Summary: The core objective of business-critical functions is to design seamless customer experiences in the digital space. To keep pace with the thunderous developments in client expectations, collaborative teams are the crux of all solutions.
What was even a couple of years back only a niche business unit in development has now transitioned into a mission-critical business function. We are talking about customer success departments which have seen a significant rise in importance over a period of two years now. In fact, a recent research by Bain and Company revealed that businesses which offer superior customer experience have been able to rake up their revenues by over 8% than their competitors.
CIOs around the world have been banging their heads over cracking the code to build long-lasting and meaningful customer journeys. But the secret to a successful customer digital journey has remained untapped – until now!
Let’s talk about one more relevant statistic in this regard. As per a recent Customer Success Industry & Salary Report, around 31% customer success teams work in tandem with the sales teams for more than half of their work hours. In fact, only 34% of customer success teams are standalone units, while the rest 14% are subdivisions of the sales and marketing teams. This speaks volumes about the crux of the solution – collaborative teams!
Time is ripe for CIOs of every fast-moving software development company to analyze their organizational structures and closely examine the dynamics between teams that work more closely than ever. However, more than that, it is important that CIOs should dawn upon this realization that a customer journey is no different than a product which should be optimized and managed in every step of the way.
“We at Radixweb, consider Customer Success as more than a unit under the Sales Department. We see it as an integral part of our organizational culture and have rather discovered how it can function as a new growth engine for our venture” said Dharmesh Acharya, COO, Radixweb. He added that, “As a customer focused company, one of our primal goals is to integrate value with every tech investment that our clients make with us. We believe in sustainable relationships.”
However, another side of the coin says that focusing the entire business operations on client experiences is a difficult objective. Besides, customer expectations from software development services have and are continuously evolving in terms of range and volume. Dealing with complex and in-depth assistance can easily put a strain on existing organizational models in the form of interdepartmental rivalry and silos.
Clients on the other hand do not care about organizational processes. All they seek is accurate and prompt redressal of their queries and concerns – which means that legacy contact center models do not work for emerging customer redressal needs. This calls for greater collaboration across several departments of the businesses to address individual client concerns as well as existing bottlenecks.
In order to build successful product leadership and smart customer digital journeys, fast moving organizations must target the following four key areas:
1. Facilitating Closer Collaboration with Right Tools:
The first step towards achieving seamless delivery systems in any organization is to break down silos between departments. Progressive CIOs have adopted measures from the use of collaborative technologies to building customer hubs that physically brings resources with complimentary skills to address persisting issues.
Collaborative technology on the other hand, promotes real-time interaction between departments, thus reducing information overload and promoting unified views on customer engagement platforms. Since these platforms are integrated with various modes of communication and are centralized repositories of client information, they help looping in systems from various departments in real time and troubleshooting complicated issues with ease.
2. Facilitating Cross Skilling and Industry Specific Knowledge:
In spite of the rising DevOps approaches, a bevy of organizations still reel from inconsistent access and sharing of knowledge between departments and customer service channels. This either happens because brands fail to invest due time and efforts in maintaining multiple sources of information – which is practically impossible; or because resources are not skilled enough to deal with multifaceted customer queries. The solution to this issue is building a constantly updated centralized knowledge base and cross skilling resources to efficiently handle these information channels.
To solve this bottleneck with ease, Radixweb has integrated a reskilling system for its resources across departments wherein experts train multidisciplinary talents on relevant industry skills that enable them to efficiently manage time and belt out accurate responses for client concerns with minimal diversions.
3. Crafting an Integrated Service Culture:
The way your clients feel about being treated by your people has a lot to say about what your operational culture is! Ingraining a culture of service is essential for designing outstanding customer digital journeys. Hence, it is essential to work with professionals who have the capacities of patience, empathy, active listening and the ability to handle objections from clients.
As a people-focused company, Radixweb practices a people-first attitude for both internal and external stakeholders in a way that the organizational culture is deeply ingrained in everyone working under the process.
4. Ensure Transparent Communication:
One of our core values at Radixweb is to ensure transparency across all levels of the organization – this is one fundamental virtue that has pivoted Radixweb towards building collaborating teams with ease. Ensuring transparent communications within teams and with clients has paved the way for people to feel valued and needed. This has created an environment wherein people take responsibilities of their actions in the longer run.
The prerequisites to a successful customer digital journey are designing an exceptional customer experience – one that cannot be built without providing the customer-facing teams with the right tech tools and building a customer-focused culture across the organization. And sustainable customer success is like playing ‘building blocks’ that require constant realignment and collaborative achievement to design long-standing relationships.
