I was chatting recently with a colleague who’s in the public utilities industry and we were discussing (as I do with most of my colleagues) Customer Experience and how certain brands handle ‘issues’ and ‘tickets’ and ‘incidents’. Often these terms are used interchangeably because many brands are pretty self-centered instead of being Customer-centric.
The point my friend was making was that, when someone contacts their help center, it’s likely an issue with service. Something’s gone wrong and a Customer is calling both to report an issue and ideally raise attention so the company can fix it. But, my friend said, how many people are having the same issue? Now, in her line of business, that makes good sense. While power or water or cable may go out due to a very localized issue (our neighborhood, for example, has an alley where all the wires are strung between poles and it’s all-too-frequent that the garbage collector will pass through and snip someone’s access to either phone, cable, or power altogether…these service providers are constantly having to fix our city’s lack of concern for its citizens), usually when someone is contacting a utility to report an outage, it’s not just that one Customer who’s impacted.
So, when we look at the downside of a “ticket” (there are this many Customers negatively impacted by an outage, say) and the upside of addressing that issue (there are a lot of people to whom we’ve returned service), in the utilities business, it’s pretty easy to see the breadth of impact. Furthermore, of course, most utilities have built-in advanced technology to detect outages and service interruptions even without having to be notified by their Customers. Often, for example, if there’s a storm that knocks out power or somewhere a transformer blows, the electric company is aware and on top of the issue before anybody has the time to even reach for the cell phone to call it in. That’s not just great technology, but it’s also leaning into a business model: They’re there, after all, to provide this utility to their Customers.
But the whole interaction led me to wonder what other industries can learn from this, and how this attitude can drive great Customer Experience no matter what good or service you provide.
I suppose the first step is to adopt the utilities’ perspective of each “ticket” or “incident” representing many more Customers than just the one who is reporting (or complaining about) a problem. If someone fills out a survey (or even out-of-the-blue offers you unsolicited feedback) about your website being difficult or counterintuitive to navigate, how many other Customers are also finding it challenging? If you were to take that one Customer’s insights to heart and do some redesigning or updating, that’d be great and you could “close the ticket” and move on. But in reality, your hard work has actually improved a lot of Customers’ experiences. For that matter, if you’re thinking comprehensively like that, you can use that knowledge to prioritize which projects your digital team should take on first.
But I think an even bigger improvement to your CX might be if you also adopt another aspect of the up-time model that utilities embrace: Knowing the status of your systems (and therefore your CX) even without hearing from your Customers. You know lately I’ve been on a kick about rethinking our approach to VoC and Customer insights. This is an excellent example of actually caring about your Customers’ experiences and thoughts for reasons other than patting yourself on the back for a great NPS or fretting over a negative review somewhere. If you’re going out and trying to understand what your Customers are going through when they interact with your brand because you want to make that interaction better, then you’ll probably be curious enough to walk in their shoes more often, take a look at what things look like from outside your offices, and honestly consider how you can make things better for them.
By all means, keep asking, keep taking their calls when they have issues, and yes, take care of all those things that are brought to your attention.
But once again, we return to what seems to be a repeating alarm: Find out (and ideally fix it!) before they contact you!
