Making the Most of Customer Interactions by Making the Most of Your Customer's Time
20 May, 2010
By: Eric CamulliWe wait for things every day: for the coffee pot to finish brewing; for the light to turn green; for our popcorn to finish popping and we aren’t bothered. Yet, when customers call your business and have to wait on hold, they perceive that you don’t care enough about them to answer their call immediately. In fact, a 2008 Lightspeed survey found that waiting on hold was the second biggest frustration for customers (confusing IVR menus was number one).
Imagine calling your insurance company because your newly finished basement is flooding after a hard rain and you’re not sure it’s covered by your policy. Imagine you call your bank because you need to dispute some mysterious charges and you’re nervous about possible identity theft. Or imagine your Internet connection went down the day tickets went on sale for The Police reunion tour. Whatever the issue, you want answers. Now.
But you’re put on hold. And because you don’t know how long you will be on hold, the minutes feel like hours. In fact, as time keeps ticking, your feelings begin to escalate from annoyed - to aggravated - to flat-out insulted. By the time a customer service representative answers your call, the conversation is already off to a bad start.
The New Consumer
To make the situation even more difficult, today’s consumers are more willing to switch brands than at any time in the past. Product managers have done an excellent job in recent years of making sure their goods and services are extremely easy to buy. Ad campaigns consistently hit us with messages about how easy it is to switch brands. So we do. And if it doesn’t work out, we switch back.
Additionally, the phenomenal growth of online social networking and mobile communication has created a cultural shift in our society. Specifically, these new media are creating a more demanding consumer. Because it is much easier to get information on any topic at any time of day, consumers now expect more immediacy and convenience. Because there are multiple, if not endless, sources available to validate or negate information from businesses, consumers also demand more honesty. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, because the community aspect of social media fosters strength in numbers, consumers demand to be heard.
Social media and mobile communications enable the consumer to operate more on their terms. They can – and do – choose when, where and from whom they get information. And they have a stronger voice for sharing information in return. For that reason, providing positive customer experiences is more important than ever before. Tangible experiences with your company are all that customers have when considering whether or not they want to continue their relationship with you – and whether or not they blog about their experience to thousands of potential customers.
With such fluidity, it has never been more important for companies to ensure they don’t give their customers any reason to be dissatisfied, consider alternatives and leave. Companies that are looking toward the future of interaction should communicate with customers through the same channels and with the same respect by which customers gain information and communicate with other people in their lives. Companies that do not evolve according to their customers and leverage the same media that their customers are using, are at risk for falling into a huge channel gap.
Make the Most of Customers’ Time
If companies address hold time issues in the contact center, they take away a common opportunity for customers to question whether they want to continue giving their business. And the technology is available to help contact center managers do just that.
A simple first step is to implement technology that announces the estimated wait time, which is proven to reduce caller anxiety. A further step, one that could truly differentiate a company from its competition, is to implement virtual queuing technology, which allows callers to receive a callback in the same amount of time that they would have waited on hold, without losing their place in line. This allows your customers to do other things instead of waiting on hold until a contact center agent is available. It proves you know that their time is valuable by allowing your customers to do other things instead of waiting on hold for an available contact center agent. It’s also a viable alternative to staffing for a peak that happens only twice a day.
Additionally, businesses need to listen to what customers are telling them. Companies must reach out beyond their traditional front doors – the corporate Web site and the contact center – to meet consumers in their new world that includes social media, mobile communication and more instantaneous gratification. There are no doors, but rather a free flow of information that companies can gather and process through a variety of personal cognitive filters in order to create a meaningful customer feedback loop.
Fortunately, these channels are just as easy for a business to leverage as they are for the consumer. For example, during the busy tax season, TurboTax hosted a Twitter profile for its customer service department. Customers could tweet their questions to representatives standing by to get help with their taxes. It was a simple way for the company to engage customers on their terms and enable back-and-forth communication using the consumer’s preferred channel.
Many technologies are available for businesses to connect with customers via social media and mobile applications. For example, companies could embed a widget on a Facebook site to allow the consumer to notify the company that they have a concern, and that they want someone from the contact center to call them. Or, companies could create applications for mobile smart phones that allow users to access information they care most about, or trigger a callback from the contact center. Many possibilities exist. By giving customers the power to choose their interaction channel, businesses better meet the needs of the new consumer.
It’s About Time
Consumers are evolving and will continue to evolve in their communications. Today, social networks and mobile communications have created a new communication reality in which immediacy, convenience and honesty are imperative to successful customer relationships.
Enlightened companies know that they need to evolve in their communications as well; they need to take customers off hold, meet their customers in their communities on the other side of the companies’ corporate walls and make better use of their valuable time.
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