In a bid to improve the lot of UK consumers, a new unified Consumer Ombudsman service was launched last month. Reacting to the news, Jo Causon, CEO of the Institute of Customer Service commented, “this is a wake-up call for any organisation that only gives an after-thought to complaint handling and customer service.” Further, the recent UK Customer Satisfaction Index found that just 27% of customers do not now take organisations to task when things go wrong, whilst 41% had to escalate issues they had complained about.
This could make for depressing reading. But it got me thinking. With the surge in brands digitising their businesses and moving to ever-leaner structures as they digitally transform, could we perhaps be forgetting some of the essential tenants of serving the customer well – particularly via ‘traditional channels’? Indeed, some of these challenges of serving customers well via contact centres should be starkly familiar to us. From the parallels that can be drawn in how UK brands have become increasingly digitally-focussed over the last 4-5 years:
1. Making it a mission to just talk to a fellow human being…
it’s a like a web page that takes an age to load/ or an app that crashes as soon as you open it
Have you ever been on the receiving end of this type of telephone-based customer service? You know the drill: ‘…you will now be presented with 7 options: choose option 1 to change your payment details, option 2 to tell us you’re going to pay your bill, Option 3 for…’ Chances are you have been; we all have. These robotic, clinical and automated modes of interaction with brands are almost universally loathed by the consumers forced to use them (even more so when option selection is made via non-voice recognising ‘voice recognition’ technology’). ‘Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that’ often being the tinny reply from the machine you’re ‘talking with’.
I get it: contact centres are often set up in skills-focussed teams, and the automated voice menu is there to channel/ filter the call through to the appropriate department/ team whilst managing overall inbound traffic. But where is it written that we should make the customer do all the work for us in a pivotal moment of need? At the point they elected to call us, a likely trigger could well have been they couldn’t work out how to do what they wanted to do online or via their smartphone. So why put up yet another round of barriers to interacting with them at a likely point of frustration?
I don’t know about you, but once I’m presented with 7 options on an automated menu, I’ve forgotten what option 2 was by the time I’ve heard option 7. So I press ‘2’ anyway and then ask the answering contact centre agent to then undertake the work of correctly routing my call. Kind of defeats the object really.
That’s why First Direct get it right in my book: ‘straight through to a human’, as the platypus on their TV advertising assures us. No 7-option, voice driven menus here. Brand-interaction obstacle removed. Bravo. It’s kind of like that media-rich, attractive-yet-simple web page that loads straight away. It just flows.
2. Having a disjointed/ fragmented view of our customer when they call in…
it’s like being presented with a load of ‘personalised’ options which aren’t for me when I log in online
Ah, the seamless, omnichannel experience. The nirvana: having that conjoined view of the customer when they call in which puts - at the agents’ fingertips - their key and recent points of interaction with the brand (no matter what the channel). That’s what’s needed when customers call in…as we’ve seen, only 27% of customers are now prepared to ‘just put up with things’ when they go wrong.
Unfortunately with many brands today, this is still not yet what is on offer. Legacy system A may not talk to Legacy system B, which in turn has not migrated its data to digitally-transformed system C. Oh dear.
The key here, of course, is to put the customer at the heart of our thinking throughout…and actually design our interaction platforms around them; agnostically of channelised-thinking. After all if, as in many cases where a customer has to call us (e.g. they couldn’t change their direct debit details on our web portal), their interaction with us has already spanned at least two channels. So our thinking here, in response, could be quite inventive (yet simple):
>proactively offer the remedy: if left hanging like this online, don’t hide away the alternative means for the customer to get it done. I was left in just this situation recently when trying to change my direct debit online with a large utility. When it didn’t work, the confusing error message gave me no indication as to why my correctly-entered information wouldn’t work. Yet the contact centre number was nowhere to be seen (concealed, in fact, three layers down on the site, with my having to answer three questions just to obtain it!).
Be customer-centric – it’s not worked online (for whatever reason). That’s where other channels can kick in and pick up the slack: flick on the live chat once dwell time on key service pages has exceeded a certain limit; actually bring the contact centre number into the error message…the remedy opportunities here are literally endless.
>tackle the root causes, continually: monitor and audit ‘points of failure’ in what should be simple tasks which the customer may actually prefer to do online. If they’re not working digitally as expected, then why not? Is it down to user error (and, if so, is that because we’ve made the interaction too confusing?) or is it simply down to us (the back-end computer says no, for whatever reason)? Fixing root causes in this way will then drive online journey completion rates up and call-in rates down. But the monitoring systems have to be in place (and work effectively) to optimise these things on a continual, rather than ad-hoc, basis. Think of this as the ‘business as usual’ end of developing great customer experiences.
3. Cold ‘hand-offs’ of the customer from one agent to another…
it’s like that ‘road to nowhere’ online (broken links, out of date offers/ information)
This is still a very common one; leading brands included. Yes, it can be caused by calls being misrouted (or indeed customers misrouting themselves) but the net effect is the same: each time this happens on a call, customer frustration (as well as total call time for the organisation) builds up cumulatively to intolerable levels.
It’s like clicking on that link in a Frequently Asked Questions section of the website only to find the content there is woefully out of date (or not there at all).
Again, where there is a challenge there is always a solution (or three) just waiting to be implemented. For many brands (First Direct amongst them) multi-skilling of contact centre agents has been a key imperative. With the customer’s first point of contact enabled, empowered and trained to fulfil a wide variety of inbound service requests (and indeed, roles), hand-offs are made mercifully less common in the first place. But on the occasions when a highly specialist customer query requires the input of a more specialised colleague (e.g. a mortgage quote), the handoff is executed in a simple and seamless manner. New agent is pre-briefed by previous agent, no need to go through ID&V (Identification & Verification) once again, and new agent warmed up to the need the customer is looking to resolve. So the conversation can be a meaningful one from the first few seconds.
Sounds so simple doesn’t it? But unfortunately, it’s often the simple solutions which are still not universally-implemented.
In Summary
So interacting with our customers via traditional channels, such as contact centres, is not too dissimilar to interacting with them digitally (in terms of the challenges presented). The solutions to providing a seamless and integrated experience may well look a bit different here to online. But therein lies the opportunity offered to us via the omnichannel model: dove-tailing and integrating previously disparate channels together in pursuit of one aim and one aim alone. How can we set ourselves up to provide the simplest, cleanest and most surprisingly-delightful customer experience imaginable?
After all, 41% of customers having to escalate issues they’d already complained about is a quite a scary statistic. So it’s not just consumers who gain when service channels can be set up to be more integrated, and providing a seamless and harmonised ‘customer flow’ throughout.
So what do you think? What do you make of the current state of B2C service interactions with consumers and how these can be optimised?