Category: Customer Experience

With advances in online communication, and the court of public opinion that social media now provides, brands and their customer service faux pas are more exposed than ever. Underserved and angry customers can easily take to Twitter, Facebook, or any number of digital channels to publicly ‘out’ companies like yours for falling short, especially when it comes to your product or customer service offerings.
This is why setting and managing customer expectations and their perceptions is key. Setting expectations can ultimately protect your brand from online backlash. If your customer knows everything to expect early on, from return and exchange procedures to customer service wait times, there will be no surprises that will prompt them to ‘out’ your business online.
Here’s a complete guide on how to set and improve upon customer expectations for your business, big or small.
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What is customer expectation?
The phrase ‘customer expectation’ refers to anything and everything that a customer expects from a service, product, or brand. They can form this expectation from their own knowledge and experience, as well as research into your organization or product. They can also develop expectations on how a product or service will work or otherwise benefit their lives. This is just one reason why truth in advertising is so important!
Customer expectations are not uniform – there are different dynamics to consider, including interpersonal expectations (what your customers expect before engaging with your customer service team or other employees) and omnichannel expectations (what your customers expect in terms of the multiple channels they can engage with you on, from in-store to online). Whatever shape or size these expectations come in, it’s important to invest in expectation management to protect your business up front.
A Complete Guide to Customer Perception
Why is setting customer expectations important?
Your brand should care deeply about customer expectations. If they are not reasonable or aligned with the reality of your product or service, you will always fall short with customers. This will impact your brand reputation, your sales, and ultimately your bottom line.
Setting customer expectations so they convey the true value of your product, service, and customer experience will strengthen your brand perception, limit negative social media mentions, and help decrease logistical nightmares like unnecessary returns and refunds, and call surges on your customer service lines.
What influences customer expectations?
Customers approach your brand, and its products and services, with preconceptions in mind. They expect that your brand will work in a way that benefits them, their lifestyle, their work environment, or a particular project they are working on. These expectations are formed by several factors, including:

Marketing and advertising. Chances are the expectations customers bring to the table come directly from your marketing and advertising promises.

Lived experience. Most customers have had a previous experience with a product or service similar to yours, and thus have a working understanding of how things should work.

Other people. Word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews by other customers go quite a long way in forming preconceptions of a brand and its customer service operations.

With all this in mind, what initial steps can your brand take to manage customer expectations? Read 5 tips to help set and improve upon them, and in doing so, ultimately save your customers and customer-facing staff a lot of headaches, confusion, and frustration.
What Factors Influence Customer Perception?
5 Tips to Set Help Customer Expectations (and Fast)
1. Communicate what to expect at every opportunity, on every channel.
Customers will be less likely to roast you online or combat one of your customer service professionals if they are made aware of what to expect in every place you can think of: Your website, your social media bios, your advertising, any recorded messaging on your phone tree, on your product pages, and at checkout.
Your customers will be far more understanding and loyal to you in future if you have made them aware of what they can expect from you from a product or customer service standpoint. This information can include things like customer wait times and response times, customer service channels, business hours, return and exchange policies, and more.

TIP:
Communicating estimated hold times can help manage customer expectations, but it doesn’t relieve the frustration of having to wait on hold. Find out how call-back technology can help!

2. Scrutinize your customer’s journey by putting yourself in their shoes.
If you’re faced with an influx of bad social media mentions and you’re unclear as to why, try putting yourself in the customer’s position to understand their experience with your brand. Regularly reviewing every point of the customer journey can help you identify gaps, manage their expectations, and tweak your messaging.
Put on your analytical glasses and ask yourself: what does our customer journey look like? At what points can we better educate the customer on what to expect? Where can we collect customer feedback and reviews on a consistent basis, and how can we use that data to better position our brand?
3. Tell the truth: set realistic expectations with honest marketing tactics.
One of the most reliable ways to avoid unrealistic customer expectations is to communicate what your product or service does up front. The trick is to do so in the most clear, truthful, and compassionate way possible. Leveraging honest marketing and messaging around how your product works, and the minutia around hours, returns, and customer service levels, protects you from backlash and protects your customers from future frustration.
Avoid bold claims and embrace the truth – your honesty may be refreshing, and it will promote brand trust. If you’re unsure of what constitutes honest marketing, check out these advertising and marketing basics care of the Federal Trade Commission, developed in order to protect American consumers from deceptive or unfair advertising. These ultimately can help you develop concrete and truthful customer expectations levels as well.
4. Be reliable and consistent in meeting customer expectations.
Consistently meeting and exceeding customer expectations is a huge part of building brand loyalty over time. In being consistent in your customer service offerings, or your overall product quality and function, you’re encouraging repeat business and long-time customer loyalty. If you fall short here, and deliver an inconsistent experience, that is what you will become known for.
Make sure all of your departments, brands, and locations are aligned on:

