The following post is an excerpt from Jonathan Gale’s Keynote at this year’s conference Connect 2016. Click here for more information on next year’s conference.
Globally, we spend $3.5 trillion a year on IT. That is an enormous amount of money that is deployed across every facet of IT.
But the reality is that more than half of it consistently fails – either fails outright or fails to deliver.
Genpact studies show that we waste about 70 percent of all the money that we spend on IT projects. It is a shocking number, and it is a number which, in today’s world of cloud, mobility, analytics and transparency, is increasingly unacceptable.
Your solutions need to work, they need to provide value, and they need to have an intuitive design so that your team will adopt the tools appropriately. For customer service, we need to extract value from our technology, understand what customers want and deliver the experiences they desire.
Spending too much for too little return
Source: Gartner Forecast: Contact Centers, worldwide, 2012-2019
Global spend for customer service and within contact centers has risen inexorably over the past few years. We have invested in additional channels, to expand the range of ways customers can communicate. We have invested in CRM systems for a more wholesome view of the customer. Yet, in a counterintuitive fashion, despite all the strategic investments, customer satisfaction has remained flat (or slightly declining).
I spoke to a prominent customer service thought leader the other day and the expression that they used for me – which I thought was pretty appropriate – was “flat is the new up.”
Source: American Customer Satisfaction Index
In the world of customer service, just keeping up, just keeping CSATs level, is hard enough. Why? Because our customer interactions have become more complex. We are throwing money at the customer service problem, gaining tools to analyze and data log interactions. But we have neglected the human element – the psychology that drives customer satisfaction.
The things people used to do over the phone, actions that would potentially create a brand relationship, are being dealt with in self-service channels now. And the self-service channels are just a given. Customers expect to be able to self-serve. They expect to be able to source answers from communities and to be able to google their questions and find results.
Now, the contact center has shifted to focus around the harder, thornier, more difficult to fix issues. And that is why we are seeing this decline in CSAT.
Would you like me to check your baggage?
A recent CEB study found that even if your customer service agents consistently do an amazing job of dealing with a particularly complex issue, they will only ever be able to achieve something like 50 or 60 percent customer satisfaction.
Today, isn’t enough simply to fix the problem. Customer service reps must understand people’s “baggage.”
What do I mean by baggage? Baggage is the preconception that a patron brings to a customer service inquiry.
For two-thirds of all inquiries that you get, it is not the first call or email that that person has made. They have baggage. They are carrying a stigma – convinced, at least a third of them, that they are not getting the value that they expected from your product. At least a quarter of them think they’ve had contradictory information from you around this particular issue in the past.
The natural tendency in customer service is to try to narrow the confines of each interaction down to the specifics of the problem that we are trying to solve so that we can expedite a solution. But CEB discovered that even if you solve the issues, you may still drive CSAT down.
The acknowledgement that matters
A customer service agent simply saying to someone, “I can see you’ve been with us for a long time as a customer, and I can see this is the seventh inquiry you’ve made about this problem. I’m sorry that we haven’t managed to resolve your issue yet,” can actually produce a better CSAT and a better NPS output than actually fixing the problem. Acknowledging the baggage matters.
Things that fall under baggage include past services experience the customer has had, the length of time they’ve been a customer, how much money they spend, issues that might exist in other areas of their business, their mood or personality.
If you can provide your customer service agents that information, and you can empower them, broaden their remit to touch areas that are not directly in their control, you will see better CSAT and NPS.
Having the right technology is important; using technology the right way, even more so.
