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5 Effective Ways to Improve Customer Experience

EDI Customer Experience blog

5 Effective Ways to Improve Customer Experience

EDI Customer Experience blog

Forbes contributor Yuri Kruman said it best in his article on the importance of customer experience in the age of instant gratification – the same old customer experience no longer works.

In our digital age every business, service, and product can be subject to public scrutiny across a litany of social and web channels for past, current, and future customers to investigate. Research suggests that almost all consumers (93%) say that online reviews impact their purchasing decisions . Considering these circumstances, it is no wonder that over 90% of c-level executives say that improving customer experience is one of their top three priorities for the next several years.

Modern organizations understand the significant role customer experience plays in lowering operational costs, maintaining brand loyalty, and ensuring sustained growth. But how exactly can your organization improve customer experience?

Understand your Audience
Ensuring your organization understands what type(s) of consumers are visiting your facility or procuring your product or service is essential. The only way to meet the needs of your customers is to first understand who they are, what motivates them, and what they want. Start by assessing:

1. Who is your customer base?
2. What needs must your facility or service fulfil?
3. Are you able to meet those needs – why or why not?

This information is the foundation of an effective customer management strategy. Once you understand who your customers are and what they need from your business, you can more efficiently implement tools and strategies to improve their experience.

Encourage Customer Feedback
Over 85% of adults in the USA now own a smartphone — which is great news for your organization. There is a wealth of technology available to allow consumers to use their own device to provide the critical feedback you need to meet their needs more efficiently.

Rather than forcing your customers to stand around at kiosks and touch public smart devices to provide feedback, the best customer experience tools are accessible via a quick QR code scan with a smart device.

Leading web and app-based customer experience tools are simple, easy-to-use, and can be optimized to walk your customers through a wizard-based interface with answers your organization prepopulates to ensure you have all the information you need to address their concerns.

Harness the Data
As mathematician Clive Humby once proclaimed, “Data is the new oil.”

In the digital age, enterprises have the exciting opportunity to collect data more easily from various sources online and within their facilities. This information, when used properly, can revolutionize the customer experience.

Implementing a digital customer experience tool and customer-focused processes that allow you to collect data are critical steps your business can undertake to understand customer behavior and interest. The question then becomes, what data is important in your quest to improve customer experience? Is it impressions on the quality of your facility or service, consumer purchasing habits, public engagement, or something else? As noted above, understanding your audience and their needs should simplify the process of defining what data you need to collect.

Once you determine what data you need, you can identify important trends and patterns that you can then use to improve your processes or amenities.

Mind your Assets
Asset management is an excellent way to use data to improve customer experience. Just as you should have a well-rounded understanding of your customers, the same level of understanding should be applied to every asset within your organization.

Your assets are one of your most expensive investments and are closely related to the experience of your customers. Heating or cooling issues, restroom cleanliness, and spills/hazards are some of the most common issues often reported by customers.

Giving your customers the tools to provide feedback on your facility and its assets can help you efficiently prioritize work requests, determine key usage patterns, and identify repeat problem areas or equipment which may need to be maintained more frequently, or replaced entirely.

Empower your Employees with Information
Your employees can be your best line of defense in improving customer experience – but their efforts are only as effective as the information they receive.

Selecting a configurable, wizard style Q&A tool that guides consumers to provide all the information your technicians need is preferable. Other handy features leading customer experience tools contain that your technicians will appreciate are:

1. The ability for customers to attach photos to their feedback.
2. Mapping functionality so that they can locate issues faster.
3. Integration with your company’s Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system so they do not need to duplicate critical maintenance resolution information for two systems.

When employing a technology tool to allow customers to provide feedback, ensure that the data you collect and subsequently disseminate to your employees is complete and includes the asset and location data your technicians need to address issues quickly and efficiently.

If you have questions or want to learn more about improving the experience of your customers, contact sales@edatai.com today!

What type of Maximo Work Request Tool is Right for your Organization?

EDI ATLAS Blog

What type of Maximo Work Request Tool is Right for your Organization?

EDI ATLAS Blog

IBM Maximo allows licensees an unlimited number of requestors – but what does this mean for your organization? You have the ability to empower anyone visiting your facility to provide valuable feedback on their customer experience for free.

Allowing your employees and public users to provide feedback quickly and easily via their own smart device can help your organization understand, prioritize, and address issues faster, thereby improving the experience of your customers and overall public sentiment.

You just need to find the right request tool to pair with your Maximo EAM system to capitalize on this functionality. First, you need to understand the difference between the types of work request tools that integrate with Maximo – native apps and web-based tools.

What is the Difference Between Native Apps and Web-based Tools?

According to UX Magazine, “A native app is one that is built for a specific platform, such as iPhone or Android, using their code libraries and accessing their available hardware features (camera, GPS, etc.). A web-based app, on the other hand, is one that is hosted on the web and accessed from a browser on the mobile device.”

Features/benefits of web-based tools
1. There is no waiting for the updated iPhone/android/etc. version of the app to be released –
software updates are automatic for all users when using a web-based tool. This is especially useful for organizations who do not want to add additional burdens to their IT teams.

2. Many request apps only allow authorized Maximo users to submit Requests – a web-based tool can be configured to allow public users who do not have the app to provide the feedback you need to maintain your facility more efficiently.

3. The best web-based request tools are QR code based and allow your organization to attach Maximo asset and location data to each of the QR codes located throughout your facility.

These QR codes allow users to simply scan the code using their smart device, quickly fill out a work request with all of the pertinent data your team needs to address the issue and continue on their journey with the satisfaction that they have been able to provide you feedback on issues of importance to them.

Features/benefits of native apps
1. Users can download an app for their smart device from their app store, and the app can then access their available hardware features. The downside being that the process of going to the app store to find the app, downloading it, and then subsequently figuring out how to use said app may be a deterrent for some customers. In Enterprise situations, these apps are usually pushed to users by the IT department.

2. Thanks to the fact that the code that runs the app is stored locally on the smart device, native apps tend to be faster and more responsive than their counterparts. The negative being that users are then responsible for managing updates pushed out via the app store for their phone’s particular platform.

This becomes especially cumbersome for the organization relying on the app-based Request tool for data, because their IT team needs to continually monitor for those releases and remind their users and the general to update their apps.

3. Native apps can run asynchronously, meaning dynamic information can be stored locally on the phone temporarily and synchronized with the central web-based server later. While recent technologies and features (such as those in HTML5) will allow for this to also be done in a web-based environment, native apps are still ahead of web-based ones on this front.

Is a Web-Based or App-based Request Tool Best for your Organization?

This answer depends on whose feedback you are looking for. If your organization wants to limit requestors to only those people inside your organization, an app may be best. If you select an app-based request tool you will have to work with your IT department to set up your users, configure to specific platforms, and remind requestors to download updates from their respective app store.

If, on the other hand, you are looking for a work request tool that capitalizes on your ability to allow anyone to submit a Maximo work request free of charge, a web-based tool may be best for your organization. If your goal is to simplify the work request process for everyone involved, from your IT department, to your Maximo users, to the general public using your facility, you will want to seek out a web-based Request tool that allows anyone with a smart device to scan a QR code which is linked to Maximo asset data to quickly provide your technicians with the data they need to locate and resolve issues.