We live in an age where products and services are increasingly similar, and are increasingly based on both our fast paced lifestyle, and all that comes along with it.
If you’ve tried to have a telephone conversation with anyone under 30 years old recently, you can relate to the above statement. The fact is that the weekly call to Mom has now become three text messages over the course of the same period of time. People in general are busier than ever before.
For a business to not take this into consideration when considering how their products or services impact customers is absolute insanity. If a person can no longer make time to speak verbally to their Mother, the odds that they will be delighted under any circumstances to speak to the customer service team for the company in question are not high.
The truth is that demand is influenced now more than ever by the service or quality of service attached to doing business with a company. The difference between buying an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy has very little to do with how the devices can impact the customer’s life. After all, for all intents and purposes, they can each do about all the customer could want. The reason customers find themselves loyal to one or the other has to do with the service they received from the person who sold them the device, and the amount of effort they had to put in to make it an integral part of their daily existence.
As a daily consumer, the things I have to work for in life are things that rely on me. The things that are there for me with little to no effort are things I rely upon. If I can rely on a product or service as opposed to it relying on me, I am delighted. I don’t need to be manually delighted by the company when I have to talk to them. My true desire is to not have to talk to them.
If by no fault of its own, a company finds itself in a situation where the customer service team has to interact with me, the less effort I have to put into getting an acceptable resolution for my issue, the more I can rely on the product, and the more I’m delighted. The more effort I have to put in, the more the product has to rely on my ability and availability to talk with the company, and the less I’m delighted.
One of the most effective way to reduce customer effort when customer have no choice but to interact with the company, is by making the investment in cutting edge IT products. The truth is that technology rules the world. Having the best technology may seem expensive at first, but the difference it can make in your employee’s ability to provide that “extra” service to the customer will make all the difference in the world when it comes time to examine the bottom line.
In short, make your process as simple and as effortless as possible by building your service models with the best available technology to get the job done. That in itself will delight the customer, even it they don’t manifest their delight in words of praise or confirmation. Their disdain will be manifested many more times than their delight will be. However, any company who is not receiving negative feedback can happily cling to the old saying that “no news is good news.”
