3 Tactics for CX Leaders to Reduce Customer Service Costs

The pandemic has only made customers more selective about the digital experiences they want to receive. More than 60% of customers will defect after one bad experience, up 22% from 2021. 

So with customers expecting more and willing to put up with less, how can CX leaders deliver excellent experiences without eating into the company’s profits? 

Here are 3 tactics that will help not only reduce cost-to-serve, but also improve the quality of service delivered.

3 Ways to Reduce Cost-to-Serve

Decreasing cost-to-serve cannot not come at the expense of customer experience. Being able to deliver experiences more efficiently will be of no benefit if these experiences are not helpful to customers. 

But these are not mutually exclusive ideas either. 

When done right, reducing service costs can actually improve customer experiences. Here are 3 ways to start:

1. Empower Customers with Self-Service 

   The first way to save costs is to have customers serve themselves! 

   The most costly form of service is one-to-one support. Use digital solutions to enable customers to help themselves instead of relying on live interactions, which can cost up to 80-100x more than a self-service solution. 

   Self-service is not only the preferred method for customer interactions, but also helps businesses save more than $7 per interaction for a B2C company and $13 for a B2B company.

   With self-service, customers are able to get the answers and information they need more quickly without needing to contact a sales representative. 

   With FAQs, blogs, and forums, customers can find the information they need online or even from other customers. This not only saves the customer time, but frees customer support teams to handle more complicated issues. 
    

2. Automate Personalization 
   It’s no secret that customers have come to expect Amazon and Netflix-levels of personalization from every business they interact with. Studies show that:

   • 74% of customers feel frustrated if there’s a lack of personalization.
   • 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences.
   • 66% of consumers say encountering content that isn’t personalized would stop them from making a purchase.
   While customers may be demanding for more personalized experiences, it’s neither efficient nor cost-effective to have a single customer service representative manually personalize the experience for a few customers. CX leaders need to find technologies that enable their teams to tailor digital experiences based on roles, products, location, and business without needing to touch every interaction.
   
   Different personalization strategies that can be handled through automation include: 
   • Surfacing relevant content and product recommendations based on user role and purchase history
   • Tailoring catalogs and pricing based on their organization 
   • Targeting web pages for different audience segments 
   • Building custom workflows according to unique business purchasing processes 
   • Triggering automated alerts when specific products are back in stock 
      
3. Making Updates Without IT 

   Especially given the changes brought on by the pandemic, being able to increase the time to market of customer solutions has become so critical to business success. 

   But if customer experience is dependent on IT teams, then these solutions will inevitably take much longer to be available for customers. New tools such as low-code/no-code capabilities can empower business and non-technical teams with the tools they need to create and deliver tailored experiences quickly without needing to involve a developer.

Experience Not Expense 

While delivering excellent customer experience should be your business’s main priority, it doesn’t need to be your main expense. With the right strategy and tools in place, you can provide the experiences your customers are looking for more efficiently.

Learn how you can do this with Liferay DXP.