According to the article written by (Five9) on how to increase customer experience, every customer wants to encounter an exceptional experience. A great customer experience is known as being a seamless and effortless interaction between the customer and the company. It can take place on multiple platforms, which results into a fast and accurate resolution of the problem. By offering the customers a positive experience they will value the brand even more. As a response they are open to spend more money and convince their friends to purchase the product as well. Due to this, Five9 believes that customer experience is the same as human experience since us humans react to how the brand makes us feel. Especially during the pandemic, where the uncertainty was very high, the need of a human connection increased to provide the customers with a feeling of comfort and positive support.
Human Experience
Human experience can be divided into two main topics, Empathy and Responsiveness. Every person is changing and therefore the businesses need to adjust to the constant change in both customer needs, government mandates or global crises. To understand the perspective of the customers and to react correctly to their needs, companies need to be empathic. To increase the human experience of the customers, the following 7 elements need to be taken into account which are covering both the needed Empathy and Responsiveness: Know me, Meet me, Empower Me, Remember Me, Respond Me, Support Me and Assure Me.
7 Elements of Human Experience
Know Me – Customers want to be recognized, to feel valued and known. They don’t want to identify themselves. With the help of pre-built CRM integration, the agent could focus on being empathetic instead of keeping the customer on hold to find information about them.
Meet Me – A company should provide several channels as a contact option for customers, to leave the decision to them.
Empower Me – Respect the customer time and preference as an individual by offering the option of self-services through visual IVRs.
Remember Me – The customer should have the possibility to start a conversation on one channel and later change to another one. There shouldn’t be the need to repeat their history or issue a second time.
Respect Me – Respect their time by not keeping them on hold and solving the issues quickly.
Support Me – Proactively send reminders for appointments, follow-ups, product availability and shipment notification to resolve potential issues.
Assure Me – Reassure your customers that their data is safe, and that help is available if necessary.
Importance of human experience
The primary message of the article is to convey the knowledge that for an excellent customer experience, the journey of the customer needs to focus on the human aspects. I agree that companies need to constantly adjust to the quickly changing external environment to remain interesting to the customer. Especially during the pandemic, many businesses had to create a new type of service to keep their customers. I also agree that empathy is an important factor during the customers journey, but it depends on the type of business. In Tourism for instance, it is important to listen, understand the customers and hiring empathic people to take care of them. When people do not feel confident around them, they would not book a safari with them but would go to the competitor.
How to increase human experience?
Connected to the primary message is the second most important message of this article: “how to increase the human experience?”. To answer this question, the company Five9 is explaining the seven aspects which both are focusing on how to increase the responsiveness and empathy in your service.
Know Me
Indeed, the customer feels more valued if the company knows about them and their history with the brand. Out of security reasons it will always be necessary to identify yourself and answer a few questions. It is unrealistic that it is not necessary anymore. On the other hand, I do think that an integrated CRM and screen pop reduces the search time of finding the file of a client and therefore the agent can focus on listening to the customer and knowing their history quicker.
Meet Me & Remember Me
People love having options and deciding for themselves if and where they want to call, text, or use videos to try and fix the issue themselves. According to a study by (Gareiss, 2019), contact centres which offered eight or more channels saw a 92% increase in customer satisfaction rate. Businesses with four or less channels only saw a 50% increase. I believe the satisfaction only shows improvement if the company has an up-to-date software. With these systems they can share information just-in-time to avoid the repetition of the customer. Repeating the same history over and over again only decreases the customer experience. In addition to this topic, I believe contacting from the beginning on the correct agent would make the customer journey even better, instead of jumping from one agent to another. Therefore to fulfill the element “meet me” correctly, “remember me” needs to work smoothly.
Support Me
Supporting the client by proactively sending appointment reminders, follow-ups, and information about the product availability etc. is a good way of resolving potential issues. On the other hand, no customer likes to receive too many messages from a business, even if it could contain helpful data. Therefore, I would suggest giving the customers the chance to decide for themselves on which topics they would like to receive emails on.
Conclusion
To sum everything up, I agree that human experience is extremely important during the customer journey. Nonetheless it must be difficult for a company to master all seven elements explained above. Not only is a high investment into modern tools and software necessary but also qualified personnel and the correct forecast in the customers behaviour is needed.
Therefore, I believe that the company should focus on the main elements, which have the highest impact on the customer. Based on a survey of (Five9), 48% of the clients believe solving the problems the first time is the most important thing, followed with 42% by the “speaking to a human and not a machine” category. Thirdly, 39% value a quick response. Last category is the “not being transferred from person to person” (37%).
Based on these numbers, the business should first focus on solving the problems the first time before moving on to the second most valued need which is providing human contact. Mastering each element step by step gives the company the opportunity to slowly invest and see how the customers are reacting to the changes.
If you are interested to find out more about the company Five9 click here.
References
Five9. (n.d.). Making Customer Service a more human experience.
Gareiss, R. (2019). Omnichannel Accelerates Contact Center Success Factors .