When was the last time you were placed on hold? How was that experience? Did you dance to the beat of the elevator music?
Were you excited about telling your story all over again to the next representative who answered the phone? Did your heart skip a beat with emotion when a recorded voice informed you that due to a higher call volume, your expected wait time would be 52 minutes?
By golly! It’s so considerate of them to let us know what to expect!
Hopefully, some of these doozies who are still stuck in the 1980s will eventually realize that competitors will slowly but surely take away the vast majority of their clients. Because surely, the world can’t go on with such business practices.
If you feel identified with any of the experiences described above — whether as a customer or as an out-of-touch business owner — welcome to our blog!
Today, we’ll take a closer look at the lessons imparted at Inbound 2021, HubSpot’s three-day conference for inbound marketers. If anything, they will make you hopeful that there is now a light at the end of the customer experience tunnel.
The main nugget of wisdom to remember from Inbound 2021 is that you should always look at things from a customer perspective. It’s irrelevant that you like doing things the way you’ve always done them, or that learning how to use a new software may sound daunting, or that you have so many things on your plate, that you keep putting the customer experience on the back burner.
The customer experience is everything. In fact, one of their big topics was putting the C back into CRM. Your customers are why you have a business. They’re why you’re successful. They’re why you continue to do what you do.
You may think it’s because of the image you present with your Armani suit collection, but without them, you wouldn’t have those, either. If you’re not fully convinced, chew on this: $1.6 trillion is lost each year due to poor customer service. In fact, customers are willing to pay more for a good customer experience.
This is why HubSpot is rolling out the red carpet for customers. They have launched several features that will make the customer experience much more seamless and enjoyable.
Yes, enjoyable. Because when customers are happy, your employees are happy — and vice versa. It all becomes a real-life "We Are the World" feeling, where everyone loves everyone else as we all build a better day for you and me.
But before we get there, it’s time to revise your existing customer service practices. Once you identify whether you’re committing some of the most common mistakes, you’ll be able to address them and implement the newest HubSpot features to keep your customers happy.
Alright. Let’s get real here, because you know who you are. It’s time to reassess if your CX department does any of the following:
You’re busy. We get it. So are your customers. When they call you to ask a question or to resolve an issue, having to repeat the same story five times as their calls get transferred is not going to keep them in a good mood by the time they get connected to the right department.
And I know you know this because you’ve likely experienced it, too. In fact, 89 percent of customers get frustrated when this happens to them.
Are you also using rotary phones? Do you know how many people either don’t check their mail regularly, throw it directly in the recycling bin, or simply misplace it?
If someone needs to reference an account number or any other details relating to transactions with you, they should be able to access all of it by creating an online account. Then it’s up to you to make those details easily available to them. Plus, it’s the environmentally friendly thing to do.
This is another flabbergasting practice. One of the expert panelists explained how he had recently purchased a Volvo, and even though he created an online account on the website, he couldn’t make payments through it.
So he called the customer service line and found out that there was another website for that. Not only that, but that he would need his account number to open an account on that second website.
Where was the account number? Oh! Well, Volvo mailed it to him. Listen, I know there are a lot of extraordinary and lovable Boomers out there, but it’s time to get with the program.
Having multiple websites requires customers to put in a lot more time and effort to get the information they want and creates a lot of confusion, while also hurting your SEO rankings.
Well, this one may sound a bit redundant after the above example. But that’s not the only iteration of companies requiring customers to go through a maze to get something accomplished.
For example, allowing customers to create an online account, but requiring them to make a phone call if they want to cancel services; or asking that they tell you their entire backstory of interactions with your business because you don’t have a good CRM; or expecting them to listen to 32 irrelevant menu options before they get a human to answer their call.
Come on. Be better than that.
Ok. So how do you do better? Glad you asked. Thankfully, HubSpot’s got you covered. Check out the newest Service Hub features that will make customers love you.
Every upgrade HubSpot announced at Inbound 2021 is circumscribed to the customer experience. Customer expectations are at an all-time high, so the customer relationship management platform is allowing unbridled customizations.
You decide what would create the best customer experience within your business, and build that. You can also test it before you take it live with HubSpot's Sandbox feature to ensure that it works the way you hope it will.
HubSpot’s enterprise customers will be able to manage multiple brands from a single portal through Business Units.
This feature lets you expand your target audience to run cross-sell and upsell campaigns. You can also manage subscription preferences and categorize campaign assets to organize them in a way that makes sense to you.
This one’s really cool. HubSpot’s Customer Portal empowers your customers with the ability to check everything relating to their account with you — past purchases, transactions, communications, project status, upcoming events, access to your knowledge base, and answers to frequently asked questions.
Not only does this foster even more trust due to its innate transparency, it also eliminates repetitive tasks from your team’s to-do list.
Are you still mailing checks to pay for bills? Because even if you are, we promise you, customers would rather do it online. HubSpot Payments streamlines secure purchases. It also makes it really easy to send your clients payment links through their preferred method of communication: email, text, and/or live chat.
But wait! There’s more! This feature combines your ecommerce data with the customer’s information that’s already saved in your CRM. So you get paid faster, customers are happier, and all related information is saved in one centralized location. You know your heart is singing with joy just reading about this.
No matter how you look at it, prioritizing the customer experience should be an ongoing process at any business — and HubSpot makes it as easy and efficient as possible.