Want to get the best CX resolutions for your customers? Here are the four things you need.

Customer experience (CX) is becoming increasingly vital to a brand’s success. But how can you make sure that you offer the kind of CX that attracts new customers and retains existing ones? We spoke to over 2000 consumers to find the answer and understand what’s most important to them when choosing a brand.

What’s clear is that as competition continues to grow, price stops being the defining competitive differentiator. CX ranks as high, with 61% of our respondents saying they’re willing to pay more for products and services to get a higher quality of customer service. And 55% of our respondents would even change brands to shop with a company that offers a better CX.

With CX proving to be such a vital part of a brand’s success, we dug deeper to find out how to balance three crucial aspects of CX—Resolution, Rapport, and Relevance—in our report: It's Time to Solve the Customer Experience Trilemma. This article will focus on resolution, and four aspects you need to optimize customer interactions in a way that keeps them coming back.

Resolve customer issues with simplicity, speed, convenience, and consistency

Providing a good resolution for your customers comes down to how well your business can perform in four crucial areas: simplicity, speed, convenience, and consistency. Over 70% of respondents highlighted each of these areas as either extremely or quite important. And when asked to expand on what makes for a good CX in these areas:

• 75% say they’d definitely return to a company in the future if it resolved their issues promptly

• 66% say the same for companies that are quick to respond

• 63% say they’ll return to companies where ‘nothing seems like too much trouble’

Different digital channels support different areas of CX

It’s all well and good knowing which areas are most important to achieving good customer service—but knowing how to deliver them is the hard part. Achieving these four components of resolution comes down to making the most of different digital channels—as each one offers different benefits to the customer.

Take simplicity—82% of our survey respondents prefer email for its ease of use, another 82% feel the same way about live chat, and 75% like the simplicity of in-app messaging. So to create a simple CX, email, live chat, and in-app messaging are the way forward. But there are other aspects of resolution to consider where different digital channels are more appropriate.

For speed—60% of our respondents prefer live chat when they’re looking for a swift response, 55% favor face-to-face communication, and 51% want the speed of video chat. Messaging apps also rank highly, with 46% valuing the rapid responses they offer.

And for convenience—74% of our respondents prefer email for its convenience at ‘any time of day or night’, 67% feel the same way about live chat, and 66% favor in-app messaging.

The consumers we surveyed send a strong message: that no single channel can do it all. To get the maximum benefit, brands will need to communicate with customers across multiple channels.

Creating a unified experience

With so many channels offering different benefits for the customer, it’s important that you can support a variety of digital channels. That’s where the fourth aspect of resolution comes into play. Consistency is vital to ensuring customers get a joined-up experience. For example, if you need to escalate a live chat conversation to a customer service agent as it’s a complex query, this should be a seamless experience for the customer. Our respondents told us it was important to get the same level of service time and time again, and when you use multiple digital channels, this can be challenging.

Using a centralized communications platform can make this a lot simpler to manage. This is because they support deeper levels of automation and can help organizations manage multiple channels through a single platform. This allows you to create end-to-end customer journey experiences—across every channel.

Create dynamic connections between businesses and their customers with CPaaS

To make the most of multiple channels, while still delivering consistent experiences, many brands are turning to Communications Platform-as-a-service (CPaaS).

Webex Connect is a CPaaS solution that helps all kinds of brands deliver the simplicity, speed, convenience and consistency modern customers’ demand. The ability to support over 10 digital communication channels, and offer both APIs and low-code interfaces helps businesses rapidly build seamless customer interactions across all touchpoints. And because everything is managed through a single platform, switching channels mid interaction is easy—and maintains the context by carrying all customer data and history forward.

On top of this, there is the flexibility to update and add new channels to the platform, so you can keep pace with new and evolving interaction models.

Optmize your customer journeys

Webex Connect doesn’t just help you manage your customer interactions with a centralized platform. It also gives you the tools to analyze and optimize your customer journeys, and enable the simplicity, speed, and convenience that’s imperative to a good resolution.

Managing all your customer interactions in one place means you get visibility of every interaction with every customer. You can view their entire journey and use this data to inform which communication methods you use in future interactions. That means you can map your end goals and outcomes to the engagement patterns of your customers. And you can adapt your processes to make sure you provide customers with optimal resolutions.

If you’re interested in trying out Webex Connect for yourself, you can book a demo today.

And don’t forget to read It's Time to Solve the Customer Experience Trilemma to also learn how to create good rapport and deliver relevant experiences for your customers to create exceptional customer experiences.