80% of service organizations believe the key to an effective multichannel strategy that delivers low effort service is to add more options, more tools, and more choices. And, it’s not hard to understand why when you consider the pressure coming internally from the company and your competitors, who are adding more channels as well. But the pressure is most palpable from your customers.
Every day, we hear from our customers about the customer service experience. What changes need to be made? What new channels or platforms need to be added? Essentially, it’s customers sharing their ideas on what a “low effort” experience looks like.
Don’t get me wrong. We absolutely need and want the customer perspective. I always tell companies that the starting point for any service organization building a multichannel strategy includes two things: Issue to Channel Map and Gathering Voice of the Customer. But herein lies the challenge. How do we determine “customer needs” versus “customer wants?”
Their feedback is critical to building a business case for investing in new channels but at the same time we can’t possibly add everything. In fact, we know that adding too many channels will end up overwhelming the customer. So, how do we truly make sense of the feedback from customers in order to ensure that we make cost effective decisions while also delivering low effort service to customers?
Some of the best examples we’ve seen:
- Maersk – The global shipping company adopted a more skeptical lens in examining customer verbatims using a questioning approach along with thorough observations of their customers to uncover true customer needs.
- Intuit – The tax services company implemented their “Follow Me Home” program to gather information on how customers troubleshooted issues in the moment to get a complete, more holistic view of the customer resolution journey.
- Conducting Focus Groups – Many of us are familiar with focus groups but you would be surprised by how many companies struggle to generate actionable insight from them. CEB Customer Contact offers guidance on how to overcome some of the pitfalls other organizations have faced in performing focus groups
How will you start to gather actionable customer insights to adopt a service strategy that is in the best interest of the company and of the customer?
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