"Almost 1/3 of Consumers Would Rather Eat a Piece of Last year’s Fruitcake..."

First, I hope each of you is having an incredible holiday season! On Friday we will begin a new year and with it new hopes and dreams. I always love new beginning and the chance to bring positive change to the world around us. I personally believe the best days are ahead of us, but I also believe for us to see this optimistic future we will need to come together and drive changes in many levels of our society, including our governments and our businesses. Society often changes much faster and is difficult for entities such as governments or businesses to keep up. Sometimes they are so late they make themselves obsolete.

I have often written about the changes in business in regard to Customer experience. Our businesses are so established in a marketing mindset that it is easy to attract new Customers so they lose focus on the existing. The challenge is the world has already changed, and Consumers now control the marketing message for the brand. Yet I am not sure brands have fully recognized this. They are embracing Customer experience in words, but actions seem to fall through. Even some of my favorite Customer oriented brands are faltering as of late. I also worry that many brands are obtaining there CX advice from the wrong sources, leading to CX frustration that it is not achieving the goals they sought. Of course these are posts for another day! More to come.

The week between Christmas and New Years is a big part of the holiday season for retailers. Stores are packed with shoppers striving to get those items that Santa Claus forgot. It is also the time where many items are returned for a variety of reasons. This is a time for these retailers to shine, or maybe not. The other day a colleague shared an email with me. I cracked up at the headline. It stated that "Almost a third of consumers would rather eat a piece of last year’s fruitcake than contact customer service." I cracked up laughing, at least until reality set in and I realized I too would rather eat fruitcake from last year instead of contacting most Customer service departments. There is nothing I hate more than to get caught up in trying to get something resolved with most companies. You have to sit on hold, striving to get through endless prompts or stand in lengthy lines, just to work with a staff that is usually not empowered to resolve things. It is an endless frustration. Of course it does not have to be that way, but it is the expectation we are often creating for our Customers. It is why Consumers often vent online.

I often hear business leaders express frustration about what is said about their brand online. These leaders express how these Consumers "don't understand our business." Why would a Consumer need to understand your business? They need to understand their life and nothing else. How much do you strive to understand your Consumer? Most companies will tell you they understand their Consumer extraordinarily well. They will rattle off all kinds of stats. They may even have a name for the persona they created. None of this adds up to understand the Consumer or what they are going through. It is simply outlining the company's ideal sales candidate. Nothing more. 

The beauty of the Consumer world is everyone at every level within your organization is a Consumer. They know how they feel about contacting Customer Service with a problem or standing in that return line at the discount retailer. The challenge is they do not see those same problems within their own organization. This is why they react to those negative online reviews stating that "they do not understand their business." Of course I have heard them say much worse than that about those reviews. Although I agree there is often more to the story than what a review has to say, I also know there is much truth to the statements as well, especially when there are multiple. 

There is good news in all of this. Many companies are striving to find ways to surprise and delight their Customers, and with Customer expectations so low, it is easy to surprise and delight them just by doing the right thing. Nothing more. It is sad to think that just handling a return easily or helping the Customer through your service line would constitute surprise and delight, but in our current world it does. Understand your Customer and deliver service in a manner YOU, as a Consumer would want. It is that easy.

PLEASE NOTE: Aspect Software offers more details of their Consumer Survey here. The company is a Client of Zeno Group, which is the company I work for. Over the years in my Customer Service roles I have worked with Aspect Software but I have never been financially compensated. I also do not currently service this Client for Zeno Group. This post is my words only and do not necessarily reflect the views of either Zeno Group or Aspect Software.