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| Credit: FreeImages.com/Sigurd Decroos |
Today’s customers are impatient. They want
– and have the right to – get answers to their questions and concerns about a
company’s products and services without being in the need to preform lengthy
searches or to dig around. This holds true for pre-purchase questions as well
as to post-purchase questions.
We regularly see or read statistics that
tell us that customers are not very forgiving in cases of poor customer service,
but on the contrary are inclined to leave when encountering a single instance
of poor service. If customers do not get the answers to their questions without
difficulties they are moving on, no matter of the company or its size. This
meanwhile has become a kind of public domain knowledge.
The only way for a company to avoid customers
leaving with the first bad experience is by building up and maintaining a good
and credible history of helping a customer with solutions to address their
needs (aka jobs-to-be-done) and by regularly providing good customer service.
At all stations of the customer journey.
An important part of this good service is
being available to help the customers on their preferred channels, at the
time of their choosing, and at their pace.
Theirs, not the
company’s!
This includes that a customer initiating a
conversation, or engaging in a conversation that is initiated by a company, may
not respond in a while, or chooses to continue using another device, or both.
On the other side a customer will not accept the company being unresponsive or
losing information during handovers between different service agents.
The conversation between a company and a
customer is both, asynchronous and asymmetric. Asymmetric no more in favor of
the company, but in favor of the customer.
Deal with asymmetric Conversations
It transpires more and more that an
important channel this conversation will happen in is chat; in adding on to my
recent article on omnichannel, and whereto I see this poorly named concept
move, businesses are well advised to closely inspect how they can help
themselves by helping their customers with a useful and consistent chat
offering.
This chat offering needs to be available in-app,
on the mobile web site or on the same web site delivered to a desktop/laptop
computer. Increasingly also in generic chat services like WhatsApp, Facebook
Messenger, Slack, …
And companies should not forget to offer a
chat button in e-mails. Although I think that the importance of e-mail will
degrade it is still an important communications channel for companies.
An integrated, intelligent, efficient chat
offer is a good way to help customers getting to the information that they want
at their pace. Efficient, integrated and intelligent are the key words here.
The chat equivalent of holding music is not an option.
Efficient
A reaction to a chat request must be near
instantaneous, with an appropriate response that takes into account all
relevant contextual information. And the system must be able to scale. As said:
‘Holding music’ will not be tolerated. Neither will the need to repeatedly
supply the same information. This takes both, a suitable number of trained human
operators – human touch will stay important – and a bot-infrastructure that is
supported by machine-learning.
Intelligent
A proactive chat initiation must come at a
sensible point of time, with an opening that is appropriate for the customer’s
current situation and context. Responses to a customer initiated chat must be
useful right from the outset, giving helpful information based upon the given
context and the information at hand.
Integrated
The context can for example be identified
through the current interaction with the site or app, and previous interactions
with the company, if the customer is willing to be identified; and if the chat
system is connected to or part of the CRM and analytics infrastructure. Integrating
chat with CRM and with advanced analytics allows for efficient and intelligent
customer engagement, regardless whether it is a marketing-, sales- or a service
scenario.
With these three concepts in place and tied
into each other the chat can and must go on at the customer’s speed – not at
the speed of business (pun at SAP intended; sorry, folks, I couldn’t resist
that one).
The customer’s speed, along with the
possibility of automation via bots, backed by a learning system, is an
opportunity for the business, as operators can scale beyond one conversation at
a time. This is important for companies of all sizes. But again, the chat
itself proceeds asymmetrically at the customer’s pace. The company needs to
offer fast and useful reactions at all times.
To Sum It Up
As said before, it is important that the trained(!)
operator who picks up the chat already has good information about the customer
and her intent. This way the conduct of the chat is immediately positive for
the customer. To enable this the customer must be identifiable and her
interactions with the site or the app need to be tracked and past interactions
need to be usable to the service. As past interactions can include more than
just a chat history, the chat service itself needs to be part of the CRM
infrastructure. This way data it
generates becomes searchable, ideally also covered by a sentiment analysis, and
other data, like purchasing history, personal information, etc. becomes
available to the chat session.
Tracking of the interactions also allows
for two additional, yet important, functionalities.
1. A chat request by the customer can be routed to the right operator.
This avoids lengthy Q&A and helps keeping the customer happy. Depending on
the sophistication of the implementation and the maturity of the organization
the first contact very well can be a chat bot, which enquires missing
information and is able to answer initially simple, with growing maturity
increasingly complicated requests.
2. A chat session can be proactively initiated in the right context. This
allows the assigned operator to come from the right angle, be helpful right
away, and to even allow for cross-, and upsell activities. Even more
interestingly, this data is useful for future marketing activities.
Some side effects of tracking of the
interactions are that it enables the company to identify issues with site or
app and to push corresponding information to customers, and to additionally perform
automated prospecting, which helps to present the right offers and prepare
cross- and upselling scenarios.
And remember,
although more and more customers are not working from laptops but from tablets
and mobile phones the solution must still be able to cover a wide variety of
platforms, without adding to implementation cost. Simplicity in installation and
usage, as well as interoperability with a wide range of technologies, are key
to an adoption in businesses of all sizes.
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