Accelerate your CX ahead of the competitive curve for firmer business stability – find out what happened at Zendesk’s CX Accelerator event

15 September 2022 | 15 Shares

Find out how to elevate your business by fine-tuning your customer experience game plan. You can watch the CX Accelerator virtual event on demand, get it here.

Company leaders are eyeing where the next business continuity investments will be made. Despite changing priorities, customer service is still top of mind since good customer experience never goes out of style.

If anything, customer conversations are increasingly important, although over a third of organisations are still categorised as “emergers” in the rankings of CX performance, according to this report.

As the business environment evolves to keep up with shifting expectations, so must the role of customer experience agents. End users are more discerning and are reluctant to give second chances in this hyper-digitised reality, with the data from multiple sources confirming that the majority of consumers will switch services after a single bad experience.

Doing business in 2022 requires resilience and resourcefulness, and the customer experience journey is no different. What can customer experience leadership do differently and better in 2022? How can organisations circumvent common obstacles and find common ground across the customer experience value chain – from the C-suite to CX leaders to help desk agents to the customers themselves – to build better, connected experiences and elevate the journey with digital support?

Zendesk hosted a CX Accelerator virtual event on the 21st of September, to promote the launch of new research. And you can catch up on all the happenings, still relevant and still impactful.

Compelling insights into consumer behavior and the changing dynamics in modern customer care was broken down at the CX Accelerator virtual briefing lasting 90 minutes. Among the incisive findings were how invaluable CX has become in driving better business outcomes, with more than half (64%) of companies saying that customer service played a direct role in their business performance

Source: Zendesk

A similar number, 60%, pointed out that CX could have positive or negative impact on customer retention. Zendesk harnesses cutting-edge data to break customer-facing teams into categories, from Starters to Emergers to Risers to Champions, to determine how best targeted solutions can be deployed at scale to boost efficiency and new revenue growth opportunities, whilst keeping the bottomline manageable.

Customers are more engaged than last year, which means more opportunities to cross-sell or upsell relevant linked products that can round out the customer purchasing experience. And as the business becomes more adept at figuring out how to keep its client base happy, meeting customers where they are with the right personalised, omnichannel support mechanisms, will be critical.

Of the 4,900+ business decision-makers surveyed by Zendesk (read the CX Accelerator Report here), those classified as ‘Champions’ of CX reported they were six times more likely to discover a new sales opportunity in over a quarter of customer interactions than CX ‘Starters.’

A preponderance of chatbot and human customer interactions also characterised CX high fliers’ customer-facing processes, with most touchpoints comprising bots handing off to human agents. Of course, doing has to be done at the right time, and with a deep understanding of where automation is most effective, and where agent support is required.

“The biggest changes businesses face to keep up with – let alone get ahead of – customers’ expectations are both operational and cultural,” said Jeff Titterton, chief operating officer at Zendesk. Operational issues confronting CX decision-makers are centred around the number of applications in use in customer-facing roles – between six and 15, in most cases. While leveraging multiple apps can give a more-rounded view of customers (and thereby give better experiences), there is always the danger of data silos emerging, which may negatively impact the business. That’s why deploying software that can integrate key data from critical applications is important in driving CX quality upwards.

The CX Accelerator report also highlights the importance of a unified approach to CX in terms of business operations. Ensuring Support and Sales teams share information better builds stronger relationships with individual customers and is shown to reduce churn and increase CX metrics.

Having the right knowledge, strategy and skills can ensure that businesses succeed in terms of nurturing customers that will revisit for repeat business and remain engaged. Training staff “at the coal face” has to go hand-in-hand with a strategic rethink among decision-makers that places CX concerns front-of-mind.

At the CX Accerlerator virtual event, company leaders from across organisations, including CX, IT, and HR leads, virtually workshoped the best CX strategies to scale their customer experience, leveraging insights from nearly 5,000 CX pros whose opinions formed the basis of the CX Accelerator Report.

With regional UK and Ireland insights complemented by a global perspective on agent performances and business operations, the research has been gathered – those who register to watch the envent on demand will also obtain access to the CX Accelerator workbook. Inside, there are 12 activities to help plot the right CX plan, driven by strategic insights from the world’s leading customer experience practitioners.

Click here now to watch the CX Accelerator virtual event, available right now!