When it comes to the loyalty of your customers and the impact it creates (lifetime value, continuing revenue, openness to new products and services, willingness to recommend) there is no part of the customer experience (CX) that is more important than the interactions between you and your customers.
Think of it this way: The entirety of the CX consists of two components–actions and interactions. Actions are anything customers do entirely by themselves, whether that’s something a person sees, hears or clicks on. interactions are 2-way exchanges between humans, which includes all forms of voice, video or messaging.
By volume, actions comprise the majority of the touch points a customer will ever experience. According to Gartner, 85% of all touch points fall into this category. But it’s the interactions customers are having–with YOUR team–that carve a much deeper groove into a person’s psyche. They are more rare and more personal, so therefore they have much more influence over a person’s feeling about wanting to continue as a customer of your organization, aka loyalty.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
– Maya Angelou
However, when a customer begins an interaction online but then has to abandon their digital journey and start all over again by dialing 10 digits, re-authenticating their identity, and speaking with a call center rep–that is the very definition of “high-effort.” And (as we learned in the research that led to The Effortless Experience) a customer who has this kind of experience is 10x more likely to become disloyal.
Unfortunately, this scenario plays out all too frequently. In fact, just about all of us can think of situations where we’ve gone through this kind of run-around with companies we’ve done business with, right?
That’s why the Glia Interaction Platform was created based on a ChannelLess® architecture. It is the only unified way to manage ALL the 2-way exchanges you have with your customers–both digital-first and phone-first–with seamless transitions between messaging and voice/video. There’s never a need to “start all over” using a different channel.
If a customer begins online and engages in a chat session but their specific issue requires them to speak with someone, all they need to do is press a button, and the representative appears on THEIR screen. What’s even better is that the rep can greet the customer by name (since they’ve already been authenticated when they logged in) and likely has a good idea of their need (based on their browsing history and digital body language).
It’s the difference between: “Hi, I’m Rick, how can I help you?” and “Hi, Mr. DeLisi, it looks like you’re trying to apply for an auto loan–I’d be happy to take care of that for you.” That is the definition of a low-effort experience. In the always-on world in which most people have grown to expect and demand that service interactions are on-screen, on-demand and on point, that is exactly the kind of interaction you need to be creating.
Nothing is more important to your strategic and financial success than the loyalty of your customers. And nothing has more influence over that loyalty than the 2-way human-to-human interactions you’re having with them–which means you need to be managing those interactions very differently.
