Customer experience, or CX, has become a central and vital cog in the small business success machine. Communication with current and future customers has never been more important yet too many companies are not concentrating on it as they should. Especially when it comes to mobile operations and customer interaction and support. In some recently released data and research, Softwareadvice found that most small companies are not ready when it comes to mobile CX and satisfaction. The following is take directly from their published research:
- Among popular blogs and publications in the customer service industry, there has been a lot of discussion about how to manage and improve the customer experience. But many people, particularly small-business owners who have less time to study these sources, are still not aware of just how important CX is today: A recent Gartner survey found that 89 percent of businesses plan to compete primarily on the basis of their CX.
- The Pew Research Center reports that 91 percent of U.S. adults own cellphones, and that the cellphone “is the most quickly adopted consumer technology in the history of the world.”
- For businesses, this means that:
- Customers seek out service and support on mobile devices.
- Their CX is determined by how well these interactions are handled by the company, its website and the mobile technologies it uses.
- Many consumers decide whether they will spend their money with a company based on the quality of its mobile CX.
- As evidenced in a Software Advice study on live chat, a consumer’s age is often a good predictor of their preferences and habits. Seventy-seven percent of those age 18 to 24 seek service on a mobile device “several times a week” or “several times a month,” versus just 26 percent of those 65 and older.
- Our survey defined seeking customer support as “seeking an answer to a question about a product or service.” We also made it clear we were asking about respondents’ use of non-voice service channels, such as online searches and mobile apps—not about making phone calls with mobile devices. In fact, when weighing our results to be representative of the age distribution of the U.S. adult population, we find that a combined 63 percent seek customer service with a mobile device several times a month or more.
- Many websites were designed to display on the large screens of desktop and laptop computers. If a customer tries to view a site that has not been optimized for mobile on the smaller screen of say, a smartphone, the results can be poor. Pictures and text may appear tiny, page elements can scale incorrectly and overlap and navigation buttons can be hard to find and click. These issues all detract from a mobile customer’s CX—and often prevent the customer from finding the information they seek.
- Most of our survey respondents have experienced these problems. Topping the list are problems with pages displaying and loading incorrectly, leading to and including difficulty navigating the page, cited by 90 percent.
- The second most common issue is not being able to find relevant and useful search results within the company’s website. This includes searches that returned too many results, results not related to the search and results that lacked useful information. This is the type of poor CX that can frustrate customers, forcing them to call the company, write an email or, in the worst-case scenario, take their business elsewhere.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer