111: Analog Customer Experiences

You need rules and processes to keep things running smoothly. But do the resulting analog customer experiences give rise to serious pain points in your customer journey? Analog customer experiences Artificial intelligence, customer service scripts and chat bots can be life-savers for your customer service team. It’s great when we find new ways to streamline and automate our processes, and even better when we find the solutions that are “just right.” So what happens when we put those analog experiences on auto-pilot? What is actually happening? Beware of the feeling that you’ve found the solution to all your problems! Scripted responses tend to become the experience when employees are not empowered to use their judgement. And when we rely on technology that literally has no sense of judgement, we create experiences that make no sense to the customer in the moment.   Analog experiences often inadvertently ignore real service issues. And meanwhile, support tickets are being closed, and the “right” boxes are being checked off. Everything looks great from your perspective when customers are left feeling ignored or misunderstood. Pay attention to what happens around those processes, or your analog experiences will eventually miss the mark and turn a customer who just needs a little help into a former customer. Related Content Huffington Post article, The Best Customer Service Reps are the Ones Who Pretend to be Thor 360Connext® post, Do Your Communication Tactics Undermine Your Intentions? Customers That Stick® post, Putting the Customer Ahead of the Customer Service Checklist             Episode 049: Are Canned Customer Greetings a Good Idea? Sponsor message: Give your team the customer service training they deserve Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com.   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices