Today’s digital world is progressively changing the way that clients interact with professional services firms. With customer service and customer experience beginning to overtake price and product as brand differentiators, big investments have been made over the past few years in empowering customers with more ways to engage, provide feedback and share their experiences. Let’s take a look at how professional services firms can drive customer experiences and increase employee productivity.
Drive customer engagement with consistent experiences
90% of consumers say they expect consistency and continuity from a brand across channels. In a previous blog we discussed how breaking down knowledge silos can help create consistent customer experiences, but what other factors ensure a consistent customer experience?
Getting it right the first time
According to “Understanding Customers” by Ruby Newell-Legner, it takes 12 positive brand experiences to make up for just one negative one. Therefore companies need to ensure they are getting it right the first time and continuing to provide a consistently good experience. This means setting realistic customer expectations from the start, “increasing trust is one of the best ways to manage expectations… When it’s a new relationship, there are just too many unknowns. Giving the client a better understanding of your promises as a business partner will help them set their expectations”
Know your customers across their journey
58% of companies inconsistently measure, or fail to measure their customer’s cross channel journey. If there is one thing customers hate, it’s having to repeat themselves. A real-time record and view of your service interactions, purchases and feedback across all channels can increase customer satisfaction. According to a NICE Consumer Channel Preference Survey, consumers are now using six different channels on average to contact service providers, and 86% say that they are communicating more often with businesses over all major channels, using the one that’s most convenient at any given time. Cross channel consistency is key in the customer journey, no matter what road each individual takes to connect. A CRM business management solution such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows companies to record their interactions from all touch points and across the customer journey.
Increase employee productivity and improve resource management
Professional services businesses must give customer-facing employees access to key customer insights to drive more personalised, proactive and predictive engagement.
Visibility
Professional service providers need to function at the speed of their customers, and their employees need the right real-time information and tools at their fingertips to deliver instant status updates, and make rapid decisions. Project Managers also need overall visibility of what is being delivered; with stage status reviews, resource utilisation and project estimation functionality. A PSA solution can provide visibility across the company.
Resource management
Talented professionals are a firm’s primary revenue-producing assets and typically account for 70 per cent of operating expenses. More effective utilisation of available expertise, plus higher productivity through collaboration and best practices, can increase revenue per employee and firm profitability. The key is to recruit the right people, assign them to the right projects, and ensure they apply the right practices. The planning module within Prodware’s PSA solution can be used to plan your project phases and tasks and view your team schedule to allocate resources depending on their skill, cost and availability.
Now more than ever, forming trusted relationships and upholding a positive reputation rely on the delivery of outstanding and increasingly personalised experiences—not just for a single project, but consistently across each customer interaction with the firm.
Microsoft Dynamics for Professional Services business solutions are designed with service industries in mind, combining consistent project management, internal resource management and communication, tailored to the needs of the industry to help reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction. To find out more contact Prodware.
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