Great Customer Experience is like adding heat to CX. Most areas in the United States are generally cold, and you need to bring a little heat into your conversations. Bringing high heat is adopted from baseball, which is to make it fast or make it accurate.
In my CX Quick Tips interview with one of our CX Experts Roy Atkinson, we explored the Examples of Great Customer Experience – Add Heat.
To make your customers more comfortable, you need to provide them with some warmth, which I mean in the figurative sense.
What Is A Cold Experience?
When I talk about the cold experience, I am referring to leaving the customer feeling chilly and awful. In other terms, it is depriving your customer of a great customer experience. When you feel cold, you basically not making a human connection. This means your organization does not seem to be there for its customers and fails to deliver.
Generally, a cold experience occurs when your conversation with a customer feels rehearsed, overly scripted, and mechanical. The cold experience results from an interaction that doesn’t feel authentic. It occurs when your agents do not show an understanding of the concept of CX.
It also occurs when your business does not seem to care about its customers. For example, your customer has to wait on hold for about an hour, and after the wait, they are only given at most 10 seconds to speak. According to Nextiva, one-third of consumers say they would consider switching companies after just one instance of bad customer service.
Poor customer service and dismissive action towards your customers lead to cold experiences. They feel unloved and ignored. One of my favorite quotes by Steve Jobs is, “Get close to your customers, so close that you tell them what they need before they realize it.” Organizations saying they care when their service proves otherwise, and that’s propaganda.
According to a survey by Microsoft, across the globe, 96% of consumers say customer service is an important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand.
Providing Great Customer Experience In The Pandemic
Consider how people’s lives are now different from how they were in the past; hence, accommodate your customers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lives have changed hence the need for businesses to change their mode of operation. Your contact center agents were used to being in a room working as a group, but now they have to work individually at home. Customers are no longer visiting offices, but it is now happening via zoom, email, electronic mediums, and technology they are not used to.
It would help if you wrapped your brains around having to think of things differently. Also, make sure you can approximate the same type of CX that you used to provide. There is a need to deliver your promise to your customers despite all the changes.
Make sure you can appropriate the same type of CX that your customers are used to. If warmth and empathy are part of your proposed CX, then you have to figure out how to get that warmth and empathy into everything you do. Whether it’s remotely, electronically, or in-person, you have to honor your promise to the customer.
What Most Organisations Need To Create Great Customer Experience
Most organizations have realized that they can change a lot faster than they ever thought.
Statistics show that around about 12 March 2020, Microsoft Teams had 560 million meeting minutes. By the 31st of the same month, it was having 2.7 billion meeting minutes per day. Such a rapid increase in Microsoft teams’ utilization is evidence of how organizations quickly embraced the change.
It means, all organizations that were utilizing Microsoft Teams totally redesigned their mode of operation in a period of just two weeks. Organizations actually realized that they could change fast if they want to and if need be.
Conclusion
Customer service is seriously under threat due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. There is a serious need for you to embrace the change and provide heat for your customers. Great Customer Experience entails making customers comfortable and valued.
I encourage you to continue to improve your customer experience and to continue to create an environment that allows for the growth of new ideas. We are now moving into a period in time where brands with outstanding customer experience will excel.
Watch My Interview With Roy Atkinson
Please Comment
- How has the Pandemic affected CX in your business?
- What are the characteristics of a great customer experience, in your own opinion?
- What influences your brand choice when it comes to customer experience?
Jim Rembach is the Editor in Chief of the Customer Service Weekly and it’s Podcast host. He is President of CX Global Media and the creator of the Call Center Coach Virtual Leaders Academy. As the host of the Fast Leader Show Podcast, he has interviewed hundreds of experts, authors, academics, researchers, and practitioners on various angles, viewpoints, and perspectives for improving the customer experience. He has held positions in retail operations, contact centers, customer support, customer success, sales, and measured the customer experience. He is a certified Emotional Intelligence practitioner, Employee Retention Specialist, and recipient of numerous industry awards.