Presented by Freshworks
If you’ve been in business for any respectable amount of time, you know something really, really well: Your customers don’t care how your business operation is structured, or how complicated it is for you to deliver great support. They just crave an experience that gets their job done quick and fast. And they want it now.
No exceptions.
Most organizations take that to mean that a great customer experience is never possible. That ‘good enough’ is enough.
But is it?
We all know support requests or sales calls that have gone horribly wrong, causing the business to lose thousands of dollars, in seconds.
Put simply, we want to solve that problem — the holy grail of the perfect customer experience. Not one unhappy customer, not one lost sales lead, not one chat experience that goes nowhere.
And how do we solve it?
With context.
A customer can approach or be approached through multiple channels but to ensure great customer engagement, the conversation needs context.
Great conversations + great data = great experience
We have been thinking about how to get that context precisely when it is needed. Great conversations alone are not powerful enough. It needs to have substance; it needs to solve a customer problem. Only when the conversation meets information, can that substance be provided.
Here’s an example: When a customer approaches support with a query, a conversation begins, and the support agent is having a conversation, wanting to answer the customer. But since she has no idea about the plan the customer is on, or the name of the salesperson associated with the account, she can’t answer the question well. She might have to ask the customer these questions. That’s not a great experience. The customer might be miffed, and rightly so. “Don’t you know who handles which account in your own company?”, is a question that might be put to the agent.
But if the agent had all this information on hand, she might have been able to address the customer’s query better. What was only a great conversation would be enhanced by the data at hand. And what an experience that would be! No customer would ever leave!
Hurdles on the grail quest
Except that, as everyone knows, this is difficult to do.
Conversations can be spread across multiple channels like email, calls, chats, social interactions or even a helpdesk ticket. For that perfect customer experience, all these conversations need to be unified, no matter the tool used for what channel.
Only when your tools are tightly integrated and have the ability to help you with contextual information from data, can you get further ahead on that grail quest for great customer experience.
However, businesses have to juggle between different software to deliver this cohesive experience. Any of the products themselves, on their own, are brilliant; they come with great features and do the job, but they falter when it comes to communicating with each other. It is this lack of communication that hurts the experience for customers and prospects alike.
Crossing the final chasm
Companies around the globe have increasingly become aware of this. And in a large organization with many customer touchpoints, an immense amount of coordination is required to streamline and deliver the precise experience the customer needs.
So how do you fix this?
Imagine a support platform that is able to pull out your customer information from the CRM platform — it not only gives you the opportunity to serve the customer better but also creates the space to cross/up sell.
Think of a marketing function where the power of retargeting is unparalleled to such an extent, that you know which pages the customer’s been on and how many times. This information is available with your sales agent with just a few clicks.
Imagine if your software empowers you with such deep context every single time.
This isn’t important only for the business. It’s also more efficient, saves time, and saves loads of effort.
This is what we think is the holy grail of the perfect customer experience, and parts of it are here already.
With Freshworks 360, we are close to realizing this vision. Freshworks 360 will provide businesses with an easy-to-use toolset to complete the customer engagement experience. The products within Freshworks 360 include Freshdesk, Freshsales, Freshmarketer, Freshcaller (call center software), and Freshchat (customer messaging software), providing an easy way for businesses to access their customer’s context.
So does that mean that customers should move to software that functions as a complete customer engagement platform and make sure that no one customer or prospect goes away without that perfect experience?
We sure think so.
And we are not talking about just the big enterprises. Even smaller companies need to have access to great tools to manage their operations as they grow. Having a software onboard, that already talks to each other can be a great advantage to organizations as they grow and scale.
This is our vision: The complete customer engagement platform of the future, where no customer has a less than perfect experience.
We are betting on it.
Arvind Parthiban is Director of Marketing at Freshworks. Previously, he was the CEO of Zarget. He’s an ITIL expert and always passionate about football, beer and movies. LinkedIn | Twitter
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