Blog Highlights

• 47% of business and individual consumers will leave a brand after a poor customer experience, costing global businesses nearly $100 billion each year
• Companies are spending thousands annually on per-employee training but struggle with hiring
• Enterprises that use automation technologies to support human operations increase annual revenues 22% and 8x better retention

Customer service used to be so simple.

Every question, comment, or complaint could be easily addressed simply by calling into a contact center or sending an email to a customer support team — and then wait hours or days for a response. But times and expectations about the “customer experience” have changed. 

Today’s customers — both business buyers and individual consumers — demand engaging, personalized interactions with helpful people and resources across any channel or platform. And while more than two-thirds of enterprises plan to prioritize a connected customer experience, many are finding that the time and energy required to meet changing market demands is more than human teams can handle on their own.

As a result, enterprising business leaders are turning to technology to help improve retention, customer satisfaction, and revenue generation in the connected era. Specifically, they’re discovering that using tools for automating previously manual data entry tasks and with arming human agents with detailed customer information heading into an interaction combine to produce the scale, speed, and insights they need to optimize the customer experience.

New expectations require new business processes 

Me, not we

While many observers are quick to compare pre- and post-Internet purchase habits to illustrate evolving customer expectations, year-over-year trends are more revealing and insightful for business leaders looking to capitalize.

In just the last five years, the number of customers who say they’re willing to switch brands following a subpar customer experience has increased nearly 30%. Such a radical shift isn’t necessarily because companies have gotten worse at addressing customers’ needs, but rather that so many have failed to keep up with how modern customers expect to be served or understand that customer communication is a two-way street. 

The current generation of buyers is already accustomed to communicating with friends and family via Facebook, Twitter, text, and Skype. So why wouldn’t they want or expect to be able to communicate with their bank, credit card provider, software vendor, or any other company in the same manner?

Today’s buyer wants connected experiences that feature seamless handoffs and contextual interactions, both inbound and outbound. That means that when they call into the central customer support team and have to be transferred to a different department or specialists, they won’t have to rehash their issue to each representative or settle for having to speak with a supervisor to have their problem resolved.  

At the same time, they want brands to offer more guidance and more relevant product and service recommendations based on the customer’s previous activities. Whether that’s analyzing their online journey to help steer them toward better solutions or using data from previous phone and chat interactions to send personalized offers, customers expect brands to use their resources and talent to tailor each and every experience rather than continuing with a traditional one-size-fits-all approach — and to do so without jeopardizing their personal information. 

High cost of failing to meet customer demands

Personalizing customer experiences isn’t just a nice thing brands can do for their customers. It’s now a business imperative if companies want to remain relevant, competitive, and in business because customers are no longer afraid to leave long-standing brand relationships in search of better service.

Fickle and Free: Waning customer loyalty can cost billions

• More than 75% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations
• 84% of customers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business
• 91% of customers who are unhappy with a brand will leave without complaining
• 45% of customers cite unknowledgeable staff — limited understanding of products, services, pricing, or policies — as a reason for switching
• U.S. businesses lose more than $62 billion per year due to poor customer service
• Global businesses miss out on as much as $98 billion in potential revenues because of poor customer experiences 

As global customers increasingly adopt a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately position toward brands, customer experience leaders at those organizations continue to seek ways of delivering on those expectations without breaking the bank. 

The human element

Supply and demand

The knee-jerk reaction to customer experience management is simply to throw more people and money at the problem. Staffing contact centers, support, and customer success teams with more people and additional shifts every day of the week seems like a reasonable approach on the surface.

Already, companies big and small are spending more on training their existing talent — an average of more than $1,800 per employee each year — and investing significantly more on new talent acquisition than in the past. Yet when it comes to scaling human-based teams to meet growing global demand, they’re encountering an entirely new set of challenges.

The hardship of hiring in the Digital Age:

• 21st Century communications technologies require 21st Century new skills
• Team must understand complex technologies like electronic medical records (EMR) systems, networking and infrastructure, or marketing automation platforms 
• Nearly 80% of global organizations believe there’s a talent gap between their business’s needs and available talent
• Time-to-hire new talent can average up to 45 days depending on the industry
• Talent shortages and long recruiting cycles result in increased HR costs, lower productivity, and missing out on revenue because of inadequate staffing

Logically, more resources should translate to the ability to handle more inbound calls, respond to more emails, and take on more live chats, and generally address a greater volume of issues and questions. But even as many older workers make way for a generation of younger and savvier employees, unemployment rates in most regions remain historically low and radically shrink the talent pool — and now human staffing is riskier and more expensive than ever.  

Human nature and limitations

Even for companies able to achieve their staffing goals, many still experience other issues created by employing humans. Namely, humans aren’t capable of multitasking. 

