CX - The new battleground

Don’t you love these acronyms? CX, or Customer eXperience has morphed over the years from pursuing WOW (sorry Tom Peters) to simply giving better customer service. So what’s the difference?

Experience – the expectations that consumers have today have gone Warp Factor 5 since the advent of the internet, and more so mobility combined with social media.

Everyone has a voice, and more and more people want to be heard or at least feel that someone has heard them and has acknowledged their gripe. But being heard above all the noise and the 7+ billion people on the planet is difficult. The frustrations escalate – quickly. A mild emotion can go into full-blown rage if there hasn’t been a response on Facebook, Twitter or an online chat request. Gone are the days of waiting patiently for a few days as the ante has seriously been upped! HelloPeter here we come…

What’s the big boo-ha then? E-M-O-T-I-O-N. And this isn’t a Zulu word for “go”!

Emotions are directly linked to an experience, good or bad that clients have when they interact with you. But there are two important factors that influence their lifecycle or intensity. TIME and EMPATHY.

As time ticks on without any response to a request, invariably mild frustration leads to irritation which leads to anger. Unless tempered early on, companies are faced with the very real risk of losing a client or churning, and along with it the invariable foghorns on social media or around the dinner table. Sadly everyone’s patience has evaporated. This is not unlike seeing two blue ticks denoting read, when sending a WhatsApp message. This frustration of not even receiving a thumbs-up emoticon of acknowledgement drives people into a frothing frenzy. So, be warned – ensure you have a multi-channel strategy to service your clients, but don’t be a Doris…make sure they are MANNED with people who have EMPATHY.

Purely having a pulse and responding to these channel interactions is not enough. If you are merely ticking the box for the CX Director you are missing a trick. Without a sincere and deep understanding of the client’s emotional roller coaster they are going through, you may as well hire a bot or an auto-answer responder. With no EQ. these bums-in-seats are as useless as ejection seats on a helicopter.
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TIP: there are thousands of experienced or even retired people out there who probably are desperate for extra income. Hire folk who have been around the block, and have years of being frustrated consumers.
If you want to retain your hard-earned customers, then get serious about the experience they receive at every touchpoint