Automated Transcript
I’m Rich McPhee, and I’m joined today by our resident expert, Martin Korner.
So, Martin, I hear lots and lots about this term “customer experience,” it’s everywhere. Could you help us break down what exactly customer experience is and, more importantly, why it matters to most organisations in business today? Customer experience has obviously always been important. Why is it any different now?
I think the reason that it’s so important now is because it’s extremely easy for customers to find out how good a company’s customer service is.
Yeah. So it’s a great point, right? The first thing you do when you search for a new company is you put their name in Google. My generation would certainly look at Google, some others go to TikTok, as you told me earlier, and one of the first results that comes up is a story sitting next to them on multiple star-rated websites. So, yeah, that’s a great point and insight that their experience rating is accessible. I guess that bleeds into some of the research I’ve seen as well from top research companies. The top five reasons an organisation buys are also the same top five reasons a customer would leave an organisation.
So, the top five being the experience of others and peer reviews, and the feel or value they’ve received from that company. And the inverse is that personal experience of loss, etc., a bad experience, and they would actually leave. So, it does make sense that it’s a big driver for sure.
Exactly. And those experiences stick with you, don’t they? You know, where you’ve been really frustrated by a company. You’ve not been able to take a product back for a refund, or you’ve just been bounced around different departments and not been able to get the result you wanted. You just remember that, you’ll tell your friends about it, and you’ll avoid going back to that company in the future. So, yeah, I think it’s a really important area.
Certainly, from a customer experience perspective, on a more personal note, the seven things that I would expect personally when I interact with an organisation, I’m not really that bothered about how fast they’re going to deal with a phone call, but being able to contact them at the right time when suitable for me is great. There’s nothing more frustrating for me than phoning an organisation and them saying, “I’m sorry, but our office hours are 9 to 5,” and this is something I’ve been waiting in a call queue for an hour on. Some of the best experiences I’ve had from customer experience are actually dealing with the likes of WhatsApp, where it’s an asynchronous communication. You deal with it over a period of 24 to 48 hours. I don’t mind that. I just don’t have to be stuck on a call. So, scenarios like that are fantastic. And not only that, it’s from start to finish. Whenever I actually start the interaction, transaction, and inquiry, all the way through, and there’s some great feedback.
I guess that’s what I would like as a customer. From an organisation’s perspective, those are the kinds of things they should be thinking about when implementing it.
I think that’s exactly the right way to approach it. Rather than thinking from a business perspective, you know, how do we reduce our handle time or how do we improve this KPI, think, if I was a customer of my own service, what is it that I’d expect at every step of that journey? And it’s not just when you’ve got a problem and you have to fill in the contact centre form. It starts right at the start of that journey. So, what opportunities are there to self-serve? Are things on the website, the things on the app that you can do yourself as a customer? Often customers want to handle it themselves. They don’t want to have to get in touch with someone all the time. Then there’s the automation. So, when you do phone up or go on the web shop, are there steps that you can help yourself with? There might be a chatbot which helps you. You might be able to find your delivery status by typing in your order number, for example. Then there’s the step where you get through to the agent, and how they can help you make sure they give you a good experience. Then there’s the follow-up. Any follow-up actions, anything where they need to send you information afterwards and they can show that it does happen. On any follow-up actions, if there’s a case being opened, then an extra one is proactive communications as well. If there’s an outage in your area, having contact sent out to you before you have to phone with the issue, just to let you know, your service is going to be off for the next three hours, we’re aware of it, we’re fixing it. Reply to this message if you still want to speak to someone about it.
All those areas are different parts of the CX journey. I think they’re all important and they all need to work together.
That’s really interesting. Everything you’ve just described there is really putting the customer at the heart of the planning and all those touchpoints on the journey when the organisation is actually thinking about how to implement.
I think you could potentially put that into a box of customer centricity, which is another one of these buzzwords that flies about. Yeah. So, having that customer-centric approach, building your service around them, their needs, their communications.
It’s one thing to approach this from what technology, tools, systems, and processes you need to do. But what is really the key to successful CX in an organisation? How do you embed that customer-centricity mindset and get everyone firing in the same direction?
