The software-oriented Customer Experience framework — Phase 2/3
Phase 2: Virtualise — Reduce — Manage
We’ve sorted the before and the after of the interaction, by gathering feedback, converting them into insights, and taking actions based on them, but what about the actual interaction?
Let’s start with a simple question, what do you look for in a service provider, apart from quality?
I look for 3 things : Organization, Speed, Safety
As a service provider or a brand, we need to be able to find the perfect balance between these 3 key attributes. Luckily, with emerging solutions, it is very simple to achieve this. Let’s understand how.
Organization and Speed
Structure is the key to success.
Ensuring that interactions are organized, especially in Covid season, is a key determinant of how well your brand would appeal to existing as well as potential clients. We need to ensure that, long unruly queues are avoided, safety measures are strictly adhered to and the waiting, as well as service times, are kept at the minimum. The problem though is that, without clearly defined systems in place to manage this, people will automatically tend to find “out-of-order” techniques to get their work done faster.
Organization goes hand-in-hand with speed. This is because, if you are able to efficiently manage the influx in your outlets, the speed of delivering the service automatically follows.
How do we organize interactions?
Virtualise — Reduce — Manage
Transform physical interactions into virtual experiences
Covid-19 has definitely proven how toxic physical interactions can be, and why it is important to ensure that for tasks that do not require it, these be avoided at the maximum.
67% of customers are known to visit brand outlets for matters that do not necessarily require physical interactions. Let’s provide these customers with the ability, to contact us and have their needs fulfilled, right at the comfort of their homes. Booking virtual appointments is a great way to go about this.
Using an appointment management system (My suggestion, RightTime 😉), allowing users to book appointments online and not only that but providing them with the ability to use an existing conferencing tool of their choice (eg Zoom, Webex, Teams) to interact with your brand serves as the ideal image booster. This would reassure clients of their safety and comfort during their interactions with your brand, and in turn, lead to higher engagement and contentment rates.
Maintain a controlled number of people in outlets
The key to organisation is knowing one’s limits.
We can’t restrict customers from visiting us but allowing 100 people to simultaneously enter a store/outlet with a capacity of 25, is not necessarily the best idea.
Let’s re-organize this using the appointment management system discussed earlier. Convincing clients to book appointments using a clearly defined calendar by setting limits to the number of bookings by time slot would surely avoid an unexpectedly high influx of customers. It would also help us to be able to provide a personalized experience as we would be prepared to serve the numbers entering at a given time.
Do not forget, though, to not set the entire store’s limit open for bookings. We need to provide a certain margin for “walk-in” customers, as we may have quite a few who may not be able to book their visits online and we must cater to them as well.
Manage queues efficiently to ensure orderliness
Uncertainty equals failure.
We’ve ensured clients have the necessary tools to inform us of their arrival, but now that they are here. What do we do?
Would we manually call the next person we see to approach us? This process is immensely flawed, to say the least. It doesn’t inform clients of their position and keeps them on edge due to the level of uncertainty involved. If you hear closely, you might probably hear their thoughts, “Is it my turn yet? God, I thought I was here before him. He’s been called too, why am I still here? Did they call my name, and I didn’t hear ? Should I ask someone ? Help !”.
The feeling of uncertainty reduces the customer’s satisfaction rate, as well as impacts the brand image. A queue management system (Umm, RightQ 😉) would help towards building the ideal interaction experience. This benefits both the customers as well as the advisors/agents. The customers would create and receive his ticket which in turn would allow him to know exactly when it would be his turn. The agents no longer have to guess who was the next person in line, as a simple click of a button would inform him of the next in line.
Why not combine this, with an integrated digital signage solution (RightPlayer, anyone 😉)? This would not only allow us to display a set of advertisements and/or videos to keep the user entertained as he waits but also display the information of the ticket called, as well as the next tickets in the queue.
Having a queue management solution in place would also help measure and in turn reduce waiting and service times, as we would be able to measure the client’s need and in turn prioritize and segment our workforce to meet these demands.
All of these would allow customers to spend less time worrying about if they missed their turn and instead more on the actual resolution of the solution they turned to your brand for.
Safety
Customer safety has become an undeniable must-have for organizations. No-one would visit a place, that would lead them to be injured, fall sick, or worse, die. With the current pandemic in play, we must make sure that customers feel safe while interacting with us, if not, we risk losing them to the competition.
How do we do this ?
More importantly, how do we do this using technology?
Apart from the normal safety measures that everyone must follow, we need to be able to harness the power of tech-based solutions in order to provide the extra boost of satisfaction customers need (Yes, I know making customers happy is hard).
It is one thing to have a security guard/customer advisor check for an incoming customer’s temperature using a plastic gun and another to put in place a system that automates the entire progress. Why not replace this process by a machine, capable of verifying if a customer has worn his mask, check his/her temperature, as well as providing the user with sanitizer in order to completely automate the process, rendering it more optimal (Ahem, RightKiosk Flexi 😉) ?
This phase covered interaction management, complementing its predecessor who covered feedback management. In the last phase of this series, we shall cover how all of the previously discussed solutions can form a single armory of Customer Experience.
