Customer satisfaction is at its lowest level in 15 yearsOpens a new window as the digital economy soars. Customers can’t find the information they’re looking for, and customer service agents are overworked and understaffed.
It’s a problem that every company needs to overcome as soon as it can, ideally even before the pandemic is officially over. The digital economy might slow down, but it won’t go away. We’ll still see customers ordering, returning, looking for service and more, all online.
Knowing our own customers needed a solution, our business value team dived into our dataOpens a new window . We looked at the top-performing customers, or those that improved CSAT scores by almost 30%, succeeded 50% more often in self-service success, decreased case resolution time by 25%, or had other impressive outcomes.
What we found is that all the top-performing companies doubled down on one thing: relevance. They gave customers exactly what they wanted, right when they needed it. Many companies leveraged artificial intelligence to provide personalized, customized recommendations quicker than it takes to blink. And customers and agents rewarded them with their time, their money, their productivity and more.
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Here’s a deep dive into our data that looks at how companies can create relevance and improve KPIs.
1. Bring Together IT and Customer Service
Our data found that when the customer service department and the IT team work together, the customers and agents win. The customer service department owns and drives the adoption of customer service technology for 52% of the top performers, while 43% work hand-in-hand with IT.
Customer service teams have deep knowledge of critical satisfaction KPIs and how to improve them, whether related to self-service or assisted service by agents. Meanwhile, the IT team knows how to make the technology work to achieve those goals. Together, the teams are best positioned to create the best outcomes for customers and agents.
2. Leverage Machine Learning Models To Make Search Results Relevant
The key to customer satisfaction in the digital era is finding the right results exactly when you need them. This could be a customer who wants to find the perfect shoe or a customer service agent who needs immediate details on solving a customer’s tech problem.
Many of our top performers rely on machine learning: Nine out of ten top performers use two or more machine learning models, and almost 40% of our top performers use over five machine learning models. In comparison, only 25% of bottom performers use that many machine learning models.
Often the easiest and most impactful machine learning models to implement include re-ranking to better rank search results for customers or agents and type-ahead models to anticipate what exactly the user is searching for. Both models focus on providing the most relevance for the user, updating their results based on an organization’s usage data.
3. Make Support Content Searchable
A big part of customer satisfaction is their interactions with agents. They can make or break many customer interactions with the company. Yet, agents can struggle to find the information they need quickly, switching between too many programs or windows to figure out how to solve a case.
As the increased time to resolution is directly correlated with drops in customer satisfaction scores, it’s critical that agents have a single search experience to look through all those materials. We found this when working with our customers: About 60% of top performers index five or more content sources. This includes internal and external sources like their websites, knowledge bases, CRMs, support communities, and video repositories. Compare that to how 70% of the bottom-performing companies index only one or two sources.
4. Start Improving Content Now
A strong knowledge-centered service (KCS) approach is often best for agents. It will give them the tools and content they need. It can also help identify and fill in the gap between what customers are looking for and what they are finding.
Our data found that companies at all stages of KCS maturity can create relevant experiences. Fewer low performers have mature KCS programs than high performers, but surprisingly, 33% of top performers have new KCS programs, more than either average (24%) or mature programs (14%). One reason for this could be that companies that recently started investing in KCS and Coveo are showing a stronger commitment to knowledge creation and findability, which yields better relevance and business impact.
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5. Announce and Promote New Resources or Technology Changes
The key lesson we learned from our top customers is that those who implement two-way communications see better results. Agents have ownership.
Top performers embody this. Over 50% of these companies communicate regularly about updates to the platforms their agents work with.
The pandemic created a surge in digital use. It’s unlikely we’ll see a drop in usage post pandemic. That’s why it’s critical to take the time now to double down on customer satisfaction and give your agents the support they need by following the above steps. It’ll lead to better customer satisfaction, and most importantly, loyalty, for years to come — and you’ll be one of the reasons customer satisfaction finally improves again.
What steps are you taking to improve customer experience post pandemic? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .