At an evening meal with a recruiter in the Digital space who has built-up and sold on his successful company our conversation flowed over to talking about User Experience but more specifically Customer Experience.<\/p>\n
One of the things that ignited our conversation was that in real life, although you can revel about which are the right processes and how to maximise homogenisation of the process by which customer excellence is achieved, there is no substitute for actual effective “boots on the ground\u201d\u2014the people who operationally deliver the service\u2014and their attitude to compliance with (and you might also say evangelising) the good work a company has put into engineering how it meets the needs of its customers.<\/p>\n
It can be a tough call to meet the customer needs by communicating courteously and in a timely fashion on the right channels\u2014without presenting an unhealthy front of the business that says yes to everything, unmindful of the fact that customers are part of a symbiotic relationship with a business. And businesses, even non-profit ones, need to make at least a turnover (some might even say a profit if for non-profits you think of the extrinsic good they are looking to do). I can think of a situation recently when I encountered two opposing examples of how CX can go well and how it can go\u2014in no uncertain terms\u2014badly.<\/p>\n
Of all the companies I have dealt with, I had the best experience working with Media Temple and Evernote. Now as a disclaimer, Evernote sent me a T-shirt and shot a free year\u2019s service for the inconvenience and Media Temple had someone call me back to listen and said \u201cactually we\u2019ve had other calls like this, it\u2019s making me think if we do need to find a solution. I\u2019ll bring it up.\u201d The key thing here is that they made it “personal.” They listened and were honest about what they could or couldn\u2019t do. Shaun (real name) at Evernote was courteous and you could tell he was concerned for his company and his responsibilities (without being a stuffed shirt).<\/p>\n
The bad experience was a personal item I ordered that demanded eight further separate deliveries (and their tightly controlled JIT (Just-In-Time) system forbade them to specify anything other than all-day deliveries with YODEL (and I know you\u2019re feeling my pain right now). Even when the consultant and I specified and agreed on the replacement pieces with the instructions in front of her, the order would “not make it down to the warehouse” and a different piece would be shipped out, to my delight. And yet \u201csomehow\u201d these guys get five stars in all their reviews. Maybe we\u2019re the only pixies in the garden not wearing glasses.<\/p>\n
What was going wrong in this case was that the system didn\u2019t allow for any empathy. We would speak to consultants who would say they wouldn’t stand for that treatment\u2014I kid you not that on more than one occasion the phrase \u201cSounds like you\u2019ve been to hell and back\u201d was issued… and they would then squeeze the matter into the cookie-cutter, highly optimised system that made us feel like we were banging our heads against the walls. Fortunately though, after 4 months, we managed to resolve the matter and offered the company some help to get their processes resolved.<\/p>\n
Customer Experience is first and foremost about people and smart and empathetic enquiry handling, not just about processes.<\/p>\n At an evening meal with a recruiter in the Digital space who has built-up and sold on his successful company our conversation flowed over to talking about User Experience but more specifically Customer Experience. One of the things that ignited our conversation was that in real life, although you can revel about which are the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4128,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/visionar.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/visionar.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/visionar.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visionar.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visionar.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4000"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/visionar.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4709,"href":"https:\/\/visionar.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000\/revisions\/4709"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visionar.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/visionar.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visionar.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visionar.design\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}