Be serious about Tech: Delivering the Wow Part 3

If you are serious about delivering the Wow, you need to be serious about applying technology.   My starting point is that your tech driven customer interactions should be as personal as your human interactions - only then can you deliver the Wow.  In practical terms this means customers expect you to: 1) use technology to know them and to serve up information that is specifically customized to them, and 2) to minimize their effort. 

 1) Make use of the data you have to anticipate your customers’ needs. Your customers know you have information about them – they have provided a lot of it to you by creating accounts etc, and you have it based on their interactions with your company.  They expect you to use that data to make their life easier.  When you don’t, it’s a letdown.   There are several productive ways to use that data:

• Solve customer problems proactively. Is your customer’s credit card about to expire – they probably don’t know that.  Send them a reminder.  Look at why customers contact you and then see whether you had information that could have predicted that contact.  If so, use it to provide a proactive solution to the customer.

• Use your knowledge of your customer base as a whole and your knowledge of your specific customer and anticipate why they are accessing your site.  Have they recently purchased something that has a high return rate? If so, perhaps you surface information about how to return that particular item.  Is a delivery running late? Acknowledge the defect and provide solutions to make it right. The closer a customer travels in their journey to contact you, the greater the ability you have to anticipate their intentions and offer self-service solutions.
• Provide recommendations based on what you know.  In the prior examples data was applied to reduce customer effort by anticipating needs.  Recommendations use customer data to add value to the customer by surfacing information that is useful to them. Note that this is different from getting the customer to do something you want - like buying a certain product or service.  Start with the customer and work backwards – recommendations should help the customer achieve their goals and enrich their experience with your company.

2)  Minimize Customer Effort: Recognize that your customers generally would prefer not to have to contact you.  Yes, it’s true – most people don’t look forward to contacting customer service organizations.  Not only is it a lot of effort, but it’s also usually somewhat stressful – there’s always the anticipation of potential conflict – wondering what kind of reception and response you will get from the company and how hard you’ll have to work to get the solution you need.  So when customers do contact you, make sure that interaction is awesome. 

 All that anticipatory stress and potential unpleasantness can be avoided through technology – by providing great self-service options.  Done right, these solutions will be lower stress and provide faster resolution for the customer.  A great self-service option means it’s easily discoverable, readily consumable and always solves the customer’s problem.  That requires not just presenting information, but taking the customer into specific workflows where they can take actions – for example, a search on “How do I update my credit card” doesn’t return a page explaining the process, but actually takes the customer into the workflow to make the update. You can Wow the customer by knowing them, presenting them solutions and letting them solve their problem without having to contact you.

Finally don’t forget what I consider the golden rule of using data - Use good judgment – only use data that your customer would want you to use.  Don’t be creepy.  If you aren’t sure, don’t do it.  Seriously.

 Technology is half the equation to delivering the Wow.  Not only do your customers expect you to use their data to make their lives easier, technology is also the enabler to allow your agents to Wow your customers and deliver the extraordinary support they and you expect.  And remember, what’s extraordinary today will be the minimum bar tomorrow.  So keep on innovating on behalf of your customers  - because that’s how you deliver the Wow :)