Are you setting your employees up for failure?
I’m a push-backer. That, to some, makes me a real pain-in-the-neck. It’s partly because of the field of work I’m in. After all, we CX practitioners are always alert to things brands are doing poorly because it’s in our nature to seek out those…er, we’ll call them opportunities. That’s in the spirit of what I’ve written before about CX folks being both the best Customers to have and the worst. […]
It’s not just counting
So yes, I’ve been hounding you lately about VoC and Customer insights.
And yes, I’m an analyst going way back, so I love me some good old-fashioned bean-counting!
But wait.
If you’re taking my advice and looking in clever places for your Customer insights, you’ve probably taken my admonition that, in addition to asking your Customers where their issues are, you can check your own systems to passively get an idea where you can improve simply by checking the internal ticketing system within your Customer Service, Care, and Support teams. After all, while it’s helpful to hear directly from your Customers what’s going wrong, not only don’t you have to even bother them (further?) by asking them, but you can get out ahead of problems by noting—in the real world—where people are running into issues even before they call.
But regardless of where and how you find these insights, that analysis shouldn’t be overlooked.
And I don’t mean simply to crunch your numbers (and crunch them harder!). I mean that how you analyze can make a big difference as well. […]
Try that with your spouse
I wrote a long time ago about how Customers don’t want to hear excuses about why their experiences with your brand are bad, they just want you to fix those issues. Recently I returned to the topic and some brands’ tendency to want to recruit us into their sausage-making by offering some extraneous and unnecessary trip down memory lane about why it is that they have a terrible policy or procedure when it comes to poorly serving us, the Customer.
Both of these (and likely many others, if I were to do a comprehensive review of my previous writing) examples are different versions of brands making excuses rather than solving issues. In the immortal words of a close friend of mine, “Ain’t nobody got time to listen to your excuses…get on and fix it.” […]
It isn’t technology…it’s your choices
I think I’ve mentioned before one particular service provider I’ve had for decades that’s constantly disappointing me. For some reason that’s completely lost on me—at least in recent years—this company has along the line picked up a reputation as being superb in the CX realm. To be honest, way back, they really were, but these days I think they’ve definitely fallen asleep at the wheel. Here’s something they do that ticks me and a lot of their Customers off as an example:
You can’t communicate with them.
Well, you can, but you have to do it exactly the way they want you to. I know there’s an old story about certain brands (including one I worked for a million years ago) that would actively hide their Customer Service phone number from their Customers. And I’ve even written previously about the outright funny way brands seem sometimes to deliberately tell their Customers to not bother even trying to communicate with them. But this brand in particular makes communication not impossible, but rather, a huge hassle each time. […]
Knowing before you’re told: Learning good CX from utilities
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.
[…]
Have I been recruited?
Have you ever complained about something and rather than the agent at the Customer Service desk or on the Customer Support line having what seems to be a well-rehearsed, often-used, ready solution to your concern, you receive instead a well-rehearsed, often-used, and ready explanation for why what’s bothering you has to be the case?
Usually the scenario is something like: There was this other problem Customers used to have. So, the brand comes up with a solution that takes care of that specific issue while (hopefully, fingers-crossed) attempting not to cause a more aggravating condition. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.
But even if the “solution” really is less annoying than the prevailing circumstance, the inconvenience isn’t gone altogether; sometimes it’s just replaced with a different hassle.
And so there you are as the Customer receiving a history lesson as to how we got to this state instead of the brand taking it upon itself simply to take note of your concern and recognizing that, while this may be better (again, fingers-crossed), they’re still not quite there yet. […]
