Deliver Customer-Centric Service with Digital Customer Service
One of the business trends over the last few years—especially in financial services—is a “customer-centric” approach to various processes people experience by mapping the customer journey. But through these digital transformations and customer journey sessions, have most companies become truly customer-centric?
The best litmus test for whether your company has achieved customer-centricity is to answer this one question:
Do you spend more time thinking ABOUT your customers, or thinking LIKE your customers?
Now…it shouldn’t be that hard to think like your customers, right? You certainly know enough about them. There’s more customer data at your fingertips than you could ever sift through in a lifetime:
You know who they are, where they live, how much they’ve purchased from you, how long they’ve been a customer, what their specific preferences are based on past habits, how many times they’ve contacted you, how they’ve responded to surveys and other customer feedback, how their behaviors and patterns have changed over many years–so, of course you can think like your customers.
But just one other thing in order to become customer-centric, you have to remember to NOT think about everything you know: Put aside your years of experience, everything you’ve ever learned about customer service and what it takes to run an operation, all the budgetary considerations and the metrics and the executives you have to deal with at all levels of the company, all the “people issues” that come up constantly in a big operation. Forget all that because your customers don’t know about any of that, nor do they care one iota!
This means, in order to achieve true customer-centricity you have to find a way to take your own brain out of your skull and put another persons’ in its place (a person who knows none of what you know), then hook up the wires and think with their brain. Because theirs is the only one that matters. To them.
That is customer-centricity—to learn to think LIKE a customer. Sounds easy. Until you try doing it.
Look Through Your Customers’ Lens
One of the best ways to become customer-centric and understand your customer experience is to observe how they interact with your products and digital properties. Measurements like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys can provide you valuable customer insights at a macro level. On a more granular level, tools like Live Observation can help you understand specific needs and even predict where your customers are experiencing friction in real-time. Digital Customer Service (DCS) tools put you on the same page as your customers, enabling you to see the world from their perspective.
How Do Your Customers Want to Connect?
Thinking like your customers includes taking into consideration how they want to connect with you. For example, when a customer has an issue with their debit card while out holiday shopping, would they rather dial a corporate number and traverse an IVR, or would they prefer to chat with the click of a button from their banking app? Or are they more of an SMS texting-type of person? Knowing your customer—and more importantly, thinking like them (especially as they are in the midst of some service issue that they never wanted to have in the first place!)—means that the answer isn’t always straightforward. One customer may prefer the option to view their banking information in your app and then quietly exchange chat messages to resolve their issue (without having to verbally provide their details in public). Another customer may be on-the-go and not be able to connect via text, so voice would be their preferred communication method. With Digital Customer Service, you can accommodate both options and meet your customers where they are: OnScreen.
To learn more about how you can deliver a personalized, truly customer-centric experience OnScreen, visit glia.com.
