by Devin Poole
In 2008, I made one of the biggest decisions in my life: I was going to move to Australia for a one year overseas deployment for CEB. It took me 5 wonderful years in Sydney to remember I’d forgotten to leave! But just over a month ago I finally returned to the States.
Now I don’t have to tell you that moving around the world is never easy. But this sentiment is not simply because I love a sunburnt country. It’s also driven through my extensive experiences with service organisations on both sides of the Pacific. In fact, I’ve spoken to, chatted with, emailed, IVRed, or Facebooked reps in so many industries that I can hardly remember a day in the past month where I haven’t had need to contact some company for something! As you might suspect, the experiences have varied from the outstanding to the downright dreadful. So here are a few things I’ve noticed along the way.
- Man, there are a lot of ways to contact every company. And it gets confusing. For any question I brought to providers, specifically to their websites first, it seemed like there were endless ways to solve my problem. Want to call us, go ahead… Or you can Tweet us… Or search our FAQ database. It’s all well and good to have some choice, but how am I ever supposed to decide what’s best for MY problem? Because I don’t necessarily care where I solve my problem, I just care that the problem goes away. As it turns out, 84% of customers think just like me.
- When I talk to a human… I want to speak to a real person, not a checklist! Of course, I have more insider knowledge about the way call centres run than the average customer, but we all know what it feels like to speak with a “human” versus a real person. Our QA programs are often the defining factor between the former and latter. Good news is that building a Quality function centred around customer-defined success isn’t as hard as we think.
- Just Make it Easy for me: Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but Customer Effort matters, a ton. You know from our research that 96% of customers who have had a high-effort experience (or experiences) are disloyal to that provider. I know that when a company makes it easy to handle my issue, I’m not only staying with them, but telling people about it as well. And because we know how important Ease and Effort are to our customers, we’ve created a new premium diagnostic to help measure this across your customer journeys
So I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter what country I was in or what industry I was speaking with, so many of the great and poor experiences had the same foundations. We’d love to hear how you’re battling these challenges in the comments below.