With consumer needs and expectations constantly evolving, business success these days will often come down to how well you remain connected and engaged with your customers and provide the best possible experience (CX). Achieving great CX is not easy and requires constant focus, ongoing investment and continuous improvement. According to a GoTo’s survey in partnership with Foundry, 52% of ANZ businesses rated improving CX as a top customer support goal for 2022.
Many retail businesses will at some stage outgrow their CX technology unless owners have the foresight to choose a solution that scales and evolves with the business. With technology advancing at a rapid pace, it’s vital for business owners to find a provider that will help you stay on top of the latest customer tools and trends to ensure the business keeps pace or stays ahead of the market.
What you don’t want is for technology to start holding the business back from growth and expansion, because the wrong customer solution will have a negative impact on employees, sales, customers, your brand and bottom line.
Finding a simple, unified solution
For years we put up with an outdated, basic and clunky phone system because business priorities lay elsewhere. We had absolutely no control over the IVR or any part of the system’s management. The impact was damaging. Having to rely on the vendor for every simple change or request, cost time, money, frustration and customers. Technical support was non-responsive or non-existent, and reporting was cumbersome and complex making it difficult to analyse data and gain meaningful insights. For too long we put up with a system that didn’t add value to our business. But the concept of changing something so significant was daunting – something many business owners feel too often.
Not knowing where to start, we turned to support from Converged Communication Network Applications (CCNA) and engaged a consultant to help source a feature-rich, affordable, user-friendly and sophisticated contact centre and flexible communications solution for Umart. We assessed different providers and our non-negotiables were that it be a unified tech solution; it would improve both CX and customer engagement; be fit for purpose; highly sophisticated and responsive; easy to use and configure; and it would deliver on our commercial goals.
And we found what we were looking for: GoTo Connect (Phone, Meeting and Messaging), and GoTo Contact Centre solution.
We now have full autonomy to make changes, updates and to test and learn with creative customer communication solutions. We change how our customer queues operate, we record quick and simple IVR messages, and we can experiment with different options over the course of a couple of hours to see what works best for Umart customers. This is something we would never have been able to do with our previous provider.
What we also didn’t anticipate were the benefits this unified solution would bring to our overseas call centre. GoTo Contact Centre’s solution is intuitive, easy to use, and simple to set up and configure for our overseas contact centre team. With the pandemic impacting international travel, we didn’t need to have a local team on the ground as we simply provided GoTo training materials to our front-line tech teams overseas and talked through general troubleshooting. The system is efficient, effective, user friendly and adds enormous value to our business.
And, what’s more, we don’t need to worry about it anymore because it’s seamless and it just works. It’s not often you can take a new process, system, or tool, share it with the entire business, and everyone is happy. Even established employees embraced the change to GoTo because the solution is far superior and makes their day-to-day work a pleasure.
The results
Since implementing the new phone, meeting, messaging and contact centre solutions with GoTo, Umart has seen significant increases in customer satisfaction metrics. Our Net Promoter Score has increased 20 points – unheard of in most businesses. And our customer effort score boosted from 71% to 89%, meaning 9 out of 10 Umart customers are either ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with our service.
GoTo’s solution also solved a significant issue we had with a high rate of customer complaints as a result of the poor-quality phone lines and unreliable internet at our overseas contact centre via our previous provider. Since implementing GoTo’s Contact Centre solution, Umart has had a 180-degree turnaround from a high rate of customer complaints to a growing rate of customer compliments.
My advice to businesses, no matter what growth stage you’re in, is to choose your CX solution wisely. In today’s uncertain economic environment where the pace of change will remain high, it’s vital to select tools, providers and business partners that provide a premium, agile service at an affordable price point.
If your provider is known to go above and beyond, don’t underestimate that type of support – it’s invaluable. We had run into a porting issue caused by our previous provider who disconnected one of our numbers earlier than anticipated and the GoTo team worked with us to quickly develop a solution. GoTo set up a temporary line that kept our downtime to just 30 minutes when it could’ve been much worse. That is ‘money can’t buy’ support which reinforced that we had made the best business decision for Umart both now and for the future.
Lindsay Brown is vice president & general manager APAC at GoTo, and Evan Casey, head of customer service at Umart.