How to Ensure WFH Significantly Improves Customer Experience
Customer experience is what makes or mars any business in the world today; businesses realize this and do all it takes to ensure they are now consumer-centric. The essence of digital transformation is no longer hype, but the reality is to ensure that your customers derive satisfaction from their relationships with your organization, and you add more value to both your organization and the customer lifecycle journey.
Whatever upheaval that may occur in the business world, customers expect a quick adjustment to meet up their demands. This was evident in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, where businesses embarked on WFH to ensure they serve customers.
What is the meaning of WFH?
WFH ordinarily means work from home. It has become the acronym for work that is done remotely instead of at the usual physical office.
WFH is not entirely a new phenomenon as some organizations were practicing it, however, WFH became a necessity due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It became essential that any organization that must survive the ravaging coronavirus must embark on WFH.
The fact that customers were confined to their homes did not stop them from needing the usual services and products for their daily activities. Many organizations hurriedly embarked on WFH to make sure they survive; therefore, it becomes very necessary that you put the following measures in place to ensure that WFH improves customer experience.
Around the clock customer service
WFH means there is no physical workspace where customers can come to lodge complaints; you must, therefore, ensure that their pain points are addressed in real-time. This is where efficient customer service is very vital.
Your website effectively becomes your shop, and your customer service team must be ready to attend to reviews from customers. You can even directly ask them for these reviews to understand how they feel about your products and services.
It’s important to understand that their reviews will mostly be in the unstructured format, and you may have to deploy sentiment analysis to have accurate insights. Whether the reviews you get from them are positive, negative, or neutral, you must endeavor to get back to them promptly.
One unhappy customer can cause you a great deal of harm. You can also deploy collaboration tools for video conferencing or phone calls to resolve issues directly with an unhappy customer.
Chatbots can also come in handy to ensure 24/7 service. A lot of customers prefer a live chat, and AI-assisted conversational chatbots can provide quick and efficient resolutions to customers’ pain points and at scale too.
Privacy and security of customers’ data
A customer’s privacy, a customer’s sensitive information, may determine if you lose or gain a customer. Nobody needs to harp up the fact that it’s more expensive to convert a new customer than to retain an existing one.
With the WFH model, there is bound to be a lot of data in continuous transit; this is vital for effective service to your customers. The data you require for this will be more of your customers’ personal information; it’s private to them, and they will not want it to fall into wrong hands.
Your customers cherish their privacy and will trust your organization if they realize that their sensitive information is not up for grabs. Threat actors who manage to lay their hands on this data will greatly damage the reputation of your customers.
Since you require their data to ensure effective service, you need to ensure that the following measures are in place:
1. VPN
The virtual private network (VPN) has been in existence for quite some time, however, the WFH model has made a better case for VPN. The need to establish a protected network connection when using public Wi-Fi has never been more urgent than now that businesses operate on the WFH model.
The large volumes of data you handle daily warrant the encryption of your internet traffic and the disguise of your IP address. You want to make it more difficult for threat actors to access your customers’ data, and VPN will ensure this.
The good thing about VPNs is that the encryption you need to protect your data takes place in real-time. What may determine the basis for a referral from your customers can be how you have handled their sensitive information.
Satisfied customers can go a long way to showcase their good customer experiences. This also builds brand loyalty.
2. Regular software updates
Most software updates are free, but how seriously do your employees take them? Microsoft, for instance, constantly provides updates; your employees must understand the importance of installing patches as soon as any software company provides them.
They help to make your devices less vulnerable to attacks. Skipping or postponing patches puts your customers’ data at risk.
3. Strong Passwords
Passwords confer protection against different types of hacks, but that is if your employees understand the need for strong passwords. A report says that compromising usernames and passwords is responsible for internal data breaches in 63% of all organizations.
Strong passwords must be at least eight characters with alphabets, letters, and special symbols. Apart from ensuring that your passwords are strong, you must ensure that your employees don’t drop them carelessly, especially as they are on the WFH model.
There is also the need to regularly change passwords. Where this may be problematic, you can deploy a password manager to store and generate encrypted passwords.
Impeccable delivery system
WFH essentially means that you must deliver your products to your customers; even where you have the best product in the market, it does not serve your customers’ needs if they don’t get what they want at the appropriate time. Unlike when you operate from the physical workspace and every employee reports to the office at the scheduled time, you must understand that employees on the WFH model may not be able to deliver the way you expect.
If you consider this and the fact that your customers may come from different geographical locations, you will work out a delivery system that will suit every customer. This is very vital, especially for customers on the subscription model.
Conclusion
WFH will not go away any soon, what 70% of consumers are interested in is an optimized experience. For your organization to survive, WFH must ensure significant improvement in customer experience.
Â
- How to Ensure WFH Significantly Improves Customer Experience - November 17, 2021
