The Boston & Maine Connection: Customer Experience

CX – The Customer Experience

One of the great business lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic is the power of great customer interactions. When many hard good retail doors shuttered and much of human activity moved online, we the customer quickly found the difference between robots and humans, artificial interfaces and human faces.

When schools were pushed into remote learning and administrators made software decisions choosing between iReady and other learning modules, Zoom and Google Meet, the teachers and student families bore the brunt of the learning curve and its impact on education.

When curbside pickup and groceries to go became a thing, it was the customer who dealt with the fallout of missing an available timeslot. When random shortages of toilet paper, cleaning agents and chicken occurred were you nice to the store employees who dealt with your disappointment?

How many of us made the necessary upgrade to computer hardware during the height of the pandemic? With most of these purchases fully online, we had to make our decisions without the benefit of tactile experience. How would the new keyboard feel? Will the screen images be crisp enough and the CPU fast enough to do the job at hand?

As a lifelong student of sales and marketing, I paid particular attention to the transformation of communication from face to face to remote interface. I learned from tele support teams how a kind word and acknowledgment that occasional kid or pet background sounds and sometimes less than optimal audio connections were part and parcel of our new work from home world. Being human and acknowledging it made a huge difference. Language barriers were minimized by asking and confirming on both sides of the line whether clarify of result was achieved. Some did better than others. Some accents both foreign and domestic created opportunities for connection. I asked and learned in different calls that I was speaking to representatives in Oklahoma, Hyderabad in the Indian state of Telangana and locations in the Philippines.

The best ambassadors of the businesses they represented showed extreme courtesy, shared their name clearly and expressed thanks for any and every nicety or complement. The worst would disconnect the call under some hope of anonymity. My least favorite experiences were prolonged sessions with Bots that would not transfer over to human soon enough when it became clear to me that the menu of choices was inadequate. These were most often the larger corporations that also used disingenuous messages about large call volumes and soundtracks of turning pages as the Artificial human put me on pause while allegedly looking up information. Hmmn, I have never seen a digital array turn pages, so why would I hear those sounds now.

The pandemic has shown me ways to expand customer loyalty and business growth. Leadership sets the pace and that which is inspected (surveys and stats) is respected (by employees and front-line staff). Regardless of a company internal process, the customer exits any interaction with either a positive or negative attitude toward the experience. Make it humane and reap the benefits.

Three Key Takeaways:

1. Bots that answer phones need to hand off information, so the caller doesn’t have to repeat themselves. If your employee encounters “attitude,” check the handoff process.
   
2. Give your caller a quick exit from prescribed script to an immediate human response.
   
3. Make it easy and clear how the inbound customer can get back to your organization. Delight me as Dell Computer did and let your representative send me an email with their contact information for follow up or for picking up where the previous conversation left off.