Guest Post: Why Do Many Companies Struggle to Connect with Customers?

This week we feature an article by Todd Zerbe Senior Vice President of Engineering at Avaya. He shares why a neutral experience is just as bad as a negative experience and what can turn a neutral customer experience into an amazing one.

Think about your most recent customer experience. Chances are everything was fine but is “fine” good enough? For competing organizations, a “fine” or neutral experience is just as bad as a bad experience. This is because they’re not gaining any traction.  

Research shows the average dissatisfied customer will tell 12 people about a bad service experience. If the experience is positive, the customer may tell a few friends or family members or write a review. If it’s neutral, however, they will usually tell no one. That’s because there’s no sense of actually enjoying the engagement experience. There’s no authentic connection.  

Without this connection, customers will find themselves caught in a web of faceless companies providing just “okay” experiences. For most of these organizations, a toll-free number or a dedicated email address is as far as customer support gets. Even if they have graduated to more enhanced capabilities like a 24×7 chatbot, there’s usually a lack of personalization. It’s this personalization that turns a neutral customer experience into an amazing one. In fact, without it, the technology you implement will work against you.  

Start with the Experience, then Implement Relevant Technology

Again, think about your own experiences as a consumer. If you take the time to complete a post-call survey with your bank and note that you like speaking directly with a person versus an automated system and your bank continues to make you jump through IVR hoops, will that lead to satisfaction or frustration? Will you feel heard as a customer, or neglected? Customers aren’t asking much from the brands they do business with; they just want to be understood.  

This is where companies must start to create authentic customer connections. Successful organizations start with the experience, and what customers expect from their company. Then leverage technology to deliver that at scale. This makes a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program crucial. To gain a better understanding of your CX needs, you must capture your customers’ expectations, preferences, and aversions through customer listening and insights. This can be achieved in a few ways including post-call surveys, social listening, assessing NPS scores, feedback management, and reputation management. Gaining this understanding will also help you better align your various lines of business (marketing, sales, service, and product teams).  

Combined with data from your CRM and these VoC techniques should provide you with a relatively clear view of what customers want from your brand based on a volume of collected data. This should include customer, historical, and transactional data such as interaction history, campaign history, customer verification, and upselling and cross-selling. From this vantage point, you can then start thinking about how technology will help your organization advance a positive customer experience.  

Examples of Authentic, Data-led Customer Connections

• Financial services is cited as one of today’s least trusted industries, and there’s a reason for that. If you fill out an online form, your personal information is sent to what feels like every financial institution in the country. You’ll find yourself dodging (and even blocking) phone calls and getting inundated by snail mail with generic “special” offers – all designed to sell, not help. If you’re a bank doing an outbound campaign, that makes it extremely difficult to get in touch with one of your customers – let alone authentically connect with them. Imagine being able to call a customer with an automated personalized greeting (“Hi XXX, this is your personal banker trying to connect with you. Do you have a few minutes to talk about XXX?”). Or, maybe you offer to digitally redirect the customer to a mobile or web self-service experience based on their data profile. Imagine the impact of this automation with a personal touch.    
• Sticking with banking, more research has been coming out lately showing the role that regional accents play in customer service and brand relationships. Using available data, you may see that a customer’s first language is Spanish; therefore, you connect them with a Spanish-speaking agent for better engagement. While simple, it’s these kinds of efforts that go a long way in the customer-brand relationship. There are also simple applications of AI that can detect a customer’s sentiment and tone so that if they are feeling uncomfortable, the interaction can be appropriately resolved. For example, if they are uncomfortable engaging with a machine, they can be automatically escalated to a live agent to help further.  

Conclusion

Customer experience should not be measured by the fact that “everything was fine.” Fine is nothing out of the expected ordinary. To rise above the competition, companies need to create extraordinary experiences that connect with customers. This will help build trust, loyalty, and lifelong relationships. 

Todd Zerbe is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Avaya. He brings more than twenty-five years of software development experience to Avaya. Todd leads the company’s engineering functions, teams and programs globally. He helps Avaya to innovate the best platform and applications to meet the needs of customers across multiple vertical markets and geographies.