5 Enterprise Customer Experience Challenges & How To Solve Them

Today, in an ever-competitive online landscape, customer experience is the core concern for outperforming your rivals — but it’s particularly significant for enterprise businesses. Companies that grow sufficiently to reach the enterprise level have already nailed the fundamentals of their operations: their price points, value propositions, and promotional copy. They need to do more.

Of course, the larger your business becomes, the harder it gets to achieve lofty customer experience ambitions. Let’s take a look at 5 customer experience challenges that are common at the enterprise level, and set out how to overcome them:

Getting Departments Working Together

The typical startup will have essentially one department accounting for various tasks. Marketing, customer service, supply, HR.. it’ll all be handled by the same core group of people. At the enterprise level, each area will most likely have its own distinct department, which massively helps with efficiency and quality but causes some issues when it comes to providing a cohesive experience (cohesion is big for CX — people like internal consistency).

The solution: get your applications running together using a system like APPSeCONNECT. Widespread integrations make it possible to continue working with disparate solutions while ensuring that information can be shared very easily, helping to handle high-value customer requests and achieve broad consistency.

Dealing With Support Requests

Handling support requests when you run a small business isn’t too bad: you can generally take your time, knowing that you have enough slack in your schedule to accommodate, and find a great solution. It’s different at enterprise level. The typical enterprise business gets far more support requests than it can handle internally, leading to messages going unanswered and clients becoming frustrated.

The solution: combine a well-programmed live chat chatbot with a small set of competent support assistants. The chatbot can handle most basic queries very efficiently, and anything that requires escalation can go to a human. This allows you to maintain a 24-hour business presence without spending too much (you can use virtual assistants to save money).

Reaching Customers Across Multiple Channels

Given the various technological wonders available to them, shoppers like to have options: they like to be able to buy wherever they are and no matter what devices they’re using. For instance, if someone wants to order through a Facebook chat, for instance, they should be able to. While most companies have learned that it’s vital to be mobile-responsive, plenty still don’t know how to approach multichannel selling.

The solution: invest in an eCommerce platform with multichannel (or even omnichannel) capability. Provided you choose sensibly, it won’t take prohibitively long to get the required integrations set up, and everything after that should be reasonably simple.

Justifying Substantial Investment

Customer experience doesn’t automatically sound like something that deserves investment. Sales sounds more essential, because people can see the clear value in those. Running a business at the enterprise level often means trying to keep various leading figures happy, and if the person handling the investment doesn’t really understand what CX is all about, they’ll be unlikely to approve a substantial budget for it.

The solution: patiently explain to anyone who needs to hear it that great customer experience has a massive ROI (use analytics to bolster the case) The more you polish your site, the more visitors will go on to convert and become loyal customers — loyal customers who’ll spend more and bring in valuable referrals.

Meeting Varying Needs and Expectations

Different customers have different preferences, obviously. Some people like to receive a lot of marketing materials, while others prefer to be left alone and seek out products or services when they need them. Some like upselling and cross-selling options, while others get annoyed by such efforts and feel unfairly pressured. This is so much worse at the enterprise level — and you have to make an attempt to keep everyone happy.

The solution: use personalization tools to track customer preferences and deploy materials, features and options only when appropriate. If you make it so that someone can simply tick a box to say that they don’t want any product recommendations, for instance, you’ll allow your customers to customize their own experiences.

Each of these CX challenges can be quite frustrating at the enterprise level, but every one of them can be solved through the smart use of software solutions. 

**This post is written by our guest author Rodney Laws. He's an Editor at Ecommerce Platforms. 

Interested to write for us? Drop a mail at guestpost@srijan.net.