With every aspect of people’s lives becoming increasingly digital and with automation taking over many of our daily interactions, pundits may not seem far out when they suggest that the end of live customer experience is near. It makes perfect sense: as computers and machine learning get better and better, having humans respond to customer queries appears more and more expensive and unnecessary.
New technologies have also shifted the standard and altered the definition of a good customer experience. Is not having to speak to a stranger in our increasingly socially anxious world something that consumers really prefer?
After all, there is a certain satisfaction to interacting with chatbots: things get done quickly, the bots are never in a bad mood; the exchange is efficient and brisk. On the other hand, there are some issues that really benefit from a human touch – such as problems with understanding and dealing with anger and distress, or issues relating to sensitive or financial data. There are certainly many pros and cons on both sides of the spectrum.
In the end, though, the only party to ultimately judge whether they’ve had a good customer experience are the customers themselves. That is why we surveyed 1,000 UK consumers to analyse the role of speed and human interaction in customer experience.
The results show that customers are not ready to say farewell to human interactions: in fact, almost nine out of ten respondents (87%) claimed that being able to contact a live agent increased their loyalty and led them to want to purchase more or more frequently from that company. This should provide strong motivation for businesses to steer well away from schemes that see them replacing their customer contact centres with full automation – especially seeing as over two-thirds (69%) of the people surveyed said they would walk away from any company that does not offer any human contact as part of their customer experience.
At the same time, however, customers do value the availability of multiple contact channels. Eight out of ten customers (84%) reported that the ability to choose a channel on which to contact a service – be that via chat, phone, email or other methods – were likely to increase their business with the company. Furthermore, 81% of the people surveyed claimed that they value their queries being resolved quickly and effectively – if that doesn’t happen, they will take their business elsewhere.
One conclusion that can be drawn from these results is that investing in live customer experience is key, but combining the skilled live interactions of agents with a strong understanding of the customer journey- their preferences, their favoured channels, how they have reached the point of making a query or purchase- can bring huge rewards to businesses. This underlying data can make the difference between an informed and efficient interaction with an agent, and a sub-par one where information has to be recounted by the customer from the very start.
While the customer journey can nowadays to a certain degree be carried out by automated features and digital tools, there comes a point when artificial intelligence alone is not enough. Customers still want real people to take care of their issues, and it is in businesses’ best interests to invest in contact centres with skilled customer service agents that can accompany customers on their journey.
By Graham Ede, Yonder Digital Group
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