Yesterday, we had Senior Zoho Evangelist LSP join us for a special webinar discussing the Enterprise CX (Customer Experience) and how Zoho fits into this market. In this 1-hour webinar, LSP talks about 25 years of Zoho, what CX is and means in today’s businesses, and then joins Brett and Tyler for an open conversation about Enterprise CX. In this article, we have condensed this webinar into a short read on the key points discussed.
What is the Customer Experience?
So, what exactly does the customer experience mean?
It is how a customer feels about your brand or the service of the product that you offer. And what does it mean to say what kind of experience are they having? At every touchpoint be it the sales team, marketing team, or support folks. At every touchpoint, a customer has with your organization what is the experience that you are creating? The definition is creating the experience at every touchpoint.
Chandrashekar LSP, Senor Zoho Evangelist
Let’s look at why CX is important.
- When you deliver a good CX you build customer trust and brand loyalty.
- It helps reduce turnover and increase customer retention.
- Today’s business is all about customer’s trust, the moment they trust you they will be advocates.
Most of you probably already had a good understanding of what customer experience is, but now let’s look how it has changed over the years. The evolution of the CX has changed over the years from simply looking for a great product then to services and now it is all about the experience. It all comes down to lead nourishment. What is the experience you are creating for the lead from start to finish? Both sales and marketing need to deliver a start to finish experience for customer’s to create this complete experience for customers.
Based on this model let’s discuss what these 4 categories mean:
- Boutique– They have excellent customer focus almost creating a personalized customer experience and their processes are constantly evolving. These tend to be smaller organizations and tend to lack the tools needed to scale up.
- Endangered– These businesses are siloed organizations. Lacking unified tools to pass information across different departments, which prevents them from making informed decisions.
- Industrialized– Businesses that have all the tools needed for having flawless processes and collaboration across the organization. However, the customer focus is low.
- Strong-The goal for any organization. High customer focus and operational efficiency.
Zoho’s mission is to provide the tools and training to businesses helping them achieve the Strong category listed above.
Our Conversation Around CX & Zoho With LSP
To kick it off Brett starts with, “So 25 years you’ve been around Zoho, that’s a long time for anyone in the tech industry. What are the three things that really contributed to the longevity of your customer satisfaction throughout the years?”. To summarize LSP these factors have played a key role in Zoho’s CX:
- The age of the company has strengthened its position in the market by building trust amongst customers.
- The fact that they are long-term focused and not looking for short-term gains. They do what is right for their customers.
- Deciding in 2005, to be a privacy-focused company furthering the trust amongst clients.
- “Customers are customers, they are not our product”
- Lastly, company culture, valuing people and your employees. Out of the 9,000 employees, 1,200 of them have been with Zoho for over 20 years.
“It’s a people’s organization, customer first ideology, and being organic is what makes this company (Zoho) unique in the tech landscape. Just about every business today starts off with an exit plan. That is not what we are here for, that is very unique about Zoho, we are here for the long-term.”
When compared to many other organizations out there Zoho is truly unique and for most of us has been flying under the radar. Taking a deeper look into their organization Tyler asks, “Outside of the suite as a whole, what are some of the things that Zoho does behind the scenes that enable you to have that special place in the industry?”.
“We are a hardcore technology company.”
In short, Zoho does everything in-house. From developing software and ai to building their own data centers, everything is homegrown. Furthermore, by creating their own infrastructure across all aspects of their business, it has allowed for the vertical integration they need to grow. Having everything under one roof gets rid of the hodgepodge of external products needed to communicate seamlessly internally. This allows constant access to the information your department needs to make quick decisions.
Communication Is Key
In response to LSP discussing how everything is done in-house and the layer of communication created internally by doing this, Brett hits up home how this affects CX.
So the common thread that I’m hearing from you here and we talk about it all the time is just, communication, communication. But it’s not only external communication, but all this internal communication that’s enabled by the Zoho products, whether it is Cliq or Connect or Desk where those are both directions.
But we talk to our clients all the time and you talk about this adoption is that in order to provide a good customer experience it seems like too many companies today ignore their customers. And I think a lot of the reasons they ignore their customers internally is because they’re not actually communicating internally. Maybe they should be responding to customers, people don’t know, there is no knowledge bases, none of these things.
I bring this up not as a question right now but maybe as a jumping point. Because it seems that as we kind of go down this path where Zoho seems to really excel, is just what you are talking about. A customer comes in with one thing and then it’s like well we can also solve these 8 other problems for you. Those problems for me seem to be just around communication. I think today the biggest thing lacking that I see from companies, enterprises, small businesses, whatever, is just generally ignoring their customers. Not responding, not being timely in their responses I’d say.
Brett Martin
“If you can successfully get the teams internal communications out of their email inboxes and into a commenting system in a ticket, or into a Cliq channel about customer support, you just see so many benefits that come out of that.”
Enterprise CX and Zoho
Moving on into the conversation LSP is asked what some of the biggest challenges enterprise faces. “There is only so much that tools and platforms can do for large organizations.” At the end of the day, the customer experience trickles down from leadership. Incentivizing your teams to use the tools and identifying any friction between teams can help achieve a better CX.
If you are marching to the same tune you really need to have a unifying layer. And if you are missing out on that then you are going to miss out on CX.
LSP
As far as verticals go for CX in enterprise Zoho covers them all. However, the top 3 are finance, insurance sector, and real-estate. Being able to configure the CRM for your business how you need it to run, puts Zoho ahead of most competitors. If you take real-estate, for example, many agent solutions are pre-baked assuming that all real-estate runs the same way. However, this isn’t always true because how a person wants to run their business processes varies from case to case. Zoho gives you that flexibility to mold the tools to your needs, enhancing the CX.
BI (Business Intelligence) is another powerful and important tool successful businesses and enterprises need. With Zoho, you can integrate all of your analytics from outside sources to have real-time analytics, KPIs, & ROI statistics. If the integration doesn’t exist, Zoho Creator has you covered allowing you to create a custom app to pull in the data you need.
If you are an enterprise-level business or even an SMB and looking for a CX solution, Zoho is a best-in-class solution. It truly delivers the tools you need for the complete life cycle of the customer experience. Not to mention a price tag that is unrivaled. Interested in Zoho for your business? Drop us a line and we would be happy to help.
