customer expectations
How well does your Big Data know your customers?
When it comes to growing your business, the ingredients are straightforward: have a good product/service, understand your customers’ needs, have good, clean customer data, and deliver an exemplary customer experience every time. Do those four things better than everyone else and your company always lands on the top of the heap. Fail to do any one of these things and you end up being mediocre at best and maybe do not survive.
Have you had an experience like one of my recent ones where I was pitched by a reputable company that had not done the research about me as a customer? The pitch was so far off-base that it was actually insulting to me. Sure, they had a good product, but because they didn’t understand my needs as a customer and battered me so much on the phone, I was left with only a poor customer experience. It’s likely that I’ll never do business with them or their sister companies in the future. Continue reading “How well does your Big Data know your customers?” »
You can’t always get the customer experience you want.
But if you try sometimes, you just might find you get —— a high amount customer effort and a lot of headaches. I continue to be shocked about the customer experience dysfunction I witness in my everyday life. I have no doubt that you know what I’m talking about. We see the repetitive communication and process execution breakdowns that occur during the purchase of a product or service. To the receiver, customer experience dysfunction feels like the company does not care about its customers and couldn’t care less if they develop (and keep) the relationship.
You can feel the customer experience dysfunction when I refer to a recent purchase where I was sidelined by backorders, late product deliveries, damaged goods, returns, and faulty replacements. After two months and several attempts, the company could never get my order right. I spent countless hours calling customer service, venting my issues through social CRM, rescheduling deliveries and pick-ups, only to ultimately end up back at square one, where I had to start over with a new company. Continue reading “You can’t always get the customer experience you want.” »
Are unneccessary calls hiking up customer experience dysfunction?
What are your callers thinking about when they spend minute after minute on hold to speak to an agent? Probably among the thoughts would be ‘what’s taking so long’? Studies show that up to half of all customer service calls are unnecessarily placed due to high organizational dysfunction. A communication misstep within the customer service chain inevitably triggers a customer call to figure out what has happened with their order or shipment, for example. These unnecessary calls tie up valuable agent time, run up call center operation costs, increase customer effort and create an overall negative customer experience.
I recently placed an order online but never received an order confirmation. Usually I get a prompt confirmation email that includes the order number and an estimated ship date, but this time I didn’t. Of course, my credit card was charged but without my order number or my confirmation I had to call customer service to ensure my order was actually placed. My not-so-helpful customer service agent said I had two options: wait to see if the order arrives or to reverse my credit card charges with my bank and place the order a second time. Something as simple as a missing order confirmation email had increased my customer effort score through the roof. Continue reading “Are unneccessary calls hiking up customer experience dysfunction?” »
Holistic medicine for your call center; look at the whole customer experience.
Holistic medicine is a big picture view – the emotional, physical, psychological and environmental factors that contribute to a patient’s overall health. Without considering all of these factors, a doctor may only solve part of the affliction without completely healing the patient. In your call center, the agents lacking a holistic view of a customer’s history may only solve part of the customer’s problem but not rectify the entire issue.
Think about how information in your company is heavily siloed by department which dictates that your call center agents have access to some of the customer’s history and information but not a holistic view of their entire interaction/relationship with the company. As we discussed last week, when Big Data is put to work in the right way it greatly benefits your customers and your brand. But when marketing, sales, online and other departments generate, collect and evaluate customer data but do not share it with the call center, the power of Big Data is undermined.
Your customers already think you are the master of Big Data, right? How often do you hear, ‘why can’t you see that on your screen? ’ Customers get frustrated and call center agents fail when the customer intelligence data available is incomplete or not readily accessible to them during a call. It’s also easier to misdiagnose a customer problem, miss an up-sell or cross-sell opportunity, or even lose a customer if the agents are limited to a single view of that customer. Think about the times you’ve called about a product or service issue and how much better your customer experience would have been had they offered to upgrade your service because they could see your contract was about to expire. Or gave you a discount on a related product because they had access to your spending patterns. Or could see that you spend most of your time shopping online through their web site and then tweeting about your purchases, so you were informed about their Twitter service handle to use the next time. Continue reading “Holistic medicine for your call center; look at the whole customer experience.” »
