Technology moves so fast, often too fast for companies to keep pace with and that can make it difficult for loyalty marketers to execute well-timed and effective decisions that impact the day-to-day customer experience.
Deciding which new customer experience technologies to invest in can present a daunting task.
Karen Mawyer, AVP, voice of the member, USAA told attendees during the session, “Where to Invest Now: How to Pick the Right New CX Technologies for Your Business,” at the recent Forrester CXSF 2016 Conference, that each of her company’s 31,000 employees has customer service in their titles.
“That’s the very thing that makes us who we are,” Mawyer explained. “When we look at technology, that’s the very first thing we look at. Where is the gap in our service and how do we fill that gap? With new technology, we also consider should we develop something internally or partner with someone? Technology is changing so quickly. We’re not buying for five or 10 years out. We’re buying for the next 10 or 12 months. If it works, we’re doubling down and going for the long term.”
Kriti Kapoor, director, global social customer care, HP Inc., told attendees that her company is trying to understand how its customers want to interact and how the landscape is changing.
By 2020, Kapoor noted from a Gartner statistic, 90 perccent of all customer service will be delivered through social media and the world of messaging apps.
“It’s really easy for us to get lost in the world of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat,” Kapoor said. “Where I truly believe the world is going and where the disruption is actually happening is in this world of global messaging.”
Back in 2008, HP began crowdsourcing around online communities in seven languages around the world.
“I realized there was a real gap and an opportunity for our China operations,” Kapoor said. “We spent time in contact centers in China wanting to understand why people are calling us and what they arw calling us about. About forty percent were calling to find out where to go to drop off printers and laptops for service. We knew that 650 million people in China are on WeChat. So, we created a service on a technology platform that people are already using.”
Kapoor said HP created a brand-new presence.
“There is a self-service menu based on the top things people are looking for and we launched a chatbot within the chat environment,” Kapoor said. “People connecting with us on messaging apps has far superseded our own live chat connections. Call volumes have come down. Finding a sweet spot, finding a platform we can leverage, and expanding our social care footprint is something that’s worked very well in our favor in China and we will continue to expand that.”
When evaluating new customer experience technologies, Kapoor is interested in the following:
Can it rapidly integrate new social channels in our environment?
Can I simplify the agent desktop tools they’re using?
Can I track the sentiment of a customer during his or her journey? “This is the design we’re working toward,” she added.
Scaling social customer care is a multi-faceted effort that includes:
3D view of the customer
End-to-end social identity integration
Real-time insights
Rapid social channels integration
Unified agent desktop
Knowledge-based integration
Sentiment tracking at case level
Mawyer said one of the things USAA struggles with is how to make the best experience and how to offer customers other options.
“Customer service is at the basis of it,” she explained. “It’s about what the customer needs. How do you get out there and test and learn?”
Ian Jacobs, senior analyst, Forrester, told attendees that he thinks about the brand network and outcomes.
“It’s about changing the brand perception of your customers,” Jacobs said. “Can you get deeper into your customer base and expand your network? Can new technologies keep efficiency and create a new revenue generator? Do you have complex interactions? Do you have a high tolerance for getting it wrong? Think about the value of each interaction. Are you having interactions that are make-or-break with your customers? Some technologies work very well with complex interactions, but not so well with simple interactions.”
Typically, Jacobs said, customer service is thought of in the post-purchase world.
“But if you are a customer service person, you know deep in your bones that stuff that happens in the organization outside your control directly leads to increased volume of calls into your organization,” he said. “Did the salesperson sell the right thing to the customer? Were the expectations met? Getting the right product to the right customer is a customer service function.”
Jacobs said the most important piece of data about customer service is valuing the customer’s time.
“To me, the valuing their time idea should be the prism through which you design every single service process,” he said. “If, in some way, the technology can allow you to touch multiple points in the customer lifecycle so that you as a brand are actually thinking holistically about the impact of the pre-sales, the sales, the onboarding, and the post-sales on the entirety of the customer experience, maybe that needs to be a framework that you use when you’re thinking about customer service.”