Customer service can represent the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff

My sense is that as we come out of COVID, big business is taking the knife to overhead costs. That is not just deciding that the office footprint can no longer be sustained, but I am sensing that other costs like front line staff, the helpdesk or call center are being pruned as well.

My recent experiences with my bank, my on-demand TV supplier, and several other businesses I rely on, is that it is now ok to simply say that the “waiting time will be one hour!” Some of them do offer to call you back, at a time that is convenient for them.

A recent 2022 Global Consumer Trends report by Qualtrics, which surveyed 23,000 consumers from twenty-three countries, including New Zealand and Australia, reported that when asked “where do companies need to improve,” 43% of respondents said it was around customer service and support.

Fifty percent of the same consumers also said price and fees. That was no great surprise.

But what say the way you communicated with your customers was so slick and efficient, that it was only a major incident or outage, that generated an inbound contact. What would you say if 50% of your inbound customer interactions were to simply disappear, allowing you to focus on the critical ones, that really matter?

The Qualtrics report stated “Great CX only happens if you have the ecosystem to design, improve, & deliver it. Organisations need strong experience management competencies customer-centric culture, & technology to execute at scale.”

How do you create this fundamental change?

There is a new wave of easy-to-use software that allows a business to generate both on-demand and systems-generated communications in a completely new way. They are omnichannel from the start, and they support the growing need for communications to be bi-directional. These new platforms like Quadient's "Inspire", allow an organisation to re-think the way they communicate.

Some of the new customer communication (CCM) platforms also support Customer Journey Mapping, so that there is full visibility across the whole enterprise, of every customer interaction.

A simple example might be a renewal notice, generated as an HTML5 document that allowed the recipient to interact with it. The document might contain a “slider” so that an on-the-spot decision to increase the sum insured could be made, whilst knowing within the same interaction, exactly what the resulting increase in premium would be. These bi-directional communications are delivered by email with a link to the hosted HTML5-based documents.

The example referred to above is just that. There are a host of other use-cases, like in the retail utility sector, with retention campaigns that make it super easy for an existing customer to re-sign to a new term. Or a credit card company that wishes to promote and onboard an existing customer into a new loyalty program.

Solutions like these were hard to create and deliver, but now they can be part of everyday business, using standard “out-of-the-box” based technology, being managed by non-technology-based teams.

But it does not have to be a leap into recent technology like HTML5, it could simply be using the new CCM platform (like Inspire), to create graphically rich, plain English-based, highly engaging everyday communications.

No more ambulances, no more queues or highly frustrated customers, and for those that get it right, remember that a consumer is 5.1 times more likely to recommend an organisation after a positive customer experience. 

To find out more about Cumulo9, or Quadient, or to speak to David about enterprise-based customer communications, you can get in touch via the contact details below.

David Allen / david.allen@cumulo9.com / +64 21 484 167