Are You Aligned on Your Customer Experience?

The next time you are in a meeting with colleagues or heads of the other departments in your company, try this fun exercise!

Have everyone around the table take a minute and jot down the three words that come to their minds that best describe your company’s customer experience. Now share!

The customer experience is built across every touch point that spans the entire customer lifecycle. Yet in most cases, organizations are functionally aligned with each focusing on delivering a great experience from their area. Sounds like a recipe for success, right?

But what if the first two examples from the staff are “ease of onboarding” and “no hassle service”? Are these two definitions in alignment with each other? Certainly they both stand alone as good goals to have for your customer experience.

So then I sign up for your service, put in a user name and password, and immediately begin using the product. How easy was that! But then the first time I have a question and call for support, I spend the first 10 minutes of my call giving my name, where I’m located, what industry I’m in, the size of my company, etc. to the Customer Support rep. In this scenario, the delivery on one definition of the optimal customer experience torpedoed the other.

Innovation of products and services is all well and good, but first be clear on the customer experience you intend to deliver. Alignment across your management team is a critical first step!

Share A Little Of That Human Touch

“I just want someone to talk to,
And a little of that human touch”

Today’s lesson on great support that drives loyalty comes from “the Boss”, Bruce Springsteen himself!

My company received the following feedback from one of our customers today. It was directed toward our Customer Support organization and said:

“I have been using Constant Contact for over a year and I owe my satisfaction completely to the customer service support. Without the access to the great support I have received, I would have stopped using your service a long time ago. Kudos to your support team!”.

High praise indeed, but I was concerned with her statement “without the access to the great support I have received, I would have stopped using your service a long time ago”. So, I called the customer to ask the meaning behind that statement and she provided me with some great insight I wanted to pass along.

Her issue is time and her personal learning style. Being a busy person (as we all are), she doesn’t have the time nor the inclination to use the self-service resources (tutorials, webinars, FAQ’s) to find the answers to her questions. In her words, “I need to get an email campaign created and out the door FAST!”. As such, she is very appreciative of our Support team’s ability to quickly answer questions and keep her work flowing. She also pointed out to me that her comment was not based solely on her last interaction with us but that every time she calls Support she is greeted with friendly, knowledgeable staff that are genuinely interested in helping her be successful with our product.

She did not speak highly of other companies she has dealt with in the past that only offered self-service methods of support!

There’s a great lesson here relating to striking that balance with availability of customer support resources to your customers. Some prefer the self-service, “Let me discover on my own” way of learning, others need the immediate and 1 to 1 interaction with a human being. It’s the sum total of all resources that really makes our Support model successful. And while it’s important for us to continue to promote the use of all available resources with our customers, we never forget that sometimes it’s the human interaction piece that really drives the loyalty we generate from our customers. As a result of both a great product and service, this customer has recommended several people to our company through our referral program.

Self-service tools should compliment your support offering, not be the means to call avoidance!

“Share a little of that human touch
Feel a little of that human touch
Give me a little of that human touch”