I don’t think people will find it surprising that in the last year, in particular, business leaders – those leaders of corporations and big business- have been focusing on making managing and dealing with clients more ‘efficient’ for their businesses. We all know that means automating as much as possible.
This is not new, businesses, especially those in B2C markets with lots of consumers like airlines, travel operators, banks, telcos, energy providers, and so on have taken on customer automation with gusto but it seems to have gone to the extreme. The extremes of customer automation now make it virtually impossible to find a telephone number on their websites to contact them in person, and if you do, good luck with the waiting times, and knowing which number you need to press after the extensive menu, and of course, the holy grail of finding someone who can actually help solve your problem.
There is nothing wrong with streamlining processes and cutting costs, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of the customer and their experience (CX*).
I wrote about the concept of Net Easy Score (NES) back in 2018. NES measures how easy customers find it to interact with an organisation. It’s a measure that evolved from the Customer Effort Score which uses the question “How much effort did you need to put forth to do business with us today?”. However, in the instances cited above, NES, especially when we need to speak to a human, is more like NEDS – net extreme difficulty score.
The B2B world, however, is embracing NES and looking to find ways to make it easier for clients to engage and interact with their teams and business. Think of virtual meetings and conferences, collaboration software, and shared platforms integrated with in-person visits. COVID seems to have helped us get closer to a more collaborative human-centred relationships with our B2B clients.
However, in the B2C world it’s quite the opposite with organisations making it forever harder for customers to contact them in person. They seem to have put in place measures and protocols to prevent their clients from speaking with humans in their businesses. They’re making their policies, trading terms, and customer service options as confusing as possible. Things get even messier when these same businesses spend hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of dollars, in marketing and advertising campaigns promoting ‘how wonderful they are’ and how they ‘always put their customers first’. How disingenuous. I did a radio interview about this very topic only last week with Jenny Seaton, AfternoonFM Curtin radio who expressed similar frustrations she was getting from her listeners.
Well, we have news for these businesses: the same research that shows that executive business leaders are looking for more ‘efficiencies’, also shows that clients want to talk to humans on the phone – real people who can help clients navigate their options and who have agency to address their issues or queries, especially during upheavals like COVID, when anxiety is at its peak.
Business and sales leaders should take note of this trend, especially in times of crisis. Humans need reassurance and they need to feel safe. What they don’t need is more frustration, anxiety, and distress when they are simply trying to be a customer. Cutting back on humans operating in your customer service teams may be losing you a whole lot more than you gained in cost savings. Get it right and your customer service team could be your best sales team. So, it’s in an organisation’s best interest in the medium and long term to rethink their customer value chain and how to deliver genuine customer centric experiences across their organisations.
So, where to from here?
We need the 3 Cs: Clarity, Consistency and Communication
Clarity: What we (the customer) need is a way to understand how to do business with you (the organisation). Humans love certainty and clarity, even if there are several steps to follow. They want to know the rules and how to apply them. Customers want their interactions to be fair and reasonable -terms and conditions that are uncomplicated and devoid of tricky deceptions.
Consistency: Customers want to know what the process is and how to work with it, consistently. Businesses say they want ‘sticky’ loyal customers, well the best way to do this is to be consistent – consistently good- in how you operate. When you’re consistent then our interactions with you can become second nature to us, the customers.
Communication: We want to be kept informed of updates, changes and information that is important to us, on a regular basis. And when things get trick for us, we need humans to talk to who are willing and able to help us manage our customer experience.
Because when we find a business, and people in that business, who really do care about us, and what we do, and make an effort to help us and keep us informed, there is nothing much better than that. it’s fantastic. It’s amazing.
However, sadly it’s the exception for most businesses when it should be the norm.
Seriously, it doesn’t take that much effort to help people have a great experience.
So here are some questions to consider if you want to make life easier and better for your customers:
- How easy is it for customers to contact a real person if they have questions?
- When things get complex, do you have a way for customers to get their issues resolved effectively and quickly?
- How capable and well equipped are your people in terms of helping your customers address their concerns, needs or priorities?
- How easy are your systems to use and navigate, both internally and externally, to make things run more smoothly?
- How effective is your communication, both internally and externally?
- Are you able to keep the promises you make to customers?
Remember everybody lives by selling something.
*Customer experience (CX) is the sum total of customers’ perceptions and feelings resulting from interactions with a brand’s products and services. Customer experience spans the lifetime of customers’ relationships with a brand, starting before a purchase is made, continuing to active use and advancing to renewal or repeat purchase.
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