Why Exceeding Customer Expectations Is the New Norm

Salesforce's recent State of the Connected Customer survey found some interesting results about the importance of exceeding customer expectations. According to the survey, 80% of customers said the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services, 72% expect companies to understand their needs and expectations, and 57% have stopped buying from a company because a competitor provided a better experience.

Those are high numbers, and they speak to the importance of not only meeting, but exceeding customer expectations. Is your business wondering how to improve the customer experience? Fortunately, there are communications tools to help you wow customers — and win their future business.

Providing Seamless Experiences

Unified communications as a service (UCaaS) connects all of your communications applications together to provide an extraordinary customer experience. And it connects all of your essential teams, too, from lead generation to marketing to e-commerce to customer support. Whether a customer is calling to purchase a product or ask for help, they get a seamless experience from start to finish, moving from one device to another and one department to another without disruption. Since 70% of customers in the Salesforce survey said seamless hand-offs are very important to winning their business, this is key.

Providing a seamless experience helps exceed customer expectations in a few ways. First, everyone — including contact center agents, support team members, and front-end employees — has access to the same customer information, at the same time, from the same place. As the customer is moved from one party to the next, they don't have to repeat their question or issue; company reps can access call data in the UCaaS system and solve issues right away. With 72% of customers expecting personalized engagement and 63% expecting instant, on-demand engagement from businesses, according to Salesforce, providing this kind of experience is essential to surpassing customer expectations.

Second, UCaaS platforms enable mobile capabilities. Whether your sales and support staff work in one office, in multiple offices around the globe, or on the go, your employees are always connected to one another, and can easily connect to customers. They can reach out directly to customers to follow up on a sale, a new feature or implementation, or simply to check in, and they can also take calls while traveling. If you have employees who like to work while commuting, UCaaS makes it easy to switch between mobile and desktop without dropping the call, maintaining that seamless experience customers expect.

With the majority of customers expecting businesses to provide seamless communications, having the right tools in place is critical in today's market.

Giving Customers What They Want

In addition to efficient communications, today's customers also expect easy purchasing processes and the ability to get answers to their questions right away. Unified communications tools help keep everyone in the loop so that the customer feels heard and cared for with every touch point. And when your UCaaS platform is integrated with your CRM, the front line can be in tune with the product team, helping keep customers informed about product updates and features that they want.

This demonstrates that you not only understand your customers' expectations and needs, but you're actively working to address their pain points and enhance the features that drew them to your product or business in the first place.

On the backend, unified communications tools help you enhance the customer experience with every interaction. With a UCaaS system integrated directly into your CRM, you can collect and analyze call data from one central location. You can then leverage this data to spot changes in customer behavior and adjust accordingly to continue meeting and exceeding customer expectations at every turn.

Running call reports for things like abandonment rate, time to answer, wait time, and call duration, for example, can help you see where customers are getting stuck or not getting the information they need. Using such data can help you improve your call routing, menu options, self-serve customer support documentation, and all those other touch points that make for a great customer experience. Fifty-nine percent of customers from the Salesforce survey said that tailored engagement based on past interactions is very important to winning their business, making this kind of data analysis essential to providing a strong customer experience.

Exceed Customer Expectations for Life

How your customers experience your business directly affects your bottom line. And with the majority of customers expecting businesses to provide seamless communications, having the right tools in place is critical in today's market.

For companies learning how to exceed customer expectations, UCaaS is a vital tool. You'll be in the know as your customers respond to product or service enhancements, and you'll be able to keep up to date on changing expectations. Leveraging this technology will help keep you ahead of the curve — and ahead of your competition.