Entrepreneaur Kevin O’Leary explains the striking correlation between how a company treats its employees and superior customer experience with those well-treated employees.
Resources for success
Today’s modern consumers are becoming increasingly more empowered with improved access and knowledge to the marketplace itself. Through social media and easy, online cost comparisons, now is the time for businesses to invest in the necessary technology and resources to empower employees with the best customer experience solutions possible.
Flexibility in the cloud
One approach to improving these services for workers is by increasing flexibility for the customer by taking customer service to the cloud. With cloud technology companies can take services that were once restricted to the PC and provide the same services on every digital platform, thus improving business-customer engagement.
“The key of the cloud is to be able to access your data from anywhere, anytime,” says “Shark Tank” star and Canadian Entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary. With this flexibility, customer service and tech support can respond faster and more effectively.
“If you have a customer, regardless of… where they are, you can get a lot of profile data about the experience they’re having with your product and service,” explains O’Leary. “As you build that data, the value of that customer goes higher and higher for you.” This is where customer retention comes into play. The better equipped you are to provide service to a loyal customer, the more likely they are to stay with you in the long run. The numerous benefits associated with using the cloud makes it easy to attract customers and, with due diligence, maintain the relationship and thus increase the value of your business.
Exploring new territory
“There is no question that if you are able to score in the top [range] of customer service quarter after quarter, the value of your brand goes through the roof,” explains O’Leary. This crucial aspect is somewhat new territory for businesses, as social media now provides instant and in-depth customer feedback for all other potential and current customers to read. However, businesses can also take advantage of the information provided by these conversations by adapting to the needs of their client base.
“When you launch something that is clearly not being accepted, or is being accepted, you need to know why,” says O’Leary, “You definitely need to be monitoring this. The cloud lets you do that instantaneously.”
Use it right
In order to get the most out of the cloud and social media data management, the question becomes whether businesses need to invest in analytic solutions or if they can just build a database to access this user data on the go at all times. According to O’Leary, “It’s not just enough to collect the data — you have to actually be able to manage it and get useful information from it.” For this, there are a diverse array of dashboards available to cut and review data in multiple ways and maximize benefit. “Having data and not having the ability to analyze or manage it is useless.” With the right analytic tools, associates can summarize daily data reports in as little as a single page.
Fortunately, investing in these tools is also becoming increasingly accessible to businesses of all sizes. The average return on investment was once three years, but “the systems are so powerful and the costs have gone down, [so] you can now get your investment return in less than a year,” said O’Leary. This minimizes the risks involved so that even smaller businesses can also take advantage of cloud computing technology and empower employee engagement as well as the customer experience.
