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Context is key. Introducing Customer Journeys and Conversations

Customer support teams focus their efforts on three goals: solve the problem, make the customer happy and set them up for success. In essence, the support team is responsible for delivering a great customer experience.

The way we go about achieving these staples of support may vary, but we’re all working towards the same end goal: a better customer experience.

But there’s something missing.

When you think about your ideal customer support experience, you probably don’t think about high friction, high effort, and endless back and forth. But even with the best intentions, this is often the reality we experience as customers and sadly, inadvertently deliver to our own.

Think about the last time you contacted a larger company for customer support.

The likelihood is you checked their knowledgebase for solutions before contacting them, and tried their recommended steps. Then you email in about your problem. They respond quickly and ask you to switch channels and repeat your problem over the phone, only to find that you’re being asked to try the exact same things you’ve already read about.

Now you may feel frustrated or anxious. Your mind races through the motions:

  • Is your email or tweet locked in an information black hole?
  • Will you have to repeat yourself to someone different this time?
  • Rewrite your initial query?
  • How long is this really going to take?

You feel the people at the other end should have that information, and they should know you’ve already said this and done that.

Your journey as a customer and the work you put in started way before you first sent that email.

As support teams, we put an huge burden upon ourselves to deliver ambitiously great customer experiences. And yet we rarely have the information we need to be able to meet our own standards and deliver a personalized, contextual customer support experience.

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To be personal, proactive and effortless, you need context

At Kayako, we’re in constant pursuit of understanding our customer’s problems and we conduct plenty of research about real workflows, pain points, and support team goals.

There’s one thing that comes up over and over again: the support team feels compromised in their ability to deliver what they know to be a great customer experience because they’re siloed from the right information about the customer.

They’re missing that key ingredient: the customer’s context.

Having customer context makes the difference between a team focused on closing support ticket after support ticket, and a team which is empowered to have valuable conversations with customers and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Introducing Customer Journeys and Conversations

The Customer Journey

The customer journey is a concept that marketing teams have plenty of experience working with. They collect and map the various moments and events between you and your customer as they interact with your website, product, and apps to inform marketing and sales personalization.

We’re missing a trick. The valuable context of the customer journey should be available to all customer-facing teams. All this context that can empower support teams to create equally winning customer experiences and influence customer loyalty and happiness.

With customer journeys, Kayako collects all of your customer’s activity and provides your team with a complete, visual timeline of everything your customer has ever said and done, even before that first point of contact. This includes Help Center searches and article views and activities in your other existing apps and services to track upgrades, downgrades, purchases, errors and other key customer journey moments.

The Conversation

Kayako then uses all of this information from the customer journey to present the right information at the right time to your team—within the context of the conversations you’re having with your customers.

Let’s look at our favorite fictional and caffeinated company Brewfictus☕. They rely on Stripe and Shopify to process sales from their website for customers like Taylor West.

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Brewfictus is able to see all the steps Taylor took while trying to checkout. They have all the information they need to understand and solve the problem, even before Taylor makes contact, all without leaving the conversation to look up information.

With knowledge of Taylor’s 1 year customer anniversary coming up, they even take the opportunity to provide her with a complimentary loyalty upgrade to her shipping and win a great satisfaction rating.

Imagine seeing all the angles on your customer when you need it, and where you need it. What if you could connect the dots between what your customer is saying, what they’ve done and what they’re trying to do, and see beyond the customer’s stated problem?

Unlike one-dimensional traditional support tickets, conversations in Kayako are rich and multi-dimensional—just like your customers.

By having conversations with your customers through Kayako, you can deliver a truly personalized customer experience, and you can continue to deliver this kind of personal touch even as you grow.

Treat your customer like an individual, not just a support ticket

Building a low-friction customer experience has benefits beyond making everyone’s lives easier; you’re also increasing the probability of your customers returning and recommending you.

A study by CEB showed that 96% of customers who exert high effort to resolve a problem become disloyal. But what actually is effort? It’s anything your customer must do to get going with your product or service. That includes any and all support interactions—customer support interactions are actually 4x more likely to lead to disloyalty than to loyalty.

So, we’re fighting an uphill battle here. But here’s the opportunity: 65% of a customer’s perceived effort comes from how they felt during the interaction with you.

With Kayako, you reduce the effort for your customers, because you’ll have that customer context—their activities across all your touchpoints, the Help Center articles they’ve already viewed, the things they’ve already tried, their purchasing journey—all at your fingertips and in the context of the all important conversation.

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You can make the most of interactions, understand more about your customer, personalize it, proactively head off future problems and set your customers up for success.

Equip your team with the power of customer context

We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us. We believe traditional helpdesks are outdated. The helpdesk restrains support teams and holds them back from delivering the amazing customer support experiences that they’re capable of.

brief history of customer journeys

 

If we’re able to look beyond the support ticket and see the customer as the individual they are, your team will be empowered to truly move the needle on customer loyalty and make a lasting impact.

Better CSATs, better customer experiences, happier teams, loyal customers.

Customers do not want to repeat themselves, switch channels, or repeat the steps they’ve already taken. The sooner we can step back and look at the big picture of the entire customer journey – which starts will before that first contact – the closer we can get to the ambitious customer support experiences we’re striving for.

To start leveraging the context of your customer’s journey and have better conversations with your customers, sign up for a free trial today or register for a Kayako demo.