Experience Matters
There are quite a few “lessons” for businesses resulting from the pandemic and all the change it has generated. The shift online, for business / work and for personal activities, was an important part of the ability to continue to function with some sort of normalcy. This massive increase in the use of digital channels for everything from shopping to joining exercise classes exposed each of us to a barrage of online experiences, many for the first time. Businesses scrambled to add and modify systems and infrastructure to support new and existing channels at scale for employees, partners and customers. Building relationships and trust online can be difficult and the ongoing relationship can be fragile. The more online interactions the greater the opportunity to increase trust through positive experiences, but the dark side of that opportunity is the risk of exposure to poor interactions and the damage they can do to trust. Subscription based products and services, which are more prevalent now than ever before in a wide variety of industries, are particularly exposed to experience risks since long term company success is tied to renewals and relationships. Customer service (and customer success) takes on significantly increased importance to those experiences and the health of the customer relationships.
Expectations
In a Salesforce research study earlier this year 88% of respondents reported that experience matters as much as products, and 48% reported that they had switched brands for better customer service (“State of the Connected Customer”, May 2022). Salesforce just released the 5th edition of its “The State of Service Report”. The report, conducted by Salesforce Research, is based on a survey of 8,050 customer service professionals across 36 countries. From the “State of Service” study, 60% of service professionals reported that customer expectations increased during the pandemic.
Internal system, data and organization silos are the enemy of positive customer experiences. In the “State of the Connected Customer” report 60% of customers say it generally feels like they’re communicating with separate departments, not one company, and 66% often have to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives. In contrast to this data though, 67% of service professionals reported that their relationships to other departments are connected and 81% reported that agents have a complete and accessible view of customer sales / eCommerce transactions and customer marketing interactions (The State of Service Report, Sept 2022). Based on these two surveys there does still seem to be a gap between customer experience and what agents tools and methods deliver. Perhaps that gap is rooted in other expectations in the timeliness of interactions and resolution. In the “State of the Connected Customer” survey, 83% of the respondents expect to interact with someone immediately upon contact, and 83% expect to resolve complex problems through a single agent.
Speed and Quality
Balancing speed and quality in service delivery is challenging especially with the high level of customer expectations on the immediacy of both the interactions and the resolution. 78% of service agents think it’s difficult to balance speed and quality and 59% believe that the two are equally important (State of Service Report, Sept 2022). That doesn’t tell the whole story though. In comparison to the 2020 “State of Service” survey the number of respondents to the speed and quality question dropped in the 2022 survey from 68% to 59%, and the number of respondents that thought that speed is more important than quality doubled from 7% to 15%. While the overall number of responses is small, the shift in attitude seems to indicate that many agents are recognizing the need for immediate interaction and shorter time to resolution.
New Service Delivery Strategy
Customer then, expect your agents to have access to all the relevant data across multiple systems and departments quickly and have the ability to handle the incident from start to finish. These enhanced expectations are extremely important to the overall experience, and experiences directly impact retention and growth. What can companies do to meet these expectation shifts for as many customers as possible? There are several strategic shifts that can help agents meet customer expectations more effectively.
Shift from the old tiered service delivery model to the new collaborative delivery model, often referred to as the swarm model. (I wrote about this one here so won’t spend more time explaining it in this post)
Incorporate automation and artificial intelligence (AI) in your service delivery systems to reduce overhead from manual processes and to provide relevant and contextual data to support more effective interactions and faster resolutions. In the Salesforce “State of Service” survey the share of service decision makers who report using AI increased by 88% from 2020, with 45% of respondents versus 24% in 2020. Overall 58% of organizations are using automation. Of those organizations using automation the major benefits included time savings (50%), connection to other departments (49%), and reduction of errors (48%).
Killing data, system and organizational silos is critical in meeting customer expectations. This means integrating systems, using a customer data platform (CDP) to consolidate and manage all customer related data, providing a collaborative environment for departments to work together in real time to solve customer issues (like Salesforce Slack and Microsoft Teams) and applying automation to increase efficiency and reducing errors.
Provide self-service tools for customers that let them manage all but the most severe issues themselves. In the Salesforce “State of the Connected Customer” survey 59% of customers prefer self-service tools for simple questions/issues. In the Arion Research Subscriber Experience Report respondents reported that self-service related features were three out of the top 4 most important factors in overall subscriber satisfaction (1. Price 83%, 2. Ability to cancel or suspend the service online 80%, 3. Access to customer service online 79% and 4. Online self-service 74%).
If you need assistance revamping your customer service strategy and systems reach out to Arion Research here.
