Businesses are always looking for fresh ways to market to their clients and increase their KPIs through new and better experiences.
By now, you’ve probably heard of a total experience strategy. Enterprises are adopting this hot new trend to create a holistic approach to growth and outperform their competitors.
Total experience (TX) is a term recently coined by Gartner. It is a strategy that blends four separate disciplines – customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), user experience (UX), and multi-experience (MX) – to create superior shared experiences for not just customers but employees and users as well.
And that can be the difference between ending your year on a high note or coming up short of your goals.
But how does a business create a total experience package? And where does the voice channel fit into that strategy?
The 4 Disciplines, Living Together in Harmony
Before we can talk about the total experience, we need to understand what each discipline brings to the table. Why is it essential for all of them to work together?
Let’s start with the one that every company should be familiar with: the customer experience.
Customer Experience
Good customer experience should be top of mind for every business. After all, it’s where you make your revenue. And companies with bad customer experiences can forget about retaining loyal, repeat customers. These customers are the bread and butter of a sustainable business model.
To have a successful total experience strategy, you must start with a good customer experience plan.
Good customer experience can mean many things to many different customers. But you can condense good CX into three key ideas.
Top 3 Indicators of Good Customer Experience
An excellent total experience strategy is meant to enhance your customer experience first. After you tackle CX, improving the rest of your business follows closely behind.
Employee Experience
You can’t have satisfied customers without satisfied employees. If your workers aren’t happy with their work, they will bring that frustration to your customers. That’s bad news for businesses.
Like customer experience, employee experience can vary from person to person. But the main idea to focus on is providing your employees with the tools and resources they need to be successful.
For call center agents, that can mean using the best and most efficient UCaaS, CCaaS, or CPaaS software. It can also mean adding technology from other vendors, like branded calling, to reduce the number of missed calls, increase answer rates and engagement rates, and boost customer satisfaction.
Anything you can do to make your employees’ jobs easier is a win in the employee experience discipline.
User Experience
User experience is like customer experience with one key difference. Whereas customer experience is all about providing excellent service to the clients you already have, user experience is about delivering value to everyone, no matter where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Good UX can be the layout you use on your website or mobile app or how easy it is to sign-up for your products. It can also be the time it takes for someone to find the information they’re looking for or even the platform you use for communicating with users.
A business with good UX keeps customers and potential clients happy and coming back for more. Customers know they know they can quickly solve their issues by using your products.
Multi-Experience
This discipline is newer to the experience space but is just as important to consider as the others.
Multi-experience considers a user’s entire experience from multiple platforms, including chatbots, websites, mobile apps, augmented reality and metaverse experiences, and voice channels.
Businesses focusing on MX know how important it is to create a unified approach to their messaging and branding across all available platforms.
Branded Communications and the Total Experience
Let’s dive a bit deeper into what it means to have a total experience that includes a branded calling strategy.
Branded Communications + Customer Experience
When considering an ideal customer experience, people may no longer consider the phone call a great way to communicate with a business.
But phone makers and network carriers aren’t to blame here! Scammers, spammers, and bad robocallers have made clients reluctant to answer their phones. Customers have a fear of falling victim to a scam attempt.
We’ve found that 87% of customers rarely or never answer calls from unknown numbers, including yours!
When clients see an unknown number appear on their phones or the dreaded “scam likely” tag, they are conditioned to ignore the call.
However, there’s a quick fix to this problem, and it’s called Branded Communications.
Branded Communications allows businesses to take control of their display name when making outbound calls to customers. No more unknown numbers, scam tags, or misspelled CNAMs.
INFORM® can be up and running in seconds. It allows call centers with multiple departments and phone numbers to brand every number with their name and the reason for calling.
And the boost given by Branded Communications has scored some major points in the customer experience space.
One call center using Branded Communications saw a 10% lift in its engagement rate. And more engaged customers result in more revenue – the call center also saw a 48% increase in conversion rates.
Branded Communications + Employee Experience
Branded calls make sense for a good customer experience; correctly branded phone calls make it easier for people to decide which calls are worth their time. But have you considered how branded calls can also improve the employee experience, especially for call centers?
When your agents make outbound calls to clients, are they successfully reaching customers the first time, or does it take multiple phone calls, numerous rounds of phone tag, and lots of frustration before they connect?
Customers don’t like missing important calls, but neither do your employees making the outbound calls. Missed calls create more work for call center agents, who must attempt to reach a customer multiple times before they connect. Customers are often so frustrated by the process that they’re less likely to convert.
By adopting a branded calling solution, like INFORM® or ENGAGE®, you’re investing in your customers’ satisfaction and employees’ happiness.
Clients who have started using Branded Communications have seen their answer rates, but more importantly, their engagement rates skyrocket.
Branded Communications + User Experience
User experience is essential to consider at every step in the buyer’s journey, which is why Branded Communications fits perfectly into this discipline. Branded Communications is vital no matter where your customers are in the buyer’s journey.
The five stages of the buyer’s journey are:
In every step of the journey, a phone call is an integral part of the process. And no matter when a customer receives a phone call from you if you aren’t branding your call, your customers aren’t answering.
You could even hurt your reputation and user experience by failing to identify yourself properly!
In a First Orion report, we found that 85% of people believe that an unknown number makes a business appear illegitimate.
That damages your brand reputation and can quickly stop a traveling customer in their tracks, leading to lost time and revenue.
Branded Communications + Multi-Experience
When it comes to the multi-experience discipline, you can’t have a conversation about Branded Communications without considering what it means for the future of the product.
To put it plainly: multi-experience is the future of branded communications.
Although MX is the newest of the four disciplines, many businesses are now adopting multi-platform experiences to give their clients a cohesive branding experience across every available product.
For Branded Communications, that means delivering consistent and correct branding to the user on all platforms, whether phone calls, SMS messaging, chatbots … the list goes on.
Even beyond the current communication technology we have now, Branded Communications has potential uses in futureproofing your business. Imagine connecting to a virtual metaverse meeting with a client and branding your avatar’s virtual apparel with your company’s name, logo, and brand colors.
The possibilities of Branded Communications and the future are expansive, and blending branded calls into your multi-experience is crucial for delivering a consistent product across multiple platforms.
Take the Next Step
Branded Communications is First Orion’s solution to solving the unknown number issue and branding calls to deliver an outstanding total experience package.
Just like all four disciplines have to work together to deliver a complete total experience solution, Branded Communications should be considered in every area to create an enjoyable experience for customers, users, and employees.
Looking for more insight into First Orion’s Branded Communications solutions and how they can improve your total experience efforts? Connect with us to get started with INFORM today.
