Customer Service – How to Turn a Poor Experience into a Positive One

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With mobile phones taking over our lives and conversational interfaces becoming ubiquitous there is certainly a new level of demand arriving at customer service centers. Customers do not accept a mediocre service experience anymore. With their smartphones they have the means to get to customer service with nearly no delay and they are certainly willing to use it.

And they do it.

In this situation customers are often already feeling some frustration or disappointment because they couldn’t achieve what they wanted to achieve in the first instance. They already had their taste of a suboptimal customer experience.

Frustration, disappointment – customers’ negative emotions towards a brand have a corresponding negative impact on the business. Customers just might go buy somewhere else. After all, in times of smartphones this has become simpler than ever.

The support center now has best chances to add the feeling of being disrespected and outright anger into the mix.

Or it can create a feeling of relief, of being respected, valued, even some satisfaction; this in spite of having come into the need of asking for support. Here the service agents have the opportunity to create a positive customer experience out of a poor one – one that will overlay the negative one.

Use Customer Service To Create Positive Emotions

Benefits of investing into experience

Source: Sitecore/Avanade

Which one is better for the company – and the company’s bottom line? The answer to this question is pretty obvious. Inmoment Research recently released a study that clearly established links between positive experiences and positive outcomes for a company. And this was not the first study finding that investing into positive customer experiences results in positive outcomes for the company.

A 2016 study by Sitecore and Avanade showed a number of tangible business benefits that can be related to this investment.

The open secret is that there is an easy way to turn a customer who is on the edge into a satisfied and happy one. This way works around recognizing what the customer values:

  • Their time
  • Their channel
  • Getting their issue resolved

This way clearly involves the smartphone. After all this is the switchboard of their lives and in all likelihood also the device where the issue occurred.

Go Social? No Way!

You may say: “Go social! Twitter, Facebook! People go there all the time! And they are getting fast and efficient help there!”

Do they? Most customers aren’t getting fast and efficient help on social networks. Only few do. Mainly those with loud voices, because of having large follower numbers.

And why are people resorting to social media? They use them as a last resort after the traditional ways didn’t work.

In other words, because they are disappointed, frustrated and likely even angry. So they act as derailers of the brand, instead of being brought on the way of becoming promoters or even ambassadors.

Resolve Issues Fast, The Customers’ Way

This is where conversational interfaces, messaging and mobile in-app support come into the picture. This combination allows a customer to directly cut through to efficient service instead of repeatedly iterating through information they have already given before. Via the app the customer and many of the interactions (s)he did before the incident are already known. An agent can get to work directly, maybe even supported by a bot as a copilot, or even an autonomous one.

The emotional advantage starts right in the beginning. In most of the cases the customer is already known and can be addressed by name instead of being in the need of introducing him-/herself. And due to the information that is already available the issue has been routed to the right service agents who in turn can get right at work when the ticket arrives on their desk.

And this may very well be before they even reply, thus giving themselves the chance to be equipped with relevant knowledge and perhaps already a solution suggestion.

As a result the customer feels treated respectfully and with appreciation of his/her concerns and time.

Now, it is an illusion that every call center has enough staff to be able to immediately react to every incident and inquiry customers may have – ideal but an illusion.

There is nothing worse than the electronic equivalent of holding music and the repeated statement that “your call is important to us”! Its mere existence actually proves the contrary.

Use AI to Improve the Experience

This is where AI and machine learning, exposed by chatbots take center stage.

In a supportive role the AI can already supply the agent with possible solutions to the incident at hand before the agent takes up the issue. These solutions can get derived from the FAQ, internal documentation, a community, or from previous incidents that dealt with a similar topic. The ranked listing of suggestions can then be presented to the agent by a chatbot as part of the conversational interface that is used in between customer, service agents, and the technology.

This already has the potential of significantly speeding up the resolution process, thus addressing what the customer values. It is a better engagement model that likely creates a positive experience – maybe a little wow moment.

When enough trust has been established to the AI, the chatbot can get into an autonomous role and engage with the customer before an agent takes over. The human agent then becomes the escalation point for issues that the system cannot resolve without human interaction. To get into this escalation the bot could offer and schedule a callback by a person or simply do a handover to the next service level after informing the customer about the necessity for this.

In this model even an explicit FAQ can be made obsolete as the chatbot can serve as a front end to it.

The results?

Conversational interfaces, alone or supported by chatbots have a profoundly positive impact on the business. The main benefits are:

  • Customer service is addressed the customer way
  • Faster incident resolution
  • More satisfied customers who have a better customer experience

Satisfied customers have more positive emotions about a company. A positive base is more likely to perceive an engagement as positive, which means it turns into a positive customer experience. And positive customer experiences create positive business outcomes.

It is that simple.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Thomas Wieberneit

Thomas helps organisations of different industries and sizes to unlock their potential through digital transformation initiatives using a Think Big - Act Small approach. He is a long standing CRM practitioner, covering sales, marketing, service, collaboration, customer engagement and -experience. Coming from the technology side Thomas has the ability to translate business needs into technology solutions that add value. In his successful leadership positions and consulting engagements he has initiated, designed and implemented transformational change and delivered mission critical systems.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Nice read.
    I do not agree on your part about Social Media. A lot of consumers want to be in touch with companies via social. Not because they are angry or because they want to shout, but simply because it’s their preferred platform of communication.
    Adding the fact that most brands use social to talk TO their customers (or even shout) – it is stupid not to listen back and ENGAGE WITH your customers on the platform they choose and they feel most comfortable.
    On social as well you can use AI to improve the speed of answer and the quality of conversations.
    We are way past the time where only frustrated customers use social to complain online, now it’s a normal platform of communication now.
    Be where your customers are. That’s the Customer’s Way!

  2. thanks for reading and commenting, Ludo!

    I agree that there is some willingness to be in touch via Social Media. The context of my post is customer service, though. And getting quality support via social media is still (generally) akin of who is able to shout loud gets the attention. This is pretty sad, but I can somehow understand this as the likelihood for a ‘shitstorm’ is growing with the number of followers.

    I also agree that it is stupid to not engage with customers on social media. But many brands are. As you say, they are talking to the customers, not with it, even when trying to engage.

    I, however, do not agree with your conclusion. Although social media should be a normal communications platform – bi directionally – it is not. Brands mainly use these platforms to blast their message out, regardless of who would like to receive it.

    Thanks again for your contribution and start of the discussion!
    Thomas

  3. This is one of the most interesting article I have ever read about customer service. I would like to intervene on social media, following the conversation.
    I agree with Ludo: I think that social media are very important be exploited. As Ludo said, people want to be in touch with companies on social media, but for me also because they spend a lot of time on them and because the way to contact a company it’s really fast!

    I agree on the fact that social media isn’t for everyone, though. It’s reasonable to think that elder customers would prefer phone calls, rather than young one would prefer social media or e-mail. The ideal solution (hard and time-consuming to realize – but ideal) would be to understand customers’ preferences (ideally through a fast survey): in this way a company can achieve two main results:
    1. Better fulfillment of different customer needs, giving them an omnichannel customer service experience
    2. Better allocation of customer service resources

    I think that social media cannot be used for every business activity (e.g.: customer retention customized campaigns), but could be exploited during the day-by-day assistance (for instance in telco could be for technical problems, general info, fast explanations about offers).
    Hence, in conclusion, I think that every company should consider the introduction of social customer service, depending on their business and as said their customer preferences.

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