Building lasting customer relationships takes more than award-winning products and services. It is also understanding and addressing customer needs. That is why CCC created the Customer Experience First (CX1) program, which allows CCC to: (I) help connect with its customers; (ii) know its customer’s priorities, concerns, and pressure points; and (iii) make enhancements—both big and small—so each customer experience is more intuitive, streamlined, and pleasant.
At the heart of this CX1 initiative is our Customer Service Team, the people on the front lines with our customers every day. In fact, CCC was recently named a gold winner in the Customer Service Department of the Year category in the Best in Biz Awards 2022 International.
In this blog post, I will be sharing highlights that demonstrate how our Customer Service Department—as well as other teams supporting them—have made a measurable impact on our CX.
Expanding & Training Our Team to Improve CX
Over the past 18 months, CCC has committed to further developing and refining our distributed customer service workforce. When we saw a higher demand for 24-hour global service, we teamed up with a customer service outsourcing partner and expanded our team into eight different nations in order to stay in line with what our customers need. We invested in training to ensure high-quality responses, recruited technical staff to meet a more complex and highly specific demand, implemented chat functionality for on-demand support, and created a tiered service approach to create workforce breadth. These combined efforts resulted in a 34.7% decrease in resolution times.
Streamlining Workflows to Provide Faster Resolution Times
By analyzing our robust customer experience metrics—which include inquiry-to-order ratio, customer satisfaction, resolution times, and queue wait times—we were able to identify friction points for our clients and put together teams to restructure those processes.
Launching New Self-Service Options
Through analyzing our CX data, CCC also discovered that 10-15% of our customers prefer self-service options. So we built three new knowledge bases that empower our customers seeking alternative service channels. In a little over a year, the articles within the knowledge bases have been accessed over 100,000 times. Not only does this provide clients with another avenue to get immediate answers to their questions, but it also enables our representatives to achieve impressive response times for other customers by reducing the total number of inquiries they receive. In fact, 80% of phone and chat inquiries are answered in 60 seconds or less and email is returned within one to 12 hours.
Because of a singular focus on our customers—and our determination to find ways we can improve their experience at every turn—we have improved our customer satisfaction score from 4.2 to 4.6 out of five over the last 5 years. This represents the most meaningful impact our CX1 initiative has had on our business. Our customers’ positive perception of us and their satisfaction with our service is—and always will be—our first priority.