Despite rigorous measurements and sentiment analysis, the number of bad customer experiences that occur every second isn’t known. How many living trees currently populate our planet? We should know these things. For now, I’ll speculate that they are both large numbers, and one is escalating while the other is declining. You know which is which.
Instead, I’ll explore more scrutable questions. Poor customer experiences occur in every industry. Why do some create nary a ruffled feather, while others cause everyone to go bat-poop crazy? Dr. Dao knows what I’m talking about. Is there a “perfect storm” of conditions where a weak spark of customer letdown will ignite an inferno of pain and outrage? Finally, how much repeat vendor ineptitude, crassness, inefficiency and apathy will consumers accept before saying “enough!”
The answers impact the profits for every organization across every industry. Customer service delivery carries uncertainty and risk. Some issues are cheap to mitigate. Clear directional signage for airport car rental return areas are inexpensive but avert headaches for harried travelers arriving late to catch a flight. Others are costly. Rapid product delivery involves capital investment for sophisticated logistics and IT infrastructure.
“Customers expect perfection every time.” That admonishment has been beaten into our heads for so long, we’ve forgotten to question whether satisfying this alleged truth really matters. We need balance. How about, “don’t waste the company’s money on projects that don’t bring meaningful improvements.”
Not every business can address every CX risk. Fortunately, not every business needs to. Some CX outcomes can be plain-old good, and that’s good enough. I offered to send this article to my trash hauler, but the service manager politely declined. Seems he was busy planning the company’s annual golf outing coming up in May. That was fine with me. I told him to just make sure he continues to collect my refuse around once a week.
Does this mean that some companies get a pass for providing impeccable customer service, while others are firmly on the hook?
Yes.
There are situations when underserved customers are especially prone to getting wigged out. Companies that understand what they are can avoid squandering resources fixing things that don’t need fixing, and they’re more likely to improve what’s consequential. According to a 2015 Harvard Business Review Article, When the Customer is Stressed by Leonard Berry, Scott Davis, and Jody Wilmet, there are five conditions that portend high levels of customer stress.
Customer stress is elevated when customers face
- lack of familiarity with the service being delivered
- lack of control over the performance of the service
- major consequences if things go wrong
- complexity that makes the service a black box and gives its provider the upper hand
- long duration across a series of events
After the authors gleaned these findings, they applied them in the most difficult and demanding context: service delivery for cancer treatment centers. I’ll survive my missed trash pickup. Safety pins can replace dress shirt buttons that my dry cleaner ruins. I’m not offended if the grocery cashier fails to make eye contact, or to thank me for my business. But every cancer patient faces life-changing consequences. Every interaction matters. Adopting a strong customer service ethos and CX risk mitigation is crucial for these organizations.
“The [Bellin] cancer center, which opened in 2008, surpassed its five-year growth and revenue targets in just two years, and nearly 100% of patients (who are regularly surveyed) say they are ‘highly likely’ to recommend its medical and radiation oncology services. Bellin achieved these results in large part by following the four guidelines for succeeding in highly emotional contexts,” according to the article.
The guidelines extend to any service operation that meet the stress conditions:
- Identify emotional triggers. The authors suggest using surveys, interviews, focus groups, controlled experiments, and experience mapping. “Open-ended prompts about common frustrations can be particularly revealing: “Describe the worst experience that you or a family member ever had when using this type of service.” “If you were the CEO of this organization for a day and could make just one improvement for customers, what would it be?”
- Respond Early to Intense Emotions. That includes preparing customers for what to expect in the sequence of events, and communicating with care. “A valuable exercise is to convene top providers and ask them to identify phrases that needlessly undermine customers’ self-esteem, confidence, or hope. These ‘never phrases’ can be incorporated into training sessions for the purpose of eliminating them.”
- Enhance Customer Control. Many companies overlook this important tactic. Post-service call, many customers feel abandoned (except for the instantaneous How did we do? survey). The authors suggest mitigating the problem by offering a mobile application to consolidate content for ancillary service and support needs.
- Hire the Right People and Prepare Them for the Role. My most memorable support calls were with agents who were also users of the same product or service. “People who deliver high-emotion services must be able to effectively cope with stress, respectfully communicate with customers, and strengthen customers’ confidence. Thus excellent service organizations view the process of hiring and training employees as crucial to serving customers well.”
Pursuing excellence in service delivery is a potentially worthy goal. But delivering it matters more for some companies than for others.
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