Delightful Customer Experiences – Why They’re Important

How do we put customers at the heart of our processes?

Let’s be honest, most customer service processes are not really built with the customer’s needs at the forefront.

In the pre-digital age, we tended to hire people to front our businesses that were primarily selected for their ability to relate to customers and persuade them to buy our products and services.

We could only afford to hire so many of these people, so our processes tended to be designed with a limited resource in mind.

Queues for the teller window at the bank, waiting rooms at medical practices and the infamous call centre are all examples of ancient mechanisms designed to ration that scarce customer-facing resource and serve customers as efficiently as possible.

In the digital world, those kinds of processes are as outmoded as hand-written invoices. For all practical purposes, no one who genuinely cares about customers likes to see them suffer in this way.

If that sounds a little harsh, consider this: if you are asking your customer to wait for your process you are basically saying that your time is more important than theirs. That might be a practical solution, but it isn’t putting your customer at the heart of your process.

The evidence is strong that customers are increasingly turning away from these traditional approaches to service and favouring companies that offer something better.

One easy way to improve the customer experience is to use a chat service. This can be driven by artificial intelligence and there are plenty of good options for deploying these on websites. Even a chat interface that connects you to a human service agent is usually a nicer experience for customers than listening to the excruciating sound of music on hold interspersed with messages apologising for making you wait, which only serves to draw the customers attention to the unpleasantness of the experience.

Websites that take users on circuitous paths back to the same place without solving their problem, systems that are complicated and hard to navigate and technology that makes no attempt to hide complexity are all things to be avoided like the plague. If you aren’t thinking in these terms, you can be sure that your customers are, and as soon as they find a superior solution to meet their needs no amount of brand loyalty or history of dealing with your company will be sufficient to hold on to them.

The first step is to acknowledge that change is required. The next step is to ask your customers what they think and critically, to begin thinking that way yourself.

Then it’s a matter of incremental improvements, starting with the low-hanging fruit. That’s the easy part once you’ve made the commitment to put the customer at the heart of the process.

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Ray Delany is the Founder of CIO Studio, a company built to partner with SMEs and help them solve the “strategy” problem and align their digital investment with their business outcomes.

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