Why customers want effortless engagement

It is well known in busi­ness that the bet­ter the cus­tomer ser­vice, the greater the cus­tomer loy­al­ty and the health­i­er the bot­tom line.

A mas­sive 91% of cus­tomers claim they would buy again based on a good expe­ri­ence, accord­ing to a sur­vey by Sales­force last year. And since 75% of new cus­tomers have been try­ing out dif­fer­ent brands dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, accord­ing to McK­in­sey, com­pa­nies have to pull out all the stops to secure their loy­al­ty.

At a time when cus­tomers have been glued to devices of every shape and form, mak­ing sure they are get­ting the most from their tech­nol­o­gy is para­mount.

In many cas­es, the pan­dem­ic has been the cat­a­lyst com­pa­nies need­ed to make the leap towards a more tech-dri­ven cus­tomer sup­port frame­work. But the pres­sure to make this change has been there for some time.

“Fun­da­men­tal­ly, the cost of serv­ing cus­tomers is going up. Con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy is now more com­pli­cat­ed and there is a lot of pres­sure on chan­nels. The pan­dem­ic sim­ply accel­er­at­ed that tran­si­tion,” insists Matt Dyson, gen­er­al man­ag­er of Lucid­CX, a Likewize com­pa­ny.

While many com­pa­nies have imple­ment­ed chat­bots and added ‘how to’ videos to their web­sites, the approach to tru­ly great cus­tomer sup­port must be more deeply inte­grat­ed and is more com­pli­cat­ed than sim­ply adding anoth­er tool. It begins with a strate­gic shift that hap­pens from the point of sale.

“A lot of com­pa­nies assume cus­tomer care has to be reac­tive, but there’s a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate high­er cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion through proac­tive edu­ca­tion when they first buy a prod­uct. The vast major­i­ty of issues – 76% – are down to edu­ca­tion rather than phys­i­cal issues with their device,” Dyson says.

With cus­tomer onboard­ing the first line of defence, com­pa­nies must strike a bal­ance. “When a cus­tomer buys a device, they’re not going to have a 45-minute call about it. That’s ter­mi­nal­ly sad,” Dyson admits. How­ev­er, inter­ac­tive videos where users can skip the more obvi­ous – to them – parts and proac­tive emails that flag cer­tain func­tion­al­i­ties imme­di­ate­ly improve the customer’s rela­tion­ship with their new device and head prob­lems off at the pass.

Cus­tomer edu­ca­tion cer­tain­ly has the poten­tial to remove a great deal of ini­tial frus­tra­tion. But when there is a real issue, it is vital it’s dealt with swift­ly, capa­bly and effec­tive­ly.
In many instances, this can still be achieved through a tech­nol­o­gy-only solu­tion. Crit­i­cal to main­tain­ing the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship is help­ing them find a solu­tion via one of the brand’s own chan­nels, rather than forc­ing them to resort to search­ing else­where. But this is some­thing that is often eas­i­er said than done.

Dyson says: “The abil­i­ty to exe­cute a dig­i­tal-first strat­e­gy is so impor­tant but it’s so much more than putting the knowl­edge base online. It needs to have an effec­tive, nat­ur­al lan­guage-based search engine. Every prob­lem should be dealt with in one inter­ac­tion and the best solu­tion offered first time.”

Should cus­tomers end up with a call cen­tre rep­re­sen­ta­tive, it should still be a one call, one agent inter­ac­tion, what­ev­er the prob­lem. Using tech­nol­o­gy such as Likewize Wiz­e­View to cre­ate ‘instant experts’, putting a sin­gle source of truth at their fin­ger­tips — from device diag­nos­tics and prob­lem-solv­ing guide­lines to cus­tomer data — there is no more need for the cus­tomer to be passed from pil­lar to post in search of a solu­tion.

With the poten­tial to train an agent from scratch in as lit­tle as nine min­utes, agents can now han­dle queries that would almost always require a sec­ond line of sup­port. In some cas­es, this has meant com­pa­nies have been able to halve their call cen­tre vol­umes.

The num­bers cer­tain­ly speak for them­selves. With first-call res­o­lu­tion as a result of instant experts and dig­i­tal call deflec­tion, com­pa­nies can take large vol­umes of cus­tomer sup­port calls and move them into self-ser­vice, in many cas­es migrat­ing 40% of a huge­ly com­pli­cat­ed triage jour­ney online.

Tech­nol­o­gy may be the enabler, but at its heart it is a cus­tomer expe­ri­ence phi­los­o­phy that dri­ves suc­cess. “Fun­da­men­tal­ly, you have to under­stand the voice of the cus­tomer,” Dyson con­cludes. “Once you do that the effects are pro­found.”

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