Asking Why is just the first step
I’ve written on several occasions (and many others I’m sure I could dig up) about how it’s your responsibility as a brand to take care of your Customers, not just to give them excuses.
Sometimes when I lodge a criticism of a policy or process with a brand, I’m given an excuse in reply. When I call requesting something or bringing something to light, what I expect (well, maybe there’s my problem!) is that the brand, in response, will take to heart the trouble their systems and/or policies present to their Customers and see it as an opportunity to fix the issue, not a reason simply to explain why they have those in place…even if they’re softened by a heartfelt expression of regret that I have to endure them.
As I’ve said before I don’t care that you care. I’m not contacting you looking for sympathy or understanding. I’m not one to simply enjoy griping for no real reason. For me, it is about the nail! So don’t treat it simply as a gripe-session. […]
Sometimes it’s not even your processes
As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and Process Engineer, and if you’ve ever read any of my stuff about the whole purpose of CX, you know I’m all about processes. One of the coolest things I ever discovered in my professional journey was the great applicability of these traditional waste- and error-reduction methods to simply making your Customers happier and driving alignment between your Brand Promise and your Brand Delivery. It’s quite truly my bread-and-butter and the animating principle of my entire practice. So yes. Let’s fix your processes; and thus your outcomes.
But here’s the thing, too: Sometimes it’s not even your processes that are the problem, but rather your policies. […]
How I came around on the ROI of CX
One could say that I’ve been a bit schizophrenic about the idea of a Return On Investment for Customer Experience. I may be a bit more charitable to myself and say that I continue to evolve on “the ROI question.”
One of the first things I ever did as a CX “thought leader” was a video for the CXPA imploring CX leaders to tie their endeavors and CX-based metrics directly to those of the overall enterprise. Specifically, I emphasized how making that correlation between, say, NPS or C-SAT, and overall revenues would help with buy-in: People outside of the “CX bubble” are more inclined to care about where their CX KPIs are headed if they know that they’re a harbinger of good-or-bad sales. After all, as I like to say, we’re all in the business of business to make money.
That said, as I ventured out more into the wilderness as a CX consultant and fractional CX leader, I found that a lot of people were simply hand-waving CX…treating it as a newest flavor-of-the-month and making Customer-centric-sounding speeches, but not really putting anything into it. Surely there were some out there who truly saw the value of getting CX right, but many were just paying it lip-service. It was that exposure that led me to kind of drift the other direction: If your heart’s not really in CX, you’re likely not going to be very successful with those CX endeavors, because you’re not doing it for the right reason.
For that matter, I also noticed a bit of a paradox when business leaders would have to be convinced to engage in better Brand Promise alignment simply because of the ROI. That’s fine as it is, but I saw hypocrisy when the same CEO would stand up in front of an all-hands meeting and aver that by golly, nothing’s more important than The Customer! (Really? Why did we have to battle it out, then, to decide to focus on CX, and only after I convinced you there was this fantastic pot of gold at the other end?) That zeal led me on more of a mission on behalf of Customers. I even went so far as to write in several places (including in my own book!) that, if you’re “doing” it simply for the money, you’re “Doing CX Wrong.”
Well. Then again… […]
Is my feedback *really* important to you?
Customer Support, Customer Service, and Customer Care (whichever you call it) tends to be a predominantly transactional existence: Customer has a problem, question, issue, etc.; Customer contacts brand; brand helps Customer (ideally); Customer goes on about life. And on and on.
Very usually after such an interaction, the Customer is invited via an email link to take a survey because (as it’s expressed in an auto-generated missive), “Your opinion matters to us!”
Does it, really, though? […]
Everything doesn’t need to be an escalation
I wrote recently about a pretty rough experience I had with a digitally-based company. The long-and-short of it was that a technical glitch (which is inevitable for an online company eventually) was compounded by a horrible recovery effort. Eventually I had to escalate to the executive level in order to get my solution.
At about the same time, I was also going through another escalation (also executive… I can hear you already, “Okay, Karen. Settle down.”) with another legacy brand for another issue I was having with them.
In that previous article, I alluded to the concept of relationships with brands not necessarily being hugely damaged by glitches or issues, but rather the way that the recovery can either make or break a Customer’s perception of your brand. Sometimes, it’s said, a good recovery from an issue can improve a a brand’s image above where it otherwise would have been without the issue in the first place. That’s a concept many brands have embraced, and (although neither of the two of whom I speak here really do) many excel at the recovery function. That’s not a reason to deliberately sabotage your Customers’ initial experiences just so they can see how great it is to deal with your Customer Care organization. It’s best to “No be there,” after all.
But the escalations got me to thinking about these two issues in particular. […]
Glitches are born of tech; Good CX is how you react
Everything is digital these days. I know, I know; I sound like an old man…perhaps shaking his fist and yelling at clouds. And of course it’s an exaggeration.
And I’m not talking about how even traditionally brick-and-mortar brands allow you to order their goods online and have them delivered to your home. Nor do I mean that even my dentist has a website nowadays (I had to throw in the word “nowadays” to keep my old-man cred).
What I mean is that there are brands like Uber, Rover, and Vrbo that are organically and only online entities. They are completely digital in the sense that, sure, they may own assets like office space and servers somewhere, they exist only in the ether. They’re all code. Amazon would be one like that, except that it owns all that inventory and all those warehouses and trucks and such. And think about companies like DoorDash…that’s a fully online company that removes the need for you, its user, to have to go to a traditional brick-and-mortar location. Maybe it’s safer to say that everything’s a service?
Anyway, I recently had an experience with one of these online-only organizations (not any of those listed above, but just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about). As I said, these companies basically are code: they have an app or a website (or both). You go on there, open an account, pay for something, and get it. Like the above examples of Uber, Rover, Vrbo, and DoorDash, a lot of times their main aim is to be the middleman for and connect you with someone who has something you want (a ride somewhere, a place to stay, etc.). The business model is to streamline the finding of those connections (usually through a marketplace of some sort) and enable the transaction (usually where they get their cut by either charging you or the provider—sometimes both—a little bit for the service).
Again, that’s all done with code. Someone’s written a program and ‘put it out there’ in an app store and/or on a website. That’s all they do. They don’t walk your dog or take you somewhere or create (and often don’t even ship) any of the goods you purchase. They just code. […]
