Customer experience, or CX, is enormously important for your business. When you hit the CX sweet spot, you’ll convert leads into buyers, retain existing customers, and reap a new crop of prospects when happy customers recommend your company to their friends and family. CX is so important, shoppers are willing to pay up to 16% more for the same products, yet only 49% say that companies deliver a good customer experience.
With the stakes that high, you want to use all the tools at your disposal to improve customer experience. At first glance, you might not see the impact that project management can have on customer experience. After all, even the best agile project management tools are aimed at your employees, not your customers.
But when you think about it, CX relates to every interaction that a customer has with your company, product, or service, so it spans your entire organization. With that in mind, here are 4 ways to put your project management software to work boosting your CX.
1. Use automated workflows to keep customers from slipping through the cracks
If you promise a customer that someone will be in touch soon to answer their question or process their request, and then nobody calls, chances are high that you won’t be getting a second chance. If they have a single bad experience, even with a brand they love, 32% of consumers worldwide and 17% in the US are willing to walk away without a word.
This is where you remember that agile project management tools include automated workflows. You can use them to prevent you from losing track of customers who’ve contacted your customer support or sales teams. For example, set up routing workflows that send inquiries to the right person first time, so you won’t risk dropping the customer as you pass them between teams. Or create automated reminders that notify you or the assigned team member if the task isn’t marked as “complete” within a certain timeframe.
Automated workflows can also take time-consuming, repetitive tasks off your hands so that you can dedicate more time to human customer interactions.
2. Reduce consumer frustration by democratizing access to customer data
Among their many high expectations, customers today expect that brands will know and remember them and their issues. 86% of consumers assume that you recognize them and pick up the conversation without hesitation if they switch channels, and 71% expect that if they get transferred to a second (or subsequent) agent, the new agent will be fully informed about all the details they’ve shared so far.
The only way to meet these demands is to aggregate detailed customer data from multiple channels and sources, make sure it’s updated in real time, and store it in a single location that’s accessible to everyone in a customer-facing role. Project management platforms fill this need admirably so that you can deliver customer service that feels like a single conversation, no matter how many channels or agents it spans.
3. Increase your army of informed employees
As well as democratizing access to customer data, you can (and should) use project management software to open up access to business data too. When you keep the information that’s needed to answer frequently-asked customer questions in a central location, you’ll widen the number of employees who can resolve any given consumer issue.
As a result, you’ll slash the number of times that you have to transfer a customer before they reach resolution, which matters when 68% say it annoys them when they’re passed between departments. Reducing the need to transfer customers also lessens the risk that they’ll get lost in the process, and the faster you can fix a customer’s complaint, the more delighted they’ll be with your CX.
4. Encourage collaboration both inside and outside the organization
One of the lesser-known benefits of advanced, agile project management software is that it encourages collaboration with customers as well as within the organization. Set up your systems to record and share valuable customer opinion and insights from customer behavioral data, so it’s at your fingertips to inform decision making across the board. When your business decisions are based on deep customer feedback, you’ll see the impact on the way that customers feel about their interactions with your sales teams, marketing campaigns, customer support agents, and the products and services themselves.
Additionally, when you use project management software to increase internal collaboration, it makes your employees feel more connected to the business as a whole, which plays a key role in increasing employee engagement. Engaged employees, by and large, drive better customer experiences and have a deeper understanding of customer needs.
Project management software should be part of customer experience arsenal
Project management tools can impact more than simply helping your teams meet their deadlines. With the right tactics, you can use project management software to educate more employees to understand customer needs and answer consumer questions; build automated workflows that improve customer interactions; and invite your target market to take part in making your products and services even better.