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Balancing Authenticity with Marketing Goals to Drive Customer Service

by Chris Frascella, Content Director, Velaro, Inc. - January 15, 2015

Balancing Authenticity with Marketing Goals to Drive Customer Service by Chris Frascella

Ear­lier this month, the Impact Blog! team included among their pre­dic­tions for cus­tomer ser­vice expec­ta­tions in 2015: “Authen­tic­ity wins the day.” This referred specif­i­cally to the increas­ing dis­sat­is­fac­tion among cus­tomers with overly scripted con­ver­sa­tion and with sales pitches dis­guised as more inno­cent con­ver­sa­tions. I’m going to address the first point, scripted con­ver­sa­tions, specif­i­cally: how can you bal­ance the desire for authen­tic­ity with the need for effi­ciency and for con­sis­tency in your cus­tomer ser­vice organization?

There are two sim­ple ways to opti­mize cus­tomer ser­vice like this. 1) per­son­al­ize by staff 2) per­son­al­ize by customer

As the afore­men­tioned Impact Blog! post noted: “It’s not about stray­ing away from a boil­er­plate mes­sage as much as it is con­nect­ing with a cus­tomer to under­stand his needs so a per­son­al­ized approach can be taken.” Per­son­al­iza­tion is key.

But why does bal­anc­ing authen­tic­ity with effi­ciency matter?

The VRU – Cus­tomer Ser­vice at 100% Effi­ciency and 0% Authenticity

One of the most uni­ver­sally frus­trat­ing cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ences is dial­ing a sup­port line and get­ting a VRU (voice response unit). These sys­tems make it hard to nav­i­gate to the depart­ment you’re look­ing to reach, espe­cially if you guess wrong and have to endure long wait times only to reach the wrong per­son or team!

VRU sys­tems (and other sys­tems like them, like heavily-automated live chat tools) are clearly designed to be effi­cient for the cus­tomer ser­vice orga­ni­za­tion and by virtue of what they are, pro­vide a con­sis­tent cus­tomer expe­ri­ence (up until the point that a human rep­re­sen­ta­tive is reached, at least). And, admit­tedly, this should improve cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, by reduc­ing the wait time for any given customer—but as a cus­tomer, it doesn’t feel that way! You want to get out of the dig­i­tal maze of the VRU and reach a per­son as quickly as pos­si­ble, because you believe that a per­son can actu­ally lis­ten to what your needs are and pro­vide you with the answer you’re look­ing for.More on meet­ing cus­tomers on their pre­ferred terms here.

Imag­ine how dis­ap­point­ing it is to escape the VRU and reach a per­son, only to have that per­son recite a script at you. It feels like they aren’t lis­ten­ing any bet­ter than an auto­mated record­ing. Not exactly a pos­i­tive cus­tomer ser­vice experience!

On the Phone with Your Mother – 100% Authen­tic­ity and 0–50% Efficiency

Depend­ing on how con­ver­sa­tions go in your fam­ily, a call with Mom could be a very to-the-point affair. In my fam­ily, how­ever, a con­ver­sa­tion with my mother typ­i­cally means a casual update on what’s new in my life and the lives of all of my imme­di­ate fam­ily. How­ever, even with­out the life-long con­text of my rela­tion­ship with her, it’s obvi­ous every time we talk that she gen­uinely cares about what I have to say, how I’m doing, what I’m strug­gling with, what I’m proud of, what I find amus­ing, etc. and wants to keep me in the loop on what’s going on in our family.

This level of authen­tic­ity is great. You’re estab­lish­ing a con­nec­tion, you’re build­ing a sense of community—but your cus­tomer ser­vice reps don’t have time for all that, as nice as it would be. The unfor­tu­nate fact of the mat­ter is you do have met­rics you need to pay atten­tion to such as time to answer, time to res­o­lu­tion, etc.

So How Do You Bal­ance Both Authen­tic­ity and Efficiency?

As I men­tioned in the begin­ning, the two sim­plest ways to inject some authen­tic­ity into your cus­tomer ser­vice orga­ni­za­tion with­out com­pro­mis­ing effi­ciency are to per­son­al­ize at the staff level and/or to per­son­al­ize at the cus­tomer level.

Per­son­al­iz­ing at the staff level means let­ting your reps phrase things more nat­u­rally. For instance, say­ing “Howdy” instead of “Good after­noon” if that is how they gen­er­ally greet their peers. There’s not a whole lot of wig­gle room here, as you do need reps to use tech­ni­cal ter­mi­nol­ogy appro­pri­ately, and main­tain some level of pro­fes­sion­al­ism (you don’t want them say­ing “What do you want?” instead of “How can I help you?”)—but to the extent you can let some of their per­son­al­ity shine through, cus­tomers will rec­og­nize and appre­ci­ate that.

Per­son­al­iz­ing at the cus­tomer level can take sev­eral forms. The cus­tomer ser­vice rep could take a look at the his­tory for a given cus­tomer and ref­er­ence it in the con­ver­sa­tion. For instance “I see you pur­chased a [rel­e­vant prod­uct here] with us ear­lier this year – how is that work­ing out for you?” While wait­ing for screens to load, the cus­tomer ser­vice rep could also make small talk rel­e­vant to the cus­tomer, for instance ask­ing what they’ve been watch­ing or read­ing recently, if they have inter­est­ing plans for the hol­i­days or the week­end, etc.

I’ve worked for com­pa­nies where hol­i­day cards were made avail­able for any staff to send to cus­tomers they felt moti­vated to write a mes­sage to, and com­pa­nies where it wasn’t unusual for cus­tomers to actively seek out spe­cific sup­port reps by name at user con­fer­ences to thank them in per­son for all of their help. These kinds of ges­tures only exist where a strong level of authen­tic­ity is allowed to flour­ish within the cus­tomer ser­vice organization.

Using Live Chat to Bridge the Gap

While sim­ple process changes can help bring more authen­tic­ity to your cus­tomer ser­vice orga­ni­za­tion, live chat soft­ware tools are uniquely well-equipped to help fully bridge this gap in cus­tomer ser­vice. For instance, pre-written mes­sages can be inserted into the con­ver­sa­tion and edited (i.e. per­son­al­ized) before being sent. In con­trast to the VRU, live chat pro­vides an almost imme­di­ate response, both ini­tially and ongo­ing through­out the con­ver­sa­tion. How­ever, live chat agents once fully trained can typ­i­cally man­age four con­ver­sa­tions simul­ta­ne­ously—mean­ing that effi­ciency isn’t com­pro­mised. It’s even pos­si­ble to insert a pre-chat sur­vey, in the man­ner of the pre-directing a VRU menu is designed to do, but more quickly and eas­ily than most VRUs.

Whether or not you decide to imple­ment per­son­al­iza­tion via live chat soft­ware, Impact Learn­ing is right that authen­tic­ity will be a defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of suc­cess­ful cus­tomer ser­vice orga­ni­za­tions in 2015, and per­son­al­iza­tion is going to be the eas­i­est way for most orga­ni­za­tions to incor­po­rate authen­tic­ity into their processes and their culture.



Author:

Chris Fras­cella is the Con­tent Direc­tor at Velaro Inc., where he is respon­si­ble for pro­mot­ing the improved per­for­mance & advance­ments of live chat soft­ware. Before join­ing the Velaro team, Chris was inte­gral in the con­tin­ued advance­ment & mar­ket­ing of outcomes-oriented, case man­age­ment soft­ware at Social Solu­tions Global.



 
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