The customer loyalty conundrum: time to wake up!
“Loyalty is driven by how well a company delivers on its basic promises and solves day-to-day problems, not on how spectacular its service experience might be.
Most customers don’t want to be ‘wowed’, they want an effortless experience. And they are far more likely to punish you for bad service than to reward you for good service”.
The Effortless Experience – Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman & Rick Delsi
Welcome to the first in my series of #CiscoBitesizeCX blogs, where I will be examining the eight, latest key trends in customer care based on our latest research.
Let me start with a question: how much effort do you put into your brand interactions? Lots, some, little… Perhaps it varies depending upon the reason and urgency. Now, talking of effort, this element of the customer experience has seen particular focus lately and is further reinforced by BT’s latest study, conducted in partnership with Cisco. Published at the end of last year, the report explores consumer behaviour across 10 countries, and reveals a major shift in how people want to communicate with organisations.
‘Chat, tap, talk: Eight key trends to transform your digital customer experience‘ reveals a plethora of interesting stats, but the ones that really caught my eye on this subject were the following: 79% of customers are more loyal to organisations that are easy and simple to contact, and 76% buy from companies that make it easier for them to do business with them. The continuing shift in customer preference towards digital service also shows no sign of slowing down as consumers have more choice than ever before.
For me though, the real ‘wake up call’, is the paradigm between how companies view their ability to deliver services in the digital world versus their own customers’ view of their ability to deliver good or excellent service.
Only 16% of customers rate the digital customer experience as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’, whilst the majority of CEO’s believe their organisations are delivering this already.
Only this weekend, I had such a poor experience that it led to me being put through to the customer retention team. In trying to update my price plan with my energy supplier, I was transferred no less that FOUR times! Four times, when I am a customer with TWELVE YEARS worth of loyalty.
Even more frustrating to me, was that with each transfer I had to start again from the beginning of my request. This was the same experience when transferred within the same channel and even between channels!
It’s a good job I can multi-task (of sorts), as I completed my childrens’ school uniform ironing whilst on the phone (talk about sucker for double punishment)…
Here at Cisco, we have developed Customer Care solutions that are helping organisations deliver continuous journeys with past interaction context, irrespective of channel. What does this do? It helps drive personalisation and therefore helps to reduce the time and effort that your customers have to put into dealing with you.
It’s time to wake up and give your customers what they want: contextual, continuous journeys that respect their time and effort.
Continue to follow me over the coming weeks as I write this series of #CiscoBitesizeCX blogs looking at the eight key trends in customer care, based on our latest research. I’d also really like to hear any comments or feedback below on your own customer experiences. See you in two weeks!
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