The Importance of Seamless Operations for Customer Engagement

Happy customers are returning customers. And returning customers may even become brand ambassadors!

I'm sure you've employed the best solutions to engage with your customers. But do they deliver a good customer experience? Are these solutions smooth and hassle-free? Is the user experience you're offering truly seamless, both for your customers and your employees?

Why a Seamless Customer Experience Is Important

Technology should make life easier, not complicate it. Perfectly well-crafted solutions can be in vain if your customers can not appreciate the effort.

Customer expectations are high and even the most technologically advanced solutions can annoy your customers when your different applications and solutions aren't linked and don’t ‘talk’ to each other. Your solutions end up being their own little islands. The customer is then forced to row their boat from one island to the other whilst getting exhausted and annoyed.

Even your own employees will start to feel frustrated when their internal experience is anything but seamless. Multiple logins, inaccessible data, and solutions without clear ownership can cause friction and slow down operations. Everybody wants to be able to offer the optimal customer experience, but if (legacy) software prevents the customer journey from going smoothly, it will be frustrating for all parties involved.

How to Create Seamless Customer Engagement

So how can you make sure that your operations and processes run smoothly and seamlessly? Well, let's have a look at what makes the experience seamless for both your customers and your employees.

Seamless Customer Experience

A seamless customer experience is, simply put, a frictionless customer journey. Customers have high (technological) expectations of businesses and when these expectations are not met, the customer will experience this as friction. So ask yourself these questions:

• Do I communicate with my customers on the channels they prefer to use?
• Is our business available when customers most need us?
• Are my (digital) processes automated for self-service?
• Is my UI mobile-friendly?
• Is it easy for my customer to find important information?
• Is my communication personalized?
• Do I offer solutions that my customers are familiar with?
• Do my solutions require work from my customers?

To create a seamless experience for customers, it is important that you meet or even outperform their expectations. A mobile-friendly or even mobile-first approach will make your business approachable and automating processes online will allow your customers to self-service. If the solutions you offer require minimal effort from your customer, are easily navigatable, and are available on platforms and channels customers are already familiar with, then they will have a positive experience with your business.

Seamless Employee Experience

A seamless experience for your employees means smooth operations and processes that will make their job easier. The solutions you offer to your employees should work for them, not against them. Ask yourself these questions:

• Do my employees need multiple logins to access all systems necessary to do their job?
• Is all knowledge stored in one place?
• Is data and data analysis easily accessed?
• Are all software solutions owned by different providers?
• Is the support for the (software) solutions well organized?
• Do the (software) solutions have clear ownership within our business?
• Do I know enough about the security of our solutions?
• Do my (software) solutions adopt new innovative trends? Do they stay on top of the technological developments?
• Do the solutions increase the quality and speed of work?

To create a seamless experience for your employees, it is important that the (software) solutions used are integrated with one another. Make sure that all (customer) information and data you have is available where needed. Let different solutions tap into the same knowledge base to prevent miscommunication and loss of knowledge. Make it easy for your employees to access the software they need to be able to do their job and make sure that the support for these solutions is fast and easily accessible.

You can achieve this by either syncing existing solutions from different providers to each other (via open APIs), or finding a provider that offers an all-in-one package.

Our Vision

Across all sectors and at companies of all sizes, technology departments must identify and deploy innovative IT solutions that meet today’s business needs while anticipating the challenges of tomorrow. Use cases and specifics may change from one business to the next, yet all technology departments share the purpose and goal of creating, simplifying, and streamlining complex digital processes.

IT and technology decision-makers must find solutions that meet the customer expectations without creating more work for the humans that deploy, maintain, secure and repair them.

Wish to read more about seamless operations and the importance of a consumer-led technology estate? Then download our paper!