The key thing here is making sure that the team who are building these solutions or buying these solutions understand that this is a key objective for the organisation. They need to have the buy-in from management that the time they’re spending focusing on the customer is valuable time. They can make decisions around that and build a good customer-centric journey. They just need that buy-in. I think that’s the main thing.
So, you’re saying that the teams tasked with doing it just need the support and sponsorship from the exec level? You don’t need the CEO to be manning the phones and getting in there, but they do need to understand what their strategy is and how it impacts their own strategic objectives and goals of the organisation for growth. To be honest, we see that a lot in the annual reports we read as well. So, we are seeing that come through very prominently. It’s good to see that you’re seeing the same things.
That’s good from the senior management in the building. But how can you get the rest of the team in the business? It takes a village to raise a child and all that. How do you get the entire organisation focused on customer experience and that customer-centric view?
It can be difficult because sometimes teams have their own KPIs, which might be things like average handle time or contacts per order, for example. Those are great KPIs, but they can’t be the main focus if you focus on the customer experience side of it first. So, when you’re tackling problems, you should look from the customer experience perspective. You’ll eventually achieve those KPIs anyway. But if you focus directly on the KPIs, you’ll probably start going down the wrong solutions. You’ll be really focused on just, “How do we get customers off the phone quicker?” That’s not a good customer experience. Whereas if your software is in the right place, if you’ve got the right tools for the agent, the agent is going to deal with that customer faster anyway because they’re not going to be spending time waiting for things to load or updating the details in different systems.
Ultimately, you’re going to achieve your KPIs. But you have to have that focus on CX and really drive that.
That’s a great point. It’s been one of these things that I’ve had to learn the hard way in business. People
live and die by their KPIs, right? And they’ve always got unintended consequences. Just like you’re saying there, if you give them a measurement of how fast they can get a customer off the phone, are they going to deliver a great experience? Probably not.
I’ve seen many approaches to people trying to nail down their customer experience and how they’re going to approach it. The general way that we’ve always done this is to go with what’s available in the market, right? In terms of the tooling that’s out there, these are tools built specifically to deliver. So why would it be a bad thing to choose some market-leading companies that have built a business around creating customer experience tools and adopting what they have?
Yeah, I think there’s a lot more to it than just choosing the technology and pressing on with it. From that perspective, you really need to look at what your specific needs are as an organisation. What are the specific problems you’re trying to solve? What are your goals and objectives as an organisation? Work through it from that perspective. The technology is just a way of solving those problems. As long as you’ve got enough flexibility within that technology to solve the problems you’ve got today, but also problems you’ll have in the future, and you can build upon it, ensure you get enough data out of that technology, and ensure you can integrate with different tools you’re using. As long as it’s something with that level of flexibility, then really, that’s further down the line. That’s a step much further in the process. But first of all, it’s identifying what those problems are, what your business needs are. It’s going to be different for different businesses. It’s not a one-size-fits-all.
That’s a really interesting point you made about getting your business priorities and requirements right. Where would they come from if every business is different? You’ve said that some people fall into this trap about reducing handling time to reduce their OPEX, etc. How does that work with customer experience? How do you know what your business requirements are for customer experience and how do you get them?
Yeah. So I think the one thing that ties all the organisations together that we work with is their customers. Those customers they’re trying to serve, whether it’s in sales, supporting customers in various different ways, or a helpdesk. The customer is the one common factor between all of those. It’s about looking at how you want to support those customers, what those customer needs are, and then how you can deliver those as a business. Bringing it all back to customer centricity: how does a customer want to interact and deal with you, and then building your support systems, tools, problem statements, and requirements around that.
I think that’s a great way, and maybe a good point, to wrap up. In terms of what you need to put in place: customer centricity, senior stakeholder buy-in, and then selecting the tooling much further down the line once you’ve got a really great handle on what you’re trying to achieve.
Thanks very much, Martin. It’s been a real pleasure again.
Cool. Thanks, Rich.
