An invitation to dance - The optimal customer experience in customer service
Author: Gudrun Scharler
Everyone is talking about it, everyone is working on it, and some claim they have already achieved it: the perfect customer experience. What this means in detail, however, often remains in the dark. In theory, the topic is not new, quite the opposite: customer service organizations have long been striving to offer their customers the perfect customer experience and to strengthen the emotional bond between the user, the product and the provider. And although the underlying conditions have changed fundamentally as a result of advancing digitization, increasingly effective data models and the use of artificial intelligence, many of the familiar challenges remain. Manufacturing a car that makes you smile whenever you enter it is certainly not easy, but it is clearly feasible. And the annual product updates from Apple or Android show that smartphones can bring whole armies of fangirls and fanboys to the barricades.
But let's be honest for a moment: How much emotional attachment do you feel towards your electricity provider? Or, to put it another way, do you even want that? For example, do you really want to feel emotionally attached to your cell phone provider? Isn't it enough that things just work and you don't have to think about it ? That's the hard part of customer experience management. What to do with products and services that "disappear" after purchase and are simply no longer present to the customer? This is where customer service becomes important. Whether it's a car, a smartphone or electricity, there will always come a point when something doesn't work and you need someone to be there to help.
Service decision makers say: customer service must change (source: Salesforce)
The hunt for the perfect customer experience
Customer service organizations usually can't help smiling a little once they hear that from now on, their company will increasingly put the customer first. For them, this is exactly the purpose of their existence, they do nothing else day after day. Often constrained by rigid processes, historically grown structures and IT landscapes, but always struggling to get the best out of their customers and to help when problems arise. But even the best customer service teams will not deny that there is always more room for improvement, of course, and they will welcome the possibilities of this renewed customer centricity and adapt it for their own purposes.
So what does Customer Experience Management mean for customer service? While the "big" CEM aims at clustering and aggregates customers into personas and tries to derive common experiences in customer journeys, customer service is mostly about very individual experiences in a very specific situation: That is, when something doesn't work. Just because, for example, a customer largely corresponds to the persona of the urban, educated, experience-hungry twenty-something in a single household when it comes to marketing issues, it doesn't mean that this person will behave in exactly the same way when it comes to complaints. And personas - including the derivation of actions - for the service case hardly exist. Customer journeys support the development of suitable service routes, but they are of little help in the actual case.
And another development is also presenting customer service with new challenges: Companies have quite rightly recognized that they need to be accessible wherever their customers communicate. Whether it is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, in a chat or in Messenger, all reasonably modern companies in the B2C sector (and increasingly also in the B2B sector) are represented there. New touchpoints for customer service are added almost on a monthly basis. To exaggerate things a bit, you could say that more touchpoints also offer more opportunities to disappoint the customer. So what can be done?
Customer service as brand ambassadors
Many companies are only very slowly becoming aware that customer service is first and foremost a brand ambassador. Of course, some marketing departments that deal with brand image and brand values on a daily basis don't like to hear that. But let's return to the example from the introduction: When was the last time you thought about your electricity provider? We only do that when something doesn't go as planned, when we're thinking about switching providers, when the bill seems too high, or when something isn't working with the power supply. Suddenly the brand is present again, perhaps only because it appears on the letterhead of the bill. All of a sudden, customer service employees become the brand's most important ambassadors. However, this is usually without the financial resources and technological achievements invested in building and maintaining the brand. So it's about time to equip customer service with exactly these resources.
Customer service is an integral part of customer experience
A good data basis
Companies know more and more about their customers: Purchasing and online behavior, brand awareness, demographic groups, interests and hobbies: customers may not be transparent, but they are quite „translucent". And what do we have at our disposal in customer service? In the best case, staff on the phone or in Messenger can see previous contacts as well as a brief summary of agreements that have been made in the past. An actual 360° view is missing. What a customer has done in other channels, what he or she may have posted on Facebook or Twitter usually remains as much in the dark as the letter with the particularly crisp complaint that has already been lying at the Legal department for several days for processing. And that only applies to the interactions a customer has had with the company. Interests, geographic and demographic data, educational background - all important criteria for developing personas - are often left out. Yet there have long been interesting solutions that specifically connect customers with employees to whom they "fit" well. None of these solutions work flawlessly today, and at the same time, industry interest - and thus development pressure on providers of such solutions - still seems to be small. If we would have understood that customer service involves actively working on the brand, things would be different. The same applies to the 360° view mentioned above. In addition to the linking and presentation of data, a lot of brainpower is required: What should be displayed? What is relevant? What not? In the end, a screen full of useless data doesn't help anyone. Here, too, we are still in our early days.
The future is digital. Isn't it?
Whether in a presentation, a board meeting or an online article: You usually can't go wrong with the phrase "The future is digital“. Nodding your head in agreement is the obvious reaction. Yes, of course, the future is digital. But not just that, right? In the end, it's still the customer who decides what a perfect customer experience is. So it's also the customer who decides which contact channel to choose. Purely digital self-service, the old-fashioned way of picking up the phone, or something in between with Messenger and the like. As a reminder: thanks to personas and customer journey design, we usually know quite precisely who decides on which form of contract conclusion - online or after detailed, personal consultation. In the event of a complaint, we generally do not use this information. Instead, we simply make everything available, see what happens, and deal with the incoming issues as quickly and as well as possible. Data-based decision-making looks different.
Looking forward
Customer service, out of all things, often happens to be the poor stepchild of customer experience management. That is the very area whose sole purpose is to be there for the customer. Yet customer service is like a complicated dance, where everything is so much easier when we start intelligently linking our knowledge and data. It is very likely that the future lies in the interplay between man and machine. The dance floor is marked out and well lit by the use of data. Simple dance steps are taken over by the machine, be it the bot that processes standard cases or self-service solutions that allow customers to manage their accounts themselves and change important settings. The complex lifting maneuvers are done by humans. This applies to all areas where, in addition to handling processes, emotional needs must also be satisfied. Bots are not particularly good at apologizing.
To sum up, let's finally start seeing customer service as key brand ambassadors across the board and equip it with the necessary resources to succeed. If we start using CEM insights for customer service, intelligently linking data and making it available at the right moment, outstanding, positive service experiences will actually become a reality. The same applies, of course, to the employees themselves. Today, they are trained to be customer service representatives, and in the future, hopefully, they will be brand ambassadors - empowered with the technological framework, comprehensive know-how, and skills needed to make customer service contact a great experience. Whether excellent customer service really leads to increased loyalty to the brand certainly varies from industry to industry. For many products and services, price is still the key argument for the time being. But even if it is unclear whether great customer service really has a positive effect on customer loyalty, one thing is certain: a miserable customer experience in the event of service often means the end of the relationship. Very often, we already have all the tools we need to prevent this. We just have to use them. Also and especially in customer service.