What your company stands for.
Customer procedures.
How your product or service is meant to work.
The quality of service/product that is being promoted to the customer.
How to consistently meet those expectations.

9 Effective Call Center Strategies to Implement This Year
5. Make setting customer expectations a big part of your employee training.
Another way to approach customer expectations is to ensure that you’re actually meeting them. You can have all of the educational and truthful messaging in the world out there, but if your staff are not consistently meeting consumer expectations, that responsibility ultimately falls on you.
Managing customer expectations is largely about ensuring your employees can meet the established service levels. Training them on how to manage a customer, how all services and operations within your company work, and generally making them subject matter experts on your brand will improve your customer’s opinion of you, your product, and your service.The post Blog first appeared on Fonolo.

Zoopla improves customer engagement and satisfaction during the UK’s first lockdown using Conga’s Commerical Operations Suite. We have seen a massive uprise in digital transformation during the COVID-19 outbreak in almost all industries. Some brands were better prepared than others, but most are still learning to adapt and perfect their practices to the continuously changing…
The post Conga supports Zoopla’s digital transformation during COVID-19 appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

This simple free tool lets you speed up just about any video you watch in Chrome.

And it’s not difficult at all to speed up audiobooks or podcasts, just look for the button in your favorite player.

If the topic lends itself to you absorbing the information faster than the person is presenting it, this simple hack increases the amount you can learn by 30%, which is huge.

On the other hand, if you’re simply speeding things up because you are in a hurry to get through it, it might be better to not do it at all.

To find out more contact: [sales@agencymate.com](mailto:sales@agencymate.com) ​ https://preview.redd.it/bk20jpt2zdy61.png?width=940&format=png&auto=webp&s=0b1c0fe60b79d8f08d060b073fd954ab5bab3f92
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What is your business to your customers? Is it your mission statement? Your product line? Your team? Despite what you may think, there is only one right answer here: it’s your customer experience. CX is the only way that your clients can perceive your company, and that can have huge consequences for your bottom line. According to experience management platform Experience.com, companies that are considered CX leaders saw a 183% return rate on their customer care efforts. That’s nearly three times that of CX laggards. These also-rans aren’t always individual businesses either—entire industries are starting to fall critically behind on CX. Even the worst offenders, though, have the tools at their disposal to improve things. Below are the 5 Industries that need a Customer Experience overhaul:
Insurance
Telecommunications
Retail
Healthcare
Hospitality
Full article: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/368392
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Hi everyone, I’m a master student in Marketing and I am currently conducting a research on the impact of CRM on business performance. I need 5 minutes of your time to answer a questionnaire. I know this is probably not the right place to do this but I’m desperate. I have send over 500 e-mails to companies and I have less than 5% answers. I would really appreciate your help. Thank you! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd7USwNd3sGSDz2PVVKa0wxIeR4Nx1zNYREW7DABvSkG_Lc1g/viewform?vc=0&c=0&w=1&flr=0
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But first, let’s understand some words…

Bitcoin is not the blockchain. If the blockchain is a printing press, Bitcoin is a kind of paper money. There are countless things that one can do with a printing press, in fact, it changed the world, but the invention of paper money isn’t even one of the top 100 most important outputs the printed press created.

Cryptocurrency has a terrible name. Most people associate “crypto” with spies and secrets. And a currency is generally backed by a nation, with a treasury, an exchequer and banks.

It’s more accurately thought of as a token.

If you went to an amusement park, you might buy a bunch of tokens or tickets to go on the rides. And if you run one of the rides, you collect the tokens, which at some point, you can trade in for a different sort of value, probably currency.