Humans can only concentrate fully on one task at a time, meaning human agents can only one customer at a time. For example, support technicians (like an IT helpdesk team member) often have more than 20 support tickets per day, forcing customers eager for an answer to their pressing questions to wait patiently for help— the exact opposite of their expectations for fast, timely responses. 

And when more than two-thirds of customers admit to using three or more different communications channels to contact a brand’s support team, there’s more information to manage and more work to do to serve each customer. 

66% of customers use 3 or more channels to connect with brands

Source: Microsoft State of Global Customer Service Report

That’s not to mention how most post-interaction data collection and reporting is done manually. Capturing the details of each customer interaction is time-consuming and prone to errors, taking team members away from serving other customers and risking tainting the pool of information the company uses to help improve their products and services. 

Technology to the rescue? Not so fast

Customer support and success teams are beginning to realize what IT teams have known for a generation: that automation can substantially improve productivity and efficiency. 

IT teams have long used platforms that automate everything from rolling out new software and configuring systems to restarting servers whose connections have been lost and taking corrective action to unexpected changes. The explosion of marketing automation platforms and high-powered customer engagement tools gives customer experience teams similar opportunities to streamline and simplify their operations too. 

Automated marketing funnels and email responders help teams communicate with more customers more efficiently, while customer data management tools alleviate some of the burden of manually collecting and organizing customer information. However, like most world-shifting solutions, automation tools aren’t one-size-fits-all. 

Organizations often try and shoehorn customers into a standardized campaigns flows and support programs, resulting in:

• Communications that are “personalized” only to the extent of using a customer’s first name
• Sending canned responses to customer inquiries
• One-way communication, the polar opposite of connected, individualized interactions customers crave

Algorithms can only do what they’re programmed to do and can’t offer the empathy a human can — a critical element to a great customer experience and a long-term relationship. Still, many companies want to automate as much customer interaction as possible to allow them to handle increasing volumes of customer interactions at minimal expense. But for most customers, the only thing as important as getting immediate answers to their questions is feeling like the brand cares about them and their business.

Man + machine, not man or machine

It turns out that while the average customer does like interacting with chatbots, digital assistants, and other automation technologies they still prefer having a human involved throughout the entire customer experience.

In fact, nearly 65% of U.S. consumers and almost 60% of consumers globally feel companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience. It makes for a compelling case that automation should ‘learn’ from human interactions and data, creating a sort of human-machine tag team that helps brands:

• Serve thousands of customers concurrently
• Automate data capture via AI-powered chat and standard forms
• Deflect simple questions with intuitive self-service/FAQ knowledge bases 
• Intelligently route to get customers to the right human expert when appropriate

Companies of all stripes can employ a mixed human-and-machine environment to create more connected, personalized, and helpful experiences that keep customers coming back for years on end. It could be a software company that wants to convert a freemium user to a paid subscription, a bank that’s helping a customer reset a password while also introducing new financial planning services, or a hospital trying to schedule a procedure while answering patient questions about new medications.

In each case the ability to address customer questions 24/7 from anywhere, re-allocate human resources to higher-value activities, and collect rich structured and unstructured data are huge business drivers. On average, businesses driven by optimizing the customer experience have: 

• 1.9x higher year-over-year customer retention
• Average revenue increase of 22% 
• Customers who are 7x more likely to purchase more from the company and 8x more likely to try other products or services
• 80% better performance in stock prices

SnapEngage is helping companies eager to solve the customer experience puzzle find the right mix of technology and human-powered interactions to satisfy a finicky customer base. The flexible, omni-channel communications solution is perfect for enterprises and healthcare organizations looking to improve their customer support, sales, and daily customer interactions.

The platform features easily customizable automated workflows to automatically respond to general inquiries, capture and qualify leads, and assist with common questions when live agents aren’t available. Workflows can be configured to reliably capture essential information around a customer’s request and triage an account before intelligently routing escalated customer inquiries to specific team members or teams for seamless handoff.

All the data collected in forms fields and free-form chat windows is synchronized with CRM and helpdesk systems to create a 360-degree view of the customer that enables teams to:

• Proactively engage leads based on advanced rules and triggers
• Securely capture rich customer data from multiple touchpoints
• Automatically send data to a common repository via compliant data transfer
• Build custom reports like capacity report to optimize staffing or agent performance analytics to achieve better response times

The expectation of the customer experience is radically different from how it was even a few years ago. And it’ll continue to evolve as market forces and new technologies reshape the balance of power between brands and their customers. Brands that find ways to personalize interactions and proactively address customers’ future demands will be the ones that find sustained, continued success no matter how or how much customer expectations change.