How to Improve Your Internal Processes for a Better Customer Experience

Every business function indulges in different activities based on their planned output. Though many of these actions are not directly related to customer service, they still impact the customer experience (CX).

For instance, your website management team leverages CMS to maintain a consistent stream of consumer-centric content on a website. Also, they can collaborate to keep the site's appearance consistent, making it easier to navigate as many CMSs come equipped with pre-made design templates.

Similarly, a sales process needs to document drop-out leads. Having such data helps marketers retarget their ads based on customer requirements. Overall, internal business processes help keep executives, managers, and other employees focused on what needs to be done to provide quality output that contributes to CX. When all such processes are streamlined, quality CX is assured. 

Why Is CX Important?

These key stats on CX speaks volume of why it is important to provide top CX — 

• Around 49% of customers would stop returning to the business if they had one bad experience.
• There is a loss of $35.3B every year due to customer churn due to CX issues.
• 77% of customers with good CX are more inclined to spread the word about the company.

Ideally, the C-suite faces a critical moment as quality CX requires leaders to go beyond traditional CX strategies. It requires redefining business operations with a life-centric approach pivoted to customer needs. 

However, some businesses put more emphasis on their public persona and the quality of their customer service than on their internal operations. For instance, many businesses consider marketing, not an essential business operation but a department that only drives lead (instead of creating brand awareness and introducing the product to a new market). 

In such cases, expecting quality customer experience is difficult since there are different levels of expectations. Imbibing a common set of philosophies across departments helps improve the quality of internal processes. This can help bridge the gap between what customers expect and what they get.  

Here are four key ways to align internal processes for a better customer experience.

Leverage Automation Wherever Possible

Automation plays a significant role in everyday business operations. For businesses looking to offer unmatched CX, automating internal processes is inevitable. Automating routine tasks help free up mental space for team members to focus on their core tasks and not indulge in mundanity. It helps avoid distraction by delegating tasks requiring little to no original thought. 

Consider automation for every department — sales, marketing, website management, customer support, product management, etc. Your sales team may quickly use HubSpot to zero in on some highly qualified leads. The time they used to spend sorting through leads is now being put toward closing deals with highly motivated prospects. In such cases, they may use a quote tool for Hubspot to automate the price quote creation process. This enables them to pursue quality leads instead of manually sorting the lead data and creating quotations using elaborate costing models. 

In turn, customer experiences are elevated due to faster resolution, providing businesses with a more in-depth understanding of what customer needs and provide a tailored solution. Automation also helps to get improved business results in the long term by facilitating consistent, cost-efficient methods of communicating with consumers and providing exceptional CX.

Provide Training to Create an Aligned Customer-First Mindset

Customer-first mindset requires everyone in the organization to be responsible for the customer, be it the CEO who drives business strategy, the salesperson directly serving the customer, or the data team working on analytics platforms. Communicate effective CX key performance indicators (KPIs) throughout the organization, and ensure this is reflected in providing training for the CX mindset.

Begin with creating a customer-first approach by training every department to deliver on a single goal. It requires developing a mindset where every team member questions — “will this step or input add value to customers?” If not, they must be ready with alternatives. 

Train your teams to leverage resources effectively and adopt best practices that reflect customer-first philosophy. 

For example, Chick-Fil-A has trained everyone in their team to reflect the culture of prioritizing customers. An overall score of 84 out of 100 shows that this restaurant chain scored very highly in customer satisfaction. Visit any of them to see how much franchises care about cultivating a customer-centric culture. And this all began with training the staff as a part of the onboarding process.

Training helps in creating a role-playing scenario as a part of the everyday job. This also ensures customer-centric decision-making as a part of the job. Some of them include the following —

• Keeping a warm and inviting tone when speaking to customers.
• Understanding customer issues thoroughly before jumping to solutions.
• Look for cost-effective fixes for customer issues to help them save more. 
• Addressing the customer's issue and then providing a solution that adds value.
• Finding alternative ways to perform tasks that speed up the process without compromising output.

Excellent customer service results from a service mentality, which can be fostered by training the staff. Eventually, they will view each interaction with a customer, each function of their job, as a way to serve customers rather than consider it a transaction.

Use business process management tools

Business process management tools are an asset as they provide insight into the day-to-day functioning of a company. Having such resources helps identify procedures draining your resources and the ones to tap into for efficiency. 

When existing client experiences are pivotal, updating your business processes with the right tools involves — 

1. Leveraging employee feedback systems to discover widespread problems experienced by workers.
2. Evaluating the existing methodical procedure from contact center protocol to CRM software to check for integration inadequacies.
3. Identifying processes to finetune for better CX.

Also, you can ask more business questions before digging through the data. Ideally, think of getting customer feedback and choose your business process tools accordingly. 

For this, you can use survey parameters like the Customer Effort Score (CES), the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), the Net Promoter Score (NPS), and the Quality of Customer Interaction (QCI). All of these are critical indicators of your business performance (what’s going right and what can improve).

Besides, you can use any of the following tools—

• Kissflow: This tool helps drive a manageable workload amongst team members while providing an easy way to drive internal processes. It facilitates various organizational processes, including workflow management, case management, project management, and collaborative efforts.
• ActiveCampaign: Most CX tools focus on what happens after a customer buys a product. But, ActiveCampaign prioritizes everything that happens before a customer makes a purchase. It ensures automation and coordination of marketing and sales efforts, allowing team members to provide quality output that ensures higher-quality leads.
• Creatio: Creatio is a BPM solution for marketing, sales, and service that controls business processes throughout the customer journey on a low-code platform. It helps automate, enforce, and comply with third-party requirements while optimizing client journeys and lowering lead-to-revenue time.
• Freshdesk: Freshdesk is an omnichannel customer service platform that helps build strong customer relationships. This is a stand-alone alternative to ActiveCampaign's Service Suite and HubSpot's Service Hub, except that Freshdesk is a dedicated customer service system with more features.

Conduct frequent audits to re-evaluate processes

Once all the processes are in place, analyze them routinely and check for any issues. It is best to divide each process item into manageable problems within the internal processes. 

Refinding internal processes aimed at bettering CX involves asking questions like — 

• What are the targeted CX KPIs, and have your teams achieved those?
• Does your team have enough resources to carry out everyday processes?
• Are all your business processes aligned with key CX goals?

Once you get answers to these questions, outline methods to redefine processes that remove process bottlenecks. It's important to examine these processes carefully and implement changes accordingly. 

It is ideal for auditing internal processes twice a year. Often, it requires revising internal process goals to ensure continued success in the face of ever-shifting business, customer, and market conditions.

This approach can keep the unwanted customer experience in check.

Bottomline

Effective internal process management ensures providing consumers with what they expect. Modern businesses rely on continuously improving the customer experience, and it often requires embracing the aforementioned tips.

Combine the efforts of different teams to boost customer satisfaction and streamline operations that yield the necessary results. Leveling up the CX results in customer retention, increase sales, and drive continual improvement across the organization.

About Author - 

Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.