customer interaction | Shep Hyken | Customer Service Expert

Top Takeaways:

Customers have so many options and want to get the best out of the money they spend. Since there are many options for companies offering more or less the same services, customer support becomes the differentiator. It comes down to how easy it is to communicate with a business and how delightful the experience is.

In the 80s, the White House commissioned the Technical Assistant Research Program to conduct a study on customer experience. They found out that the number one reason customers leave is rudeness or apathy. Almost 40 years later, our customer service and experience research has the same findings – the number one reason customers leave to do business elsewhere is rudeness or apathy.

The evolution of customer communication has expanded beyond traditional phone and mail. Companies must embrace diverse channels like chatbots, social media, and visual communication to meet customer expectations and deliver a seamless experience.

Customer service professionals and support agents now mostly consist of young professionals who are digitally acquainted. They are “obsessed” with their phones, and the internet has become a seamless extension of their day-to-day lives. Training them on a stack designed 20-30 years ago, which they have never used in their lives, then asking them to solve a problem for the customer without using their senses of visual and contextual information gathering, is a recipe for disaster. The result can be rudeness that comes from frustration from the inability to solve that issue.

Technology must feel intuitive. Just like smartphones became popular because they are easy to use, customer service platforms must prioritize user-friendly interfaces that make interactions effortless. They should have a human-first mindset when designing communication between customers, support agents, and AI.

Organizations need to be responsible for using AI for customer interactions. Proper training, data, and empathy are crucial to ensure AI understands and responds appropriately to customers, providing a human-like experience while maintaining efficiency and accuracy.

Plus, Shep and Anand discuss how AI can empower agents and increase their efficiency. Tune in!

Quotes:

“Technology should disappear in the background.”

“For good products and services to be adopted, they should be intuitive, with minimal training for end-users, support agents, and admins.”

“Natural language processing and AI play a crucial role in customer communication. When communicating with customers, it needs to feel like you’re explaining something just like you would explain it to a family or a friend.”

About:

Anand Janefalkar is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of UJET. Anand founded UJET to modernize the contact center by addressing long-standing design flaws and conventional thinking that have failed to evolve in parallel with changing human interaction landscape.

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert, New York Times bestselling author, award-winning keynote speaker, and host of Amazing Business Radio.

This episode of Amazing Business Radio with Shep Hyken answers the following questions and more:

How can exceptional customer service help reduce customer churn?
How does the evolution of customer communication from traditional methods (phone, mail) to more diverse options impact the customer experience?
Can AI be used to improve customer interactions?
How can businesses use generative AI to proactively identify and address customer pain points before they lead to churn?
How can organizations use AI responsibly?

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