Consumer Service: A misunderstood function with an astonishing future - Vol 3 - "What matters the most to consumers and colleagues?"
What matters the most to consumers and colleagues?
The previous (Vol 1) article talked about the context in which Consumer Service operate and why is it so important to understand the value that Consumer Service brings to the company. The Vol 2 article of this series gave the answer to that question by assessing the Consumer Service direct and indirect impact on a company's P&L. This Vol 3 article will try to answer the question "So what?".
We understood that Effortless Experience is something to strive for. But what is this particularly that matters the most to the external consumers and internal colleagues outside of Consumer Service departments?
What matters the most to our consumers?
In order to know how to deliver ￡X to the top line, we asked consumers what is their expectation of us. Based on the conducted qualitative research interviewing recruited consumers and combined the data with the quantitative research where consumers were invited to fill in the survey, I learnt that consumer expectations are as following:
Consumer expect basic three tings:
1) Speed of getting the answer from the company
2) Agent's expertise about company and products.
3) Treatment by the company representative
The importance of each of the three aspects mentioned above would change depending on the context and situation that consumers find themselves. The factors that impact the importance of these three expectations prioritization are:
a)Emotiveness: How emotional consumers feel about their enquiry (for example, a parent who calls about the adverse reaction their child just experienced after consuming vitamins would feel much more emotional about the inquiry, compared to a person calling to ask where they can buy the product that their dentist have recommended, which is not available in their local store)
b)Urgency: How urgent they think the answer is needed (for example if a consumer is in a supermarket and needs to make a quick decision if a particular product is in line with their dietary requirements would require quicker answer, compared to a consumer who wants to praise effectiveness of a product – and maybe get a voucher for it)
c)Perceived Complexity: How complex a consumer believes their question is (for example, a consumer enquiring about product supply issues and where to expect the product availability would be perceived as much less complex compared to another consumer who wants to understand if they can consume a Haleon product in combination with other medications they are prescribed)
We will now expand further each of the three consumer expectations in order to evaluate their connection to the effortless experience. We will also discuss each of the expectation and understand what specifically would sway consumer to be disloyal to a brand after engagement with consumer service (being it over the phone, email, messenger, web self serve or any combination of those). This will help us evaluate on what aspects a Consumer Service we could focus on to mitigate disloyalty.
1) Speed of getting an answer from the company
What circumstances cause this expectations?
Most of the consumers are clearly stating that they are expecting the answers to their queries fast. The expected speed would obviously?depend on their circumstance. The higher emotiveness and urgency, while the lower perceived complexity, the faster answer consumers would expect from Consumer Service.?
Which effortful experiences impacts consumers’ disloyalty?
A consumer would specifically feel effortful experience?in case:
?there is more than one contacts need (250% higher impact on disloyalty than average)
?if they need to repeat the same information (46% higher impact on disloyalty)
?and number of transfers (even across different channels - 20% higher impact on disloyalty) before their inquiry is completely resolved. (Link)
2) Company’s expertise about their?products and healthcare
What circumstances cause this expectation?
When asked about enquiries that they don’t want to self serve, consumers stated that they would prefer to speak to an agent because they expect them to be trained medical professionals who?posses a wealth of knowledge about products.?
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Which effortful experiences impacts consumers’ disloyalty?
A consumer would specifically feel effortful experience if they don’t get the satisfactory answer (or any answer) from Consumer Service. This would mean even that they need to keep searching, or look for an answer somewhere else, or simply if asked to do additional steps like contacting a GP. (Perceived additional effort to resolution has 23% higher impact on disloyalty than average negative experience) (Link)
3) Treatment experienced by the customer agent
What circumstances cause this expectations?
Regardless of the level of emotiveness, urgency or perceived complexity, consumers expect to be treated well.
Which effortful experiences impacts consumers’ disloyalty?
When a consumer feels like the agent is treating them just as a number and hears disinterested narration of company policies or forced offers of empathy is something that makes consumers 52% more disloyal than any other average experience. (Link)
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Now we understand what experiences are perceived as effortful, where consumer service can mitigate disloyalty and how much a disloyalty can potentially cost the company. However, the consumer service value brought to the top line of the P&L is not only through mitigating disloyalty. We will find another aspect of a value on the following pages.?
What matters the most to our colleagues?
We have concluded earlier that the value consumer service brings to companies is through mitigating consumers’ disloyalty by servicing their needs in an effortless manner. Besides consumers, there are another groups that consumer service has an opportunity to add value to. Those are the colleagues outside the CS department and within the same company. Depending on the departments’ nature of work, some of them could feel more distant from consumers than others. Being distanced from consumers might impact the team’s ability to deliver value to the consumer and revenue to the company.
It depends on the situation, but as a broad brush, our colleagues would benefit by effortlessly knowing about consumers (or interacting with them) in order
1) to make better future decisions,
2) evaluate the success of past decisions,
3) improve ongoing activities or simply
4) improve morale and motivation within their teams.
Let’s understand and suggest few examples for each of the four opportunities where Consumer Service could be useful for other colleagues:
a) Learning about impact of past decisions: This would include other departments understanding the impact their projects or activities had on consumers which Consumer Service is positioned to learn. For example, R&D would like to understand if there was any reaction of consumers to the new taste (variant) they delivered for specific market.
b) Improve ongoing activities: Involvement of the CS in projects (as the team who is directly interacting with consumers), in order to ensure consistency (in language, approach, tone etc) across multiple consumer touch points. For example, when a category crates a new Brand’s tone of voice, they would want to extend it to the CS, so that the contact center agents’ conversations with consumers can be consistent with the advertisement tone of voice.
c) Making better future decisions: This would include cross-checking different data sources (including impacts on consumers) to gain a full picture of what should be prioritized next. For example, manufacturing sites would be eager to understand what are some of the manufacturing complaints most prominent compared to the volume of manufactured and sold product units, so they can prioritise corrective actions to improve those products.
d) Morale and motivation : This would be useful for those departments who are producing something for consumers, but simply because of the nature of work, are not able to hear firsthand the impact their daily job is making to consumers’ lives. As not seeing the direct impact of their work can be sometimes demotivating. Being exposed to consumer stories helps build that connection to the consumer. The good examples are the team on the manufacturing floor, or scientist in the R&D labs.
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Why is Consumer Service well placed to achieve this? Even though other departments and external agencies could provide similar information, they would do this by recruiting?consumers and paying them to answer questions and provide opinions by imagining scenarios that are being asked. On the other side Consumer Service already communicates with?real consumers who are actively getting in touch with the company because of?real-life problems and opinions. Being the only department that has 1:1 engagement with consumers, Consumer Service is best placed to expand its scope and leverage consumers interest to learn about them and broadcast it to colleagues further.