Bizlife Smarts

Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is synonymous with customer retention and acquisition. We used to have in-person service support, but that is slowly disappearing. Companies are not only moving to call centre and online agent support, but working to replace people with A.I.

Think about it. In the pre-digital age, we’d simply walk into a bricks and mortar store, or service centre to address our customer service issues, face to face. Issues would usually be resolved (or not) with a single or a couple of customer service agent contacts.

With the rise of call centres, and moving customer service support online, proximity, let alone face to face contact, are no longer necessary. Your call or chat customer support agent can be located in Mexico, the Philippines, Brazil, or Timbuktu.

I started thinking about this issue because of several customer service experiences I encountered with blue-chip brands over the past few weeks. Many of them left me frustrated. But those are stories for another day.

Brand importance and engagement

So, what do brand importance and engagement have to do with customer satisfaction and service? Let’s first address the definitions for clarity.

Brand importance: The relative utility and value a brand holds in a consumer’s life. Think of it as, how deep an impact the loss of that product/ brand would have on a consumer’s life.

Brand engagement: This is the emotional attachment to a brand, based on consumer interactions with said brand. https://www.nbrii.com/faqs/market-research/brand-engagement-matter/

Now that we are clear on that, imagine waking up with no milk, toothpaste or even water in your house. This experience would become the biggest crisis of your day, given the importance of these things in your morning routine, and yet we rarely give them much thought. We take them for granted. They are generally high importance, low engagement products. Losing your iPhone or your internet being down, on the other hand, would probably push you close to insanity. As we well know, many people are almost literally adhered to their digital devices, thus the high importance and engagement.

Using the above analogies, here are how some of the world’s leading brands could be plotted on the importance/engagement map. The ‘Opportunistic’ segment are those brands that are either niche, or striving to rise up to the green quadrant, while battling not to fall back into the red quadrant.

All brands are constantly in a customer/brand engagement cycle that determines where they sit on the above map, and whether they make it to, or remain in the green quadrant.

Digital age challenges

Unfortunately, too many companies consider customer engagement to be Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We all know the pitfalls of social media https://bizlifesmarts.com/deleting-social-media. All that is however just the window dressing. The real nuts and bolts of customer engagement lie in customer service.

Now, think about it; where would you go today, if you had a product issue with detergent from Unilever, or a banking issue with JPMorgan Chase or issues with your Microsoft Surface or Apple MacBook Pro? If you have issues with any of these companies’ products, the first recourse they offer is a customer service hotline or online support. This is where the challenges of the digital age begin to frustrate our customer satisfaction.

Online support and the call centre

The call centre and online support agents are constrained to follow tightly scripted parameters, with little leeway for initiative and customization. Dare I say…wait for it…they are robotic?! Unfortunately, this will sound old fashioned, but it’s not like the old days of face to face service. The agents then were able to use the nuance of physical proximity to customize solutions to one’s individual issue, demeanor and understanding. Today, you get a different quality of solution, depending on the technical knowledge, level of confidence, sense of initiative and grasp of language of the agent you reach. Too many cannot provide a solution outside their script.

Out of frustration, I found that if you don’t get a satisfactory solution at first try, call or log back later. Thus, you can go from extreme frustration,to a perfect solution 30 minutes or 3 attempts later. I also found that different companies provide different levels of quality of call support. Those are likely the companies that follow what I recently read from the CEO of Steelcase Jim Keane, that, ‘Releasing control involves trust — trusting that people will make good choices if you give them a chance’.

Some supposedly blue-chip brands have now lost my business, simply due to the poor, highly frustrating, anonymous customer service.

A.I. meets customer satisfaction

We still have hope however. As A.I. continues to evolve and facial and voice recognition improve, companies must assure that their online and call support can identify consumer types and nature of the support call. Customer support must then efficiently channel online calls and chats using these nuances, for more efficient and satisfied outcomes. Out of all my recent experiences, http://klm.com did this best.

The bottom line is. If a company’s customer satisfaction declines, they will lose business to their competition. The overall intention is to improve the efficiency of customer service, both for the company and the customer. Shorter support calls and chats, fewer agent contacts and a higher resolution rate will all be measures of this.

Digitization should not lead to standardization and roboticization of customer support, but use A.I. to recreate the nuance of human interactions. It can also help improve human customer service, and not necessarily be a replacement for human interaction.

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