From Frustration To Satisfaction: Rethinking Customer Experience Journey

If winter had a companion it would be the cold IVR that consumers have to listen to while trying to resolve an issue they are facing. The cold, impersonal, sterile world of IVRS is becoming an experience to dread. One needs to understand that one reaches out to the phone banking channel only when it's really required - and you need to resolve a situation. And that time, jumping the hoops of numbers and instructions is not the best experience one would like to go through. Case in point: so little confidence do consumers have in these electronic surrogates that a few weeks after the website www.gethuman.com showed how to reach a live person quickly at 10 major consumer sites, instructions for more than 400 additional companies had poured in.

The VUCA world of marketing is replete with brands offering an excess of features, baited rebates, increasing decibels of market noise and a terrifying withdrawal of the personal touch: all evidence of indifference to what should be a company's first concern: the quality of customers' experiences.

Organisations need to calibrate the eternal truth of marketing: keeping the customer at the centre of everything we do. Did we miss the bus on that one? It is the tightrope of costs, turn-around time, new media, fickle-minded consumers, deal-led VR brand loyalty that companies have to work on, day after day. But there are certain universal truths that cannot escape us - that a satisfied customer is a repeat customer. So what does one need to do? First, an organisation must realise that customer experience is not the purview of the marketing team only. It starts with the CEO and ends with the last man standing in a customer-facing role.

There is corporate scrutiny when the revenue targets and actual sales numbers are not met - but is there equal scrutiny when the company and customer assessments diverge? We need to acknowledge that consumers have a greater number of choices today than ever before, more complex choices, and more channels through which to pursue them.

Let us look at this statistically:

• 86 per cent of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. (Oracle)
• 66 per cent of customers will switch brands if they feel unappreciated. (Salesforce)
• 77 per cent of customers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalised experience. (Salesforce)
• 57 per cent of customers are more likely to recommend a company that exceeds their expectations. (Salesforce)
• 70 per cent of loyal customers will recommend a company to others. (Oracle)
• 80 per cent of customers are more likely to do business with a company that offers a personalised experience. (Epsilon)

Customer experience is becoming key despite the tsunami to reach out to them to gain their trust. Customer dissatisfaction is equally rampant, widespread and dangerous because of customers' empowerment and the tool of social media. Although companies, with the power of data and analytics, can get under the skin of their customers and know a lot about their buying habits, incomes and other characteristics used to classify them, they know little about the thoughts, emotions and states of mind that customers' interactions with products, services, and brands induce. Yet unless companies know about these subjective experiences and the role every function plays in shaping them, customer satisfaction is more a slogan than an attainable goal. So let's electrify our customers with dopamine, bond with them triggering oxytocin, trigger serotonin and make them proud of making the right choice and surprise them with endorphin

And let us put our best experience brand foot forward.

Debal Dutt

Guest Author The author is the Chief Marketing Officer at Intellect Design