Striving for CX Success? Answer These Five Key Questions First

Encouraging debate is often one of the best ways to sort out options and to plan the best plan path forward. Over the years I played with several key questions with my clients, keynote presentations, and workshops, as well as my three books¹.

Here are five key customer experience questions for you to ask (with five more in the Notes section for you to consider²). While you may be tempted to argue for a crisp “Yes” or “No” response, try instead to use a scale from 1 to 100 or, my favorite, 1 to 4 to avoid that pesky middle zone score. The best results are when managers or participants disagree with each other, challenge each other, and wind up agreeing (or agreeing to disagree!) on how to proceed.

1. Is the customer always right?
2. Will AI replace customer service agents?
3. Is service recovery a better path to loyalty than not needing contacts in the first place?
4. Is “Digital First” the best CX strategy?
5. Are all customers created equal?

Let’s dig into each CX question and I’ll share my scores for each one. Tell me how you would score each one! Use some of them with your colleagues, clients, and managers to see how closely your responses and scores align. If they are close (and I’d be surprised!), that’s a good start; but if not, then there are good opportunities to share “Why?” or “Why not?” and forge consensus.

1. Is the customer always right?

Your customers (and all of us as customers of many places) respond to policies, cues, and behaviors, so if they develop an opinion like, “I want a refund” it usually is based on their experience with the service or performance. If there’s a robust refund program, all the better; but if not, they will still feel entitled.

Most of the time — let’s say 85 out of 100 or 3 out of 4 — I believe that the customer is always right. They rarely try “to color outside of the line” but are influenced by their last contact with other organizations that might have treated them differently, what we call Last Contact Benchmarking. Best to trust their opinions and judgment, even if it conflicts with your policies or limitations. Sooner or later, they will vote with their wallet!

2. Will AI replace customer service agents?

There is no shortage of hand-wringing that AI will take over customer care and eliminate the need for assisted support. There are innovative and seemingly successful AI-based chatbots and intelligent ways to access the best-fit responses, and these tools will grow over time.

While easier or routine inquiries or issues such as “Did you get my payment?” or “Where’s my stuff?” will be handled by solid AI-based solutions, tougher, new, unique, or repeat issues will still require agents, albeit more highly skilled and enabled. This means that workforce management (WFM) will need to shift to greater uses of skills-based routing and that some agents won’t be able to continue providing care unless they are trained; new agents will be more educated, savvy, and empathetic. Also, the emergence of AI-based “agent assist” tools will tee up “best-fit” solutions to agents and help reduce handle time while increasing first contact resolution³. Keep your eyes on agent assist!

3. Is service recovery a better path to loyalty than not needing contacts in the first place?

“Service recovery” refers to resolving the customer’s problem and enabling them to proceed. This requires what I’ve called in the past the 5 Rights = right agent, right info, right customer, right timing, and right solution; if any of these is off, service recovery odds decline. “Not needing contacts in the first place” means fixing the issues at their core or root causes so that customers do not have to encounter the problem.

In a word, I would say “No.” 90 points for not needing the contact and 10 points for service recovery. Service recovery means that this is a failure point and/or a repeat contact; eliminating the need in the first place is more powerful. Plus, if the service recovery fails (again), then customers are even more upset!

4. Is “Digital First” the best CX strategy?

“Digital First” may have started with strategies to offer sales and online offers instead of in-person, inbound, or outbound sales, but it has grown to include a myriad of inbound support channels such as apps, portals, chatbots, and IVR when used for solutions and not just routing. Many of these digital tools work well and “contain” the issue without the subsequent need for assisted support. However, most issues or reasons merit different actions than a digital one, and certain nexuses of issues, severity, urgency, and customer value lend themselves to assisted support first.

Despite all of the hype, I’d vote “No”, again: 25 for digital, 75 for other strategic actions, or 1 to 3 on the 4-point scale. Digital only works for a subset of issues or reasons including browsing to purchase. However, many companies cram too much into their digital solutions, leading to increasingly upset customers still needing assisted support, and the better path will be to ease back on what care options are provided via digital channels.

5. Are all customers created equal?

We have seen big changes in CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), customer journey mapping, customer segmentation, and other tools, many of which are in the marketing or sales camps. However, many organizations fail to map them into their customer support operations, leaving hard-won customers feeling less valued if they need help.

Also on this one, I’d say “No” or 100 to 0. Your customers certainly don’t feel like they are the same as other customers or “cohorts”, but unique. See again Peppers & Rogers’ seminal The One to One Future⁴ and many other arguments for personalization.

In short, try your hand at scoring these five CX statements and the other five in the Notes section. Keep the debate going!

Notes:

¹ Bill Price & David Jaffe, The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy & Control Costs (Wiley, 2008); Your Customer Rules! Delivering the Me2B Experiences That Today’s Customers Demand (Wiley, 2015); The Frictionless Organization: Deliver Great Customer Experiences with Less Effort (Barrett-Koehler, 2022)

² More CX questions to debate, with my quick comments in parentheses:

• Are flat contact volumes better than higher levels? (It all depends on the ratio of volumes to the drivers for those contacts, in other words, the rate of contacts or CPX where C = contacts and X = number of accounts, orders shipped, etc. You want to see CPX go down, overall.)
• Do older customers prefer talking with agents? (Usually not! It’s less experienced customers or ones with serious issues who prefer assisted support. We provided an example in The Frictionless Organization from energy giant E.ON.)
• Should we hold agents to the AHT? (No. I wrote a “white paper” in the late ’90s entitled “AHT, Not” arguing that AHT is just that, an average across many different issues, skill levels, and customer demands. My co-author and colleagues argue instead for DIHT = Dynamic Individual Handle Time, confining AHT to workforce scheduling as long as AHT differs by issue or reason).
• Are customer support operations cost centers or profit centers? (Neither one. This is one of the oldest debating questions and is quite meaningless. Instead, all support ops should be viewed as value centers, with sufficient budget to handle other departments’ mistakes and recognition for retaining customers.)
• What have been your best and worst customer experiences, ever? (While not easy to score, this can reveal a huge amount since it reminds us that we are all customers and that our experiences should color how we deliver products, services, and care to our customers.)

³ A good example of agent assist is ASAPP’s “Auto Assist” solution.

⁴ Don Peppers & Martha Rogers, The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time; 1993