We’ve all had that moment – you’re frustrated with a brand and left thinking: “Enough is enough. I’m out!” You may have even shared your negative experience on social media. While organisations may perceive this type of customer experience break-down as a minor misstep in the customer relationship, the consumer sees this as a major failure. Once a customer experiences what they consider a major CX failure, the brand risks serious consequences. Specifically, 64 percent will stop recommending the organisation, start looking for an alternative brand or actively disparage the company via word of mouth, social media or other online channels.
When customer experience goes wrong, what’s the impact on your brand and what does it take to win customers back? Recent research from SDL investigated the perceptions and behaviours of 2,784 consumers across nine countries and three generations to bring fresh insights that should be a wakeup call for every brand. The research shows that consumers are telling brands that now is the time to “Wake up and smell the customer experience opportunity”. Brands can win big at CX if they avoid some common pitfalls – as identified by the global consumer base as points of failure on the customer journey:
The disconnect in customer experience perceptions
Avoid engineering the customer journey and the customer experience around your internal organisational structure. There can be significant differences in perception between brands and the prospects and customers those brands are looking to attract, engage, and retain. Every prospect or customer is on a unique journey with that brand – and that journey makes perfect sense to the customer, regardless of how haphazard it may seem from the outside.
A unified customer experience process, please
Avoid looking for the one process, the one technology, the one “strategy du jour” that will instantly catapult your organisation from worst to first. The research shows that, from the customers’ perspective, there is no one thing that makes or breaks the customer experience: most often, it is a combination of customer-engaging people, business policies and processes, and the supporting technologies that plays the most significant role, rather than just one.
Additionally, the research shows that customers blame some CX failures on one engagement capability, while in reality, a different factor is really the root cause: in one example, customers blame people and processes for brands contacting them after the customer has requested not to be contacted – this may appear to be a people problem, but is most likely a failure within the Customer Relationship Management system, where the customer hasn’t been opted-out.
Scale of effort to remedy customer experience failure
Brands often see the scale of CX failures through the lens of how hard it would be to correct the problem. Some CX failures take tremendous time and resources (e.g., training, information technology, business process re-engineering, new human capital) to fix, and some are easy (e.g., fixing dead links on the brand Web page, empowering customer service agents to deviate – within reason — from the corporate rulebook to address customer questions and concerns). From the customer’s perspective, the scale of effort required to remedy the problem may have little to no relation to the perceived severity or impact of the CX failure: little things (in terms of time consumed or money lost) may be huge issues to the customer.
What brands, or third-party observers, may see as a minor customer inconvenience may in fact be perceived by the customer as a critical, relationship-ending, customer experience failure. The research also reveals that consumers are more likely to remember a negative experience over a positive one and younger generations are less willing to resolve a failure and will move on to another brand. One-third of customers experiencing such failures are never coming back, but the research found that for the remaining two-thirds of customers, the top three steps brands can take to bring them back include offering a genuine and personal apology, admitting the failure and offering discounts/credits related to the failure.
Customers interact with many faces of a company - from marketing, sales and support to finance. Improving customer experience involves many elements, but one of the primary challenges is to achieve buy-in across all levels and departments. Focus on delivering one face to the customer and one consistent experience so that your decisive customers receive engaging, compelling and consistent experiences at every touch point along the buying cycle. Aligning the organisation by unifying content, people, processes and technology will enable consistent communication and experience to customers across channels, markets and languages.
The bottom line: what brands believe about the customer experience may or may not have any relation to what the customer thinks about the customer experience. And given that the threshold for failure in the customer’s eyes may be far, far lower than you expected, it is worth the gamble?
By Paige O’Neill, CMO at SDL.
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