As previously mentioned, the quality of customer service influences brand loyalty. Expectations for fast, effective outcomes have remained constant over the years. However, intolerance and a willingness to go elsewhere has certainly grown when these are not met.
It’s a universal behaviour. 50% of Latin American consumers claim they would stop interacting with a company after just a single bad experience.
In similar fashion, just under 70% of UK consumers would leave a brand after a poor call centre experience according to a 2018 survey from Gem research. There is plenty more research showing the same behaviour across other parts of the world.
So, what drives this zero-tolerance approach?
A 2018 Calabrio survey of 3,000 UK and US consumers found that over half said their loyalty is earned when companies listen and act on a complaint. A similar number said they feel more loyal when they can get a hold of a company quickly and easily.
So, responsiveness and accessibility appear to be key.
What about consistency?
As a matter of choice, customers expect to engage on their preferred channel. They also expect common standards when they do so. Yet most omni-channel contact centres are in name only.
An annual mystery shopping exercise targeted at the top 100 UK brands (by Eptica) shows most customers receive different answers to the same question when using more than one channel. In the most recent report, 58% of the tested companies were completely inconsistent. In other words, different answers were provided over web, email, social and chat.
Another key driver of poor customer experience is complexity. It seems the rise of 24×7, connected lifestyles has taken its toll. Our brains hurt when confronted with difficult to complete tasks. Scan technology allows neuroscientists to pinpoint how pain receptors light up when things become too complex for us. It’s called cognitive overload.
Customers are increasingly conscious of the issue. A recent Ipsos Mori survey of 18,000 people across 23 countries revealed 54% of us now feel overwhelmed by daily choices. While 66% wish for a simpler life. An Experian report showed 85% of customers who apply for a financial services product end up dropping out because it was just too hard.
It’s also worth noting that making things easier for customers is the single most effective strategy for improving net promoter scores according to customer experience expert, Dr. Anil V. Pillai of Buyer Brain.
Let’s now sum up.
Listening to what matters to customers tells us that responsiveness, accessibility, consistency and low effort are important ingredients in the service standards that customers demand for their loyalty. Given that, it is important to have clear plans on how to improve each area. Here are some practical steps towards that goal.
Action List
In terms of responsiveness, monitor how long customers have to wait for service.
This includes both initial contact and final resolution for all types of customer engagement. Crucially, understand if this meets customer expectation. Has this changed year on year as much of the research provided here has suggested? Segment by generational response.
If you offer different service levels by channel, find out if customers understand and accept this. If not, explore alternatives. Maybe even explore the radical ideal of providing a common response standard for all channels.
Make sure you understand how performance drops during peak demand and ask customers what impact this on them. Consider boosting self service and proactive service as compensation. Or offer asynchronous channels such as messaging to provide customers with a fast, 24×7 way of registering their need without needing to wait for a response
Finally schedule regular, full scope tests of your own service experience to make sure the customers’ perspective remains front of mind
Understand what accessibility means to your customers in terms of channels, how they gain access to those channels, the quality of signposting and awareness of the options you are offering. Again, view these insights through a generational lens.
In particular, build an up to date view of how many customers choose to interact with you via smartphone. The mindset of smartphone users is even more expectant around autonomous, real time access and digital workflows.
Also understand accessibility in terms of disabled customers. What are their needs and how can you meet them?
Consolidate and unify service knowledge in order to provide consistent answers across channels. This needs a clear plan and investment in knowledge curation. The scope should include live assistance (voice, text, video), self-service and proactive service.
Focus on the way that channel management (often delivered in siloed teams) helps or hinders the consistency of information that flows through them to customers.
Stay up to speed with the latest generation of technology in how it can help in new topic discovery, auto tagging, semantic search and other key aspects of the knowledge management workflow
Make ‘low effort’ a major theme in your overall service improvement programme in order to leverage the combined benefits of reduced cost and improved CX.
Learn how to measure it and then use that insight to assess each of the customer journeys your engagement teams are involved in.
Invest in service design skills and transformative technologies to simplify journeys. Eliminate moments of high customer effort centre caused by duplicated activity such as:
- Being expected to provide personal information multiples times.
- Having to re- describe a situation when new advisors become involved.
- Having to be authenticated more than once.
- Having to move between offline, paper-based transactions and digital workflows.
