The Customer’s Bill of Rights: The Right to Choose

Customers know what good service is and expect it from every interaction they have with a company’s customer service organization, over all the interaction channels that the company supports. More often that not, they are disappointed, and are quick to voice their disappointment. And in this world of social media, this disappointment gets amplified — which leads to brand erosion.

Let’s focus on the way customers want to interact with your customer service organization:

• Customers expect to interact over all the channels that customer service organizations offer, including the traditional ones like phone, email, and chat, and the new social ones like Faceboook and Twitter.
• Customers expect the same experience over all the communication channels that they use.
• Customers expect the same information to be delivered to them over any channel.
• Customers expect to be able to start a conversation on one channel and move it to another channel without having to start the conversation over.
• Customers expect you to know who they are, what products they have purchased, and what prior interactions they’ve had with you.
• Customers expect you to add value every time they interact with you.
• Customers expect you to offer them only new products and services that make sense to them and fit with their past purchase history.

In order to offer this kind of service experience, a customer service organization needs to pay attention to the following:

• The business processes that agents follow every communication channel must be the same, so that customers have the same experience with your brand every time they interact with you.
• Agents need a solid foundation of knowledge management in order to deliver consistent, accurate, and complete information to customers. A subset of this knowledge also needs to be available to customers via web self-service.
• There needs to be some level of technology integration so that agents can access a customer’s profile and purchase history and the universal customer history record — a record of all interactions that the customer has had with you over all the channels that he has used.
• Agents need to receive targeted, personalized offers from a recommendation engine to present to the customer.

This harder than it looks. How many of you can say that you deliver this kind of service experience?

PS - Nice to know that industry pundit, and Sword-Ciboodle strategist, Mitch Lieberman, agrees with my assessment. See his blog at: http://j.mp/iMjQRW