Part 1 of this post introduced you to what a good customer experience is and why it is important for the business of a good trader. We will now delve into the reverse side of this coin, namely the bad customer experience and the ways to deal with it.
If the great customer experience is focused on ensuring that all interactions and points of contact with your business are easy, enjoyable and hassle-free, then the exact opposite is true when it comes to a bad user experience.
Surveys conducted by Temkin Group and Oracle on the customer experience show that:
Some of the most common causes of poor customer experience include:
So, the question remains, how can your organization create a great user experience strategy?
First of all, we need to be very aware of the difference between service and experience. The first is quite impersonal, like nothing personal just business. The second is about human emotions, commitment, personal attitude, memories. Which do you think is stronger than the two?
Here are a few examples of this significant difference between service and experience:
Service:
The customer has made a successful purchase from the online store topproducts.com, the product has been received, the feedback form, kindly sent by the merchant by e-mail, has been duly completed and returned by the customer.
Experience:
On the day of receiving the product, Krum received an email from Zachary from the Customer Experience department of topoproducts.com, in which he asked if everything was OK with the delivery and the product. If not everything is according to the client's expectations, he encourages him to contact the company on a specified phone, to follow a link to start a chat immediately, or to contact the ADR Center for Alternative Dispute Resolution. If direct talks do not succeed, Zachary again invites Krum to contact the ADR Center.
Service:
A client makes a holiday reservation. Talks to an employee on the phone, who is kind, informs her about everything asked, makes a reservation.
Experience:
Arriving at the hotel from the Perfect Vacations hotels group, where Vanya is going to spend her precious long-awaited one-week vacation, she is greeted at the reception by an employee from the Customer Experience department, who introduces herself as Damiana and most unexpectedly presents an upgrade to Vanya's room. She has already used the services of Perfect Vacations in another country, which means that she is a loyal customer.
However, not everything is so perfect. Even very often, customers' expectations are not met at all and they find something to complain about.
A client writes an email to the hotel or just a review on Tripadvisor about a problem during her stay. The client experience department takes over the case. Correspondence begins, which leads to even greater irritation.
Another option, from the customer experience department, Damiana contacts Vanya, apologizes and sends her a bottle of the group’s own brand of wine, along with a discount voucher for the next stay. This also becomes a memorable positive customer experience.
There is another option - instead of wine and a discount voucher, Vanya can very kindly be redirected to the ADR Center. There, in the process of negotiations, skillfully assisted by a mediator, Vanya may realize that her grounds are insufficient to have claims, and both parties agree on a smaller and less resource-intensive compensation, but satisfactory and memorable for Vanya, and often this may be a simple appology, as her complaint has been addressed and respected.
Dealing with complaints is a difficult process, so we recommend the series of publications in the section Handbook for Trade Leaders - ARE CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS A GOOD THING AND HOW MUCH DOES AN UNDERRATED COMPLAINT COST - PART 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
And let's not forget that a client who has the right to complain and a quick solution to his problem has been found, in which he also took part, remains a satisfied and loyal ambassador of the company's good practices. This is achieved precisely through the alternative dispute resolution that our ADR-NAIS Center offers.
Read also the publication from the section Handbook for Trade Leaders, Where in the Customer Journey stands the ADR.
Follow the next publications from this series, dedicated to the best practices in dealing with complaints, from the section "Trade Leaders' Guide" on the NEWS page of nais.bg, as well as in the profiles of NAIS on LinkedIn and Facebook. In the next publication we will look at the problems related to technical systems, process management and the delegation of rights and responsibilities, or in short, problems related to the internal organization.
Resources:
https://customerthink.com/2021-customer-experience-trends-and-tactics/
https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-experience-trends
https://www.superoffice.com/blog/customer-experience-strategy/