Who doesn’t just adore a time-saving shortcut? One of my favorites is most likely the ability to type in the first two letters of a web address into my browser and being magically transported to the site!
But can you, or should you, take shortcuts with your customer experience? The problem with shortcuts is that they are often in the wrong areas, leading to shortcomings and a tendency to overlook what really matters.
Based on my own experience and that of many of my clients, I’m offerning a simple set of Do’s and Don’ts guidelines on this. I suppose you can compare this to Glamour magazine, minus the hilarious photos.
Totally safe customer service shortcuts:
Automate what you can, within reason.
Use the awesome technology available to automatically reach your mailing lists, send your questionnaires and provide updates. Just see to it that your customers are always treated like human beings, especially via that automation. A little personalization can make a huge difference.
Use text analytics.
Searching for mentions and feedback can be like herding cats. Text analytics can help you round them up like cattle. Explore the many utilities that can help you gather the data you’re looking for.
Repeat what is proven to work.
I don’t know why people think it’s a crime to just do what works. Don’t ditch great ideas when you’re bored with them if they have proven successful. (Remember when Gap decided to change their logo?)
Sorry, elbow grease required:
Building a team.
Your staff, regardless of title and responsibilities, have the most profound effects on the experience your company creates for customers. Don’t cut corners with the process or try to rationalize recruiting lousy employees. Your customers and the rest of your team will suffer along with you .
Creating quality content.
Don’t waste people’s time. If your newsletter is automated wonderfully, personalized and sent at the perfect time but is made mostly of duplicate content, or just plain crap, nobody will appreciate it. And if your marketing context is not worth taking the time to read it, trash it and take your time writing new context that truly captivates and informs your customers.
Test, test, and test again.
When you’re done, how about some more testing? If your inside-out view of the process is peachy-keen, don’t it always works that way from the outside in. Test your processes as often as possible and from as many different customer perspectives as you can think of to make sure you find all of those customer process road blocks.
Shortcuts are important to help us spend the bulk of our time on things that really need our real-life attention. Where do you think it’s safe to take shortcuts?
Photo credits: seanmasn, opensourceway, cogdogblog, familymwr, See-ming Lee ??? SML, Aidan-Sally
