Want to Satisfy Your Customers? Focus on Digital Transformation -- And on Your Employees

When customers perceive that they’ve had a poor customer service experience, they may part ways with the product, service or company. According to NewVoiceMedia's Serial Switching Report (via Forbes), such departures cost businesses $75 billion a year. These are high stakes: It takes more time, energy and five times as much money to attract new customers than to retain old ones.

Companies are wise to focus on retaining customers, but what exactly are the pain points for both customers and companies? What drives a customer to leave or incentivizes them to stay?

Earlier this year, my company and CITE Research conducted a survey that gave us insights into some of the key pain points and what can be done to reduce them. In sum, a lot of the solutions to customer-company dissonance can be found in undertaking effective digital transformation that serves both the customer as well as employees.

A primary concern expressed by many customers who chose to leave a company behind was having to re-explain or repeat themselves across multiple channels of communication regarding an issue. For example, a customer might publicly complain on social media, receive an email response from a customer service agent and then resolve the situation on the telephone over a span of time that could range from minutes to days. Customers want seamless communication and fast answers to their problems -- not hand-offs and delays. They want to be met, and served, via the channel in which they’ve chosen to communicate, no matter what is happening behind the scenes.

The data bear this out: Our survey showed that such disjointed communication paths drive 41% of consumers to stop using a company’s product or service altogether. With today’s constantly evolving ways in which customers interact with companies, it is a challenge for businesses is to maintain top-notch, seamless customer service if their tech hasn’t caught up with the demand.

Where customer satisfaction and employee engagement intersect

Ineffective, disjointed communication tools frustrate employees as well as customers. According to the survey, 75% of employees admit to feeling unhappy when wrestling with what they perceive to be inadequate or ineffective technology tools. As well, 75% of those surveyed feel stress when they can’t collaborate effectively with co-workers to solve a customer issue, hindering them from serving customers as well as they’d like.

Just as customers are frustrated when they have to waste time repeating their issue, so, too, are employees frustrated when they waste time and energy. The survey revealed that 54% of workers believe ineffective tech makes them less productive. Forty percent of employees admit that these frustrations with disjointed communications technology have led them to be rude to their coworkers, friends and family. Needless to say, top-notch customer service would be difficult to offer amid those circumstances.

These research statistics, centered on both customers and employees, highlight the need for a global resolution to these concerns. A report by Constellation Research echoes these findings, citing that "consolidating and streamlining the communication interface -- the means through which employees interact with both customers and each other -- offers a multitude of benefits." Critical to both customer and employee happiness is better technology that unifies channels of communication and collaboration so that contacts are as easy and as seamless as possible on both sides.

The bottom line: improved customer and employee satisfaction via improved technology boosts business profitability

When companies invest in employee satisfaction alongside customer satisfaction via effective digital tools, businesses reap benefits.

To succeed with your digital transformation efforts, you should begin by implementing better communications technology -- not just for customers, but for employees as well. These unified technologies must meet the individual where they are, whether it be on a laptop, mobile device, phone or specific social channel. Customers want to report and receive a response via a single channel; employees seek to serve them the same way. Many companies seek to improve the customer experience, but focusing on that, in a vacuum, is a mistake. Companies that skimp on the employee experience must understand the direct impact it has on the customer experience and how much this impacts their bottom line.

With your employees well-connected and able to collaborate, your next step should be to define your digital transformation objectives and create a roadmap to ensure you can complete them. Whether you're looking to derive insights from analytics to improve the customer experience, optimize infrastructure and operations to improve agility or transform business processes to reduce costs, your team should have a blueprint to meet its goals.

And finally, you should perform thorough research on the technologies you are looking to implement. Just as you should with whatever communications technology you decide to invest in, make sure the other tools you are researching (IoT tools, cloud migration services, etc.) will help improve the customer experience, aid employees and align with your digital transformation goals.

When companies engage both customers and employees better, customer retention and business profitability are bound to see a significant boost.

Originally published in Forbes