The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how businesses lack consumer awareness, resulting in poor customer service. The requirements, wants, and expectations of customers are always shifting as a result of the ongoing disruption, forcing them to behave differently.
Marketing has become an increasingly significant competitive differentiator and driver of business growth and success as organizations attempt to address the needs of an increasingly broad and sophisticated customer base.
Companies have had to quickly adapt to the changes caused by COVID-19 over the last few months. For many companies, the first step was to stabilize operations and protect their own employees. Organizations can then develop genuine, unique ways to exhibit empathy and emotionally connect with their customers from this position.
In this environment, resilient organizations assist employees in better understanding customers, recalibrating customer experience (CX) efforts in response, and delivering value to them quickly. Empathy can help businesses make a lasting and good emotional connection with their customers.
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Here are three strategies for CMO to increase customer empathy during and after the current pandemic.
Share insights as they are revealed
Employees can’t have empathy with customers if they don’t know what they are thinking, doing, or feeling. Organizations should augment survey-based insights by integrating new data sources in their voice of the customer (VOC) programs to better understand them in the context of a pandemic.
The contact center is a useful listening post for unstructured, unsolicited customer feedback for most businesses. Organizations can leverage tools that transcribe customer service calls and make them available to relevant teams for review and customer-centricity. Now is the time to invest in establishing live conversations with customers.
A call from a customer in distress is a crucial opportunity to observe and understand what they value most. As a result, businesses should provide employees with real-time customer feedback, such as survey results, social media comments, and quotes from customer service calls.
Create a customer-centric mindset
Businesses need to bring employees closer to customers to humanize insights and increase their effectiveness. Also, to better understand their customers, they can listen to customer care calls, spend time serving customers on the front lines, take part in storytelling exercises, and watch customer videos.
To establish a deeper sense of ownership of research findings, businesses should involve employees in the research analysis process and co-create deliverables like journey maps.
Customer insights from qualitative research, such as diary studies and observations, are also visualized on journey maps and shown in immersive experience rooms for all employees to observe. Businesses should turn actions and behaviors that promote customer-centric cultural transformation into rituals in order to achieve long-term change.
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Display the contributions of the team
To guarantee that their staff has a strong sense of purpose, businesses can demonstrate how their job affects CX quality, no matter how far they are from the customer. Companies can also conduct journey and ecosystem mapping sessions with customers and stakeholders within the enterprise to connect the employee and customer journeys.
Experts believe that considering how well companies communicate with their employees about what is required of them during and after the pandemic is will be the differentiator.