If people need tokens and they’re scarce, they go up in value. If people think that tokens are going to up in value, they might buy them in anticipation of that. And the things that people do to get tokens can range from simply buying them with paper money (!) to performing various tasks (like the ride operators in the example above).

And, if a lot of people own tokens, they’re likely to do things that make tokens go up in value. Thus, an ecosystem is born.

Okay, so what’s the blockchain?

It’s a database.

Unlike most databases, it’s not controlled by one entity and it’s not easily rewritten. Instead, it’s a ledger, a permanent, examinable, public database. One can use it to record transactions of various sorts.

It would be a really good way to keep track of property records, for example. Instead, we have title insurance, unsearchable folders of deeds in City Hall and often dusty tax records.

There are databases everywhere around us (Facebook, for example, is mostly a database–who are the users, who do they know, what do they do?). Because the internet rewards people who own networks so handsomely, these organizations continue to gain in power. Google began by building a database on top of the open internet, and they’ve spent the last twenty years relentlessly making the internet less open so they can fortify the power of their databases and the attention they influence or control.

And that’s the first reason that the blockchain matters—because there’s a chance that it might lead to more open, resilient, market-focused networks and databases. It’s only a chance, though, because all the hype around the tokens sometimes makes it seem more likely that financial operators will simply seek to manipulate unregulated markets for their own benefit.

The second reason might support positive change. The existence of tokens and decentralization means that it’s possible to build resilient open source communities where early contributors and supporters benefit handsomely over time. No one owns these communities, and we can hope that these communities will work hard to serve themselves and their users, not the capital markets or other short-term players.

Consider a project like Wikipedia. Tens of thousands of people have devoted millions of hours to working to build it. 5,000 active editors are responsible for most of the work that we benefit from every day. This is unpaid work, done for the community and for the satisfaction and status that comes with it.

But of the top 100 websites, there are very few that are built on this model.

Now imagine a blockchain/token project in which contributors earned tokens as they built it and supported it.

Over time, the decentralized project would go up in value. As the ecosystem and the market delivered more and more utility to more and more people, the users would need to buy tokens to use it. And the holders of tokens would receive either a dividend or have the ability to sell their tokens if they chose.

Early speculators would attract more attention, and people with more skill than capital could invest by contributing early and often.

As the project reached a steady state, the stakeholders would shift, from innovators and speculators to people who treat their daily contributions as a job without a boss. Innovators could build on top of this network without permission, creating more and more variations and choice using the same underlying database.

One way to consider this: The open web led to a huge leap in the number of useful databases that we all use (things like Zillow, Instagram and even Tinder). They were fairly cheap to launch and run, and once the network effect kicked in, the profits were significant. Investors were eager to fund the next one, because the odds of a big win dwarfed most of what they could choose from in traditional businesses.

But dominant players are now working to make the openness of the web (the thing that allowed them to grow in the first place) less open. Google and Facebook and others push to make their stock price go up, not to serve users and others who now understand they have little choice in the matter.

The distributed nature of the blockchain, combined with this novel way of funding early contributions means that the network effect may very well bring powerful new databases to the fore, creating new ways for us to interact.

It’s hardly going to be perfect. There’s the issue of how the blockchain itself is run. If it’s run on the original method—proof of work—it’s likely to be a carbon disaster, getting worse as it succeeds. Fortunately, there are new approaches on the horizon (with great names like ‘proof of stake’ and ‘sharding’) that might address these problems.

For the typical user, the existence of the blockchain itself won’t matter, just as you don’t need to know how many volunteer editors Wikipedia has to benefit from using it.

The reason the blockchain matters is that it is an agent of change. Just like the transistor and yes, the printing press, when an agent of change shows up, it often leads to shifts that we probably didn’t expect.

Understanding it now is more productive than simply being forced to deal with it later.

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Jargon is intentionally offputting, and lingo reminds us how connected we are.

They might look similar, but the intent is what matters. Jargon is a place to hide, a chance to show off, a way to disconnect. Lingo, on the other hand, allows us to feel included.

“The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” – John Russell https://preview.redd.it/mu0yl1fdlwx61.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=c007ca794c100a2ea4c4f488153de974f286a710
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