Johannesburg, 13 Sep 2016
Heino Gevers, Customer Experience Manager for leading e-mail for business partner Mimecast, describes the process Mimecast has put in place to ensure a first-class customer experience, from a proprietary community forum and a comprehensive knowledge base that rewards active customers, to a multi-stage measurement framework.
"Your journey is our journey and we cherish every step." It's a sentiment we take very seriously at Mimecast - that the customer journey doesn't end at the transaction, not if you're focused on establishing a brand loyalty and ensuring return customers (and you should be). To attain the highest quality of customer experience (CX), you need to put in place a number of important processes - from objective measurement frameworks and great first experiences, to a positive online community.
We take first impressions very seriously. So, to improve the CX for first-time customers, we leverage the experiences past customers have had with us, to better refine the customer journey as it stands. That's why we adopted a customer measurement framework, which asks customers to score each stage of the journey, a score we ultimately tally and share with those responsible for each touch-point in Mimecast. The goal is to iron out common foibles in the system, and offer a great CX overall.
It's also crucial that you establish active platforms for customer engagement, with which you can reassure customers you've done wrong, or address complaints that need immediate resolution. However, it's important to understand the budget isn't unlimited, and you can only hire so many community managers and have so big a call centre before it becomes too expensive to maintain. Financial viability is not a crutch; it's an inescapable aspect of business. That's why we decided to leverage the expertise and experience of our incredible community, so they might assist one another.
Our commitment to delivering a first-class CX led to the creation of Mimecast Central, a platform that amalgamates a community forum, user group and comprehensive knowledge base. It's a place where customers and employees alike can share expertise, experiences and other valuable insight, and generally assist one another, or alternatively, find a solution to a problem themselves. With 13 000 members and growing, it has helped us assist customers far quicker than we could have done alone. The intention is to complement our own CX efforts, not leave it to our customers to do the heavy lifting.
Interestingly, the presence of so many experts and thought leaders in a single community gave us the unique opportunity to create a space for Mimecast Central members (Mimecasters) to earn recognition among their peers. In fact, we've created tools to write blogs, share best practices and join the 'Legends Group', all of which earn you points, redeemable in the Mimecaster Central Store - an extra incentive that encourages customers to return and engage. In an effort to create a holistic space, we've even gamified Mimecast Central, enabling Mimecasters to climb a number of leader boards as they accrue more points.
That's not to say you should focus on creating cool, enthralling experiences to the detriment of preferred social platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. You need to be where your customers are. If a customer has to go out of his/her way to contact you, they more than likely won't bother - resulting in a lost customer - and the frustration caused will be associated with your brand.
Taking it one step further, we're in the process of developing an enhanced user interface that will better distinguish Mimecast and customer mail server configuration issues, providing links to relevant knowledge base resources where appropriate. That's thanks to critical feedback and useful insight we gained from our customers, and we're using it to make their journey a better one.
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