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The Year of Emotive Customer Experience

This article was published on August 2, 2021

Business has always been an exchange — people helping people get what they want. But these days, companies seem more focused on outrunning and disrupting each other. The only problem with chasing the next big thing is that you risk losing sight of the first one: your customers.

At NewVoiceMedia, we believe that, in today’s Age of the Customer, personal, emotional customer interactions play a critical role in bridging the gap for what disruption and digital innovation alone cannot solve. In fact, Forrester’s most recent CX Index survey revealed that emotional experience makes up half of the “CX equation” —  far outweighing the variables of efficiency and effectiveness (Can the customer achieve their goal? How easy is it?). A study published in the Harvard Business Review found that emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable on a lifetime basis as highly satisfied customers because they are more likely to repurchase goods and services and recommend the business to others. That research also highlighted key emotional motivators for customers, including the desire to feel a sense of belonging (“that brand really ‘gets me’”), and to be thrilled by the shopping experience.

When It comes to creating these types of peak customer experiences, there are no substitutes for people-to-people interactions. We need to move away from tactical interactions, focus on having more human conversations, and find ways of adding value to those conversations. That means front-line contact center teams are the difference-makers on the battlefield to win the hearts and minds of customers. For brands to compete – and win – in CX in 2018 and beyond, inside sales reps must focus on making strong emotional connections with prospects, and they must understand and document the emotions that are likely to drive the prospect to purchase. Service leaders must ensure their teams optimize processes and communication in ways that create positive emotional experiences for customers. However, many businesses struggle with how to operationalize these emotive aspects of sales and service.

That’s where we come in. At NewVoiceMedia, we are passionate about providing solutions that bridge distances, devices and departments, bringing the most vital business exchange of all – the conversation – back to the heart of what you do. We help you drive well-orchestrated conversational experiences across all your customer touchpoints, help you stay close to the people you serve, make sure you hear them clearly, and that they always feel heard.

By partnering closely with Salesforce, NVM is helping businesses enable more emotionally satisfying customer experiences by:  

Building a personal connection

According to Forrester, while self-service technologies now enable consumers to handle many routine tasks easily, across many devices and channels, there is a sense that “we’ve cut the soul out of customer interactions by removing the person-to-person connection.”

Organizations that are deploying self-service solutions via websites, IVRs and mobile apps should ensure that there is always an option to reach a live agent if the customer becomes frustrated or confused. NVM’s ACD/IVR and intelligent call routing allow a caller to be easily routed to an agent with the skills to help them. Our deep integration with Salesforce then gives agents immediate access to important information about the caller, including which products they own, open cases, caller status (VIP) and sentiment, allowing them to personalize the interaction, resolve the caller’s problem and leave them with a positive emotional experience.

Understanding the customer’s (emotional) journey

Understanding your brand’s emotional customer journey is key to establishing more emotive customer interactions. NVM’s Conversation Analyzer is a speech analytics solution that enables businesses hone in on potential frustrations across their customer journey and focus on maximizing the moments that truly impact customer experience. Conversation Analyzer turns thousands of hours’ worth of contact center calls into structured data that can be mined for a better understanding of customer experience and agent performance. Sales and service managers can automatically review hundreds or thousands of calls for things like quality and compliance. They can also review the quality of the human interaction by evaluating things like the amount of time an agent spends talking versus listening to the callers. Doing these things manually can be complicated and time consuming ultimately proving to be a barrier to the organization’s ability to implement a CX program.

Removing the obstacles that create negative experiences

Once an organization has been able to understand the customer journey and uncover the obstacles that confuse and frustrate customers and prospects, the next step is to use that information to make improvements. Forrester’s research points out some rules of human emotion that can help guide you in these efforts. Remember the Peak-end Rule, which states that one’s memory of a past experience (pleasant or unpleasant) does not correspond to an average level of positive or negative feelings but to the most intense moment and the end of the episode. Also, keep in mind that negative experiences hurt more than positive ones help; and emotions change experiences as they happen.

Conversation Analyzer and our call recording technology enable managers to use these principles to coach agents by showing examples of calls that were handled well and those that could use improvement. Sales and service teams can use these insights to improve their processes and agent communication skills to help customers solve problems more efficiently and ensure that they feel good at the end of each conversation.

Motivate, our gamification software, builds onto that by enabling managers to offer rewards and incentives for agents who implement best practices and ultimately replicate the behavior of top performers. Motivate also encourages a sense of friendly competition that helps to motivate staff. Ultimately, it helps organizations build an army of top performers who are all following a set of business processes that have been optimized to ensure prospects and customers get the support they need and feel positively about the experience. Contact Accelerator also helps sales teams follow best practices. Outbound calls are automatically rescheduled in the NewVoiceMedia dialer at the optimum frequency with automatic geographic number presentation, significantly increasing the chances of a successful connection and conversation.

Another way we help ensure successful conversations is through Global Voice Assurance, our industry-leading global call routing architecture, which has dramatically raised the bar on call quality for sales and service teams. It provides businesses with the ability to manage resources across the globe as a single entity, reducing customer wait times while ensuring effortless, crystal clear conversations and service availability for calls in remote regions.

These are just some of the ways NVM makes connecting with customers as clear, smart and simple as it should be. Having these tools and built-in best practices in place allows you to focus on helping your customers get what they want -- which is why you got into business in the first place. Let this be the year of emotive customer experience, and let NewVoiceMedia be your partner in making every conversation great.

Watch this to learn more about NVM is helping sales teams create more emotive interactions.

How to make every service conversation great from NewVoiceMedia on Vimeo.

Written by Vonage Staff

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