussed in our new eBook, Business strategies for turbulent times: A leadership guide to recession-proofing. This guide is a timely read highlighting ways leaders can take decisive and targeted action now, and how Conduent solutions can help you fortify and grow success.  

Leaders of enterprises large and small need the tools, technology and support to strengthen their operations and grow success in the midst of economic uncertainty. 

Below are three best practices for building customer satisfaction overviewed in the eBook. Adopting these will help you strengthen your operations and build sustained resilience into the future.

1. Deliver seamless omnichannel interactions. 

Know your customers’ channels of choice and optimize them. Match their channel preferences with common types of intent and train agents accordingly. You can then track interaction types by channel to identify trends in intent to meet customer preferences. 

Take an honest look at your operations and evaluate what you can realistically achieve through your internal resources and where it may make sense to leverage external expertise and capabilities to achieve your objectives. 

We’ve designed our Customer Experience Management (CXM) solutions to help businesses strengthen and take their capabilities to the next level leveraging skilled talent, flexible technology, domain expertise and global reach. 

2. Enable agile work operations and talent.

Where and how people work has changed. Work-from-home and hybrid delivery models continue to accelerate and provide opportunities to increase employee satisfaction while maintaining business continuity.

As a trusted partner to leading brands, we’ve found that a scalable technology ecosystem with best-practice on-site, hybrid and work-at-home delivery models for CXM enables operational agility and proactive agent engagement that’s bolstered through integrated compliance and quality controls.

3. Humanize the digital experience.

Some customers seek a conversational experience that solely digital and/or self-service options can’t provide. They want to feel heard and understood — something only human interaction can achieve. Even when using digital channels such as chat, text and email — 65% of consumers want an actual person to respond.

Give customers off-ramps to reach a live agent while using self-service tools. Empower agents to deliver hyper-personalized customer interactions across channels by pursuing a unified, consolidated data strategy.

At Conduent, we know the more our clients interact with customers on a personalized, responsive level across channels, the more they deliver on their brand promise and increase satisfaction and loyalty. It’s why our CXM solutions focus on delivering human-centric, connected, omnichannel customer experiences throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

I encourage you to read more details about this and three other key focus areas for recession-proofing in the eBook and how we can help you build lasting business resilience.

About the Author

Ryan Collins is General Manager, Customer Experience Management at Conduent with nearly two decades delivering operational excellence in the areas of innovation, leadership and employee engagement. Supporting numerous Fortune 100 companies, Ryan works strategically with our clients to break the traditional industry trends in customer service operations creating brand ambassadors focused on delivering optimal interactions and critical outcomes. As a Customer Experience leader, Ryan is a strong believer in the power of workplace culture and regularly develops internal campaigns to change the conversation from KPIs to people, employee experience and work life balance. Ryan enjoys a good Netflix binge and can also be found on a golf course near you.

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