From the frontline to the boardroom, customer experience is embedded into our organisation. My team includes customer success-focused professionals who are dedicated to providing excellence across areas including service proposition management, product support, service delivery, customer engagement and project management.
We create software for accountants and tax advisors which allows them to support their clients in remaining compliant and in the provision of advisory services. It’s an exciting time for us as we are transforming to become a Software as a Service business, and, for anyone interested in tech, it’s a great place to be.
As a business unit, our Customer Success team has moved fast to ensure our customer’s experience has not suffered as a result of the pandemic. Despite a disruptive landscape where the Customer Success team had to rapidly shift to a remote working model, our service remained uninterrupted.
Since mid-2020, the team has also launched several initiatives that continue to be real differentiators in the competitive tax and accounting software industry, and we have begun to measure new metrics that are shaping our organisation for the better:
Embedding customer experience thinking into our organisation
It may not sound like a metric but given that our core mandate is to ‘put the customer at the heart of everything we do,’ it is essential that all key stakeholders across our business are accountable for CX improvement. For example, our leadership team leads customer feedback sessions to encourage open and honest discussion about our strengths, and what needs work.
Through dedicated programmes such as our Customer Service Week series, our team shares the importance of good CX not just with our own colleagues, but with our customers too. In this way, we can share best practice and expertise.
The importance of CX is also evident in our Customer Service Heroes programme.This year, we received nominations for almost one hundred individuals from across the UK business to recognise those who had gone above and beyond in their efforts to put our customers at the heart of what we do.
Response time and our new customer community
We have seen specific improvements in our response times in certain product areas after we focused our training efforts based on the analysis of cases in our CRM system. More of the team are now able to answer customers questions faster than ever before (and at the first point of interaction.)
In direct response to customer feedback and as part of our commitment to making things better and easier for our customers, my team launched its Customer Community in July 2020. Customers can now:
- Raise a case for support with software, billing or invoice queries
- Add comments or updates to a case and, if required, close a case without the need to contact our support team
- See the full list of open cases for your practice as well as a history of their cases
- Get involved in discussions and ask questions of their peers in other practices
- Join groups that may be relevant to their area of expertise or role in the practice
- Access the Knowledgebase, help documentation or e-learning to help customers find answers at a time that works for them
We have always measured response time, but now we can measure the effectiveness of these new digital resources as well.
Improved customer journey
We have conducted extensive research surrounding our customer journey so that we can identify pain points that we can improve on. The customer journey research has been formalised as a strategy within our organisation, and we have shared the results extensively to encourage wider feedback across the company.
In speaking to our customers regarding the customer journey, we have identified a number of areas where they share increasingly positive comments: in reliability/quality, ease of use (content and resources) empathy and responsiveness.
We also launched our Customer Engagement Programme, which changed how we communicate with customers. Based on the theme of ‘you said, we listened,’ we now update customers monthly on the aspects they have requested and that we have delivered.
Here’s to customer success
As a business, our entire workforce measures success through our ability to help advance our customers’ work and that of their practices. It also means that we learn from customers and continue to provide solutions that best support them as part of our ongoing commitment to delivering technology that makes a difference, technology for the real world.
Our priority is to transform customer interactions across the entire journey into a seamless, customer-focused end-to-end digital experience.
From user groups to in-depth panel discussions that examine the issues affecting our customers today, we’re continually putting the customer at the heart of everything we do. Moving forward, we will continue to roll out initiatives and evaluate metrics to help our business understand our customers better, embedding customer experience thinking throughout our entire organisation.
