Johannesburg, 03 Mar 2015
From the Selfie to the Stickler, companies bring a broad range of attitudes, approaches and investments to customer care. Demonstrating this is contact centre solutions provider, Ocular Technologies' partner, Aspect Software, in its "personas study".
The Aspect Customer Care Personas is a five-segment personification of companies' approach to, and execution of, customer service. Conducted by GfK Custom Research, the Customer Care Personas study is based on an analysis of practices as identified by customer service decision-makers. It aims to help companies uncover where they fall in their customer care strategy and the opportunities for improvement.
By researching companies across vertical segments, five different company customer service personas were identified based on their investment, approach and attitudes towards delivering customer service:
The Traditionalist: A Traditionalist company believes in customer service in the most conventional sense - eager to please, always putting its customers first and continually striving to build lasting customer relationships.
The Honcho: Leadership permeates throughout the Honcho's approach to customer service, ranging from strategy and implementation to performance and measurement.
The Selfie: The Selfie fully embraces technology and is ahead of the curve in customer service innovation and functionality. However, this segment suffers from an amplified sense of self, believing it is doing everything right, from prioritising customer service to involving leadership.
The Casualist: Companies here are casual in everything about their approach to customer service; too casual, in fact. Companies in this segment have extremely limited leadership, limited customer metrics and little innovative technology, which is why they see their customer service performance worsening.
The Stickler: The Stickler is easily characterised by one word: protocol. Sticklers have a strong desire for creating and following rules and procedures, and execute a formalised approach to customer service.
While it was concluded that there is no one perfect customer service persona, disconnectedness troubles companies in every segment. That is, technology is disconnected from agent engagement, metrics are disconnected from what matters to the consumer, and procedures are disconnected from delivering exceptional service.
Part of the answer to solving this disconnectedness is evaluating the appropriation of technology investment. More than half of companies that took part in the study are currently and actively using their company's customer service technology investment to replace the customer service representative, while nearly half of the participants believe that by 2020, the human interaction element of the customer service representative will be replaced by technology altogether. And, while this investment may save companies money in the short term, it may cost them dearly in the long run.
Consumer demand for more self-service options is on the rise, but companies that provide customer service on their terms and for their interests alone risk becoming laggards, while organisations that address technology investment from the consumer's perspective put themselves in position for market leadership.
In an additional Aspect-commissioned study of consumers by TNS, 73% of respondents said they wished companies offered more ways to solve customer service issues on their own, yet the same amount (75%) said they believe companies' motive for using self-service is to prevent them from talking to a customer service representative. It's no wonder that 96% of them said they were more likely to do business with a company that has strong customer service, and nearly three-quarters (72%) stopped doing business with a company because of a bad customer service experience. And the problem has only gotten worse. Nearly half (45%) say they would rather eat a piece of last year's fruitcake than deal with customer service, an 8% increase from this time last year.
"While companies work on improving their engagement with these hard-to-please consumers, brands need to know how they are perceived by their customers in order to assist them in understanding what it takes to provide exceptional customer care," says Joe Gagnon, senior vice-president and general manager Cloud Solutions at Aspect Software. "It's important, therefore, that companies know not only what their internal persona is, but what the potential business impact is of that approach so they can identify improvement opportunities. More importantly, brands must find the right balance between serving the needs of their specific customer base and the needs of their own employees and investors to deliver exceptional service as well as exceptional shareholder returns in this ever-changing landscape."
Commenting on the study, Ebrahim Dinat, chief operations officer at Ocular Technologies, adds: "In South Africa, for a customer engagement strategy to be both effective and extraordinary, the customer relationship management technologies need to be integrated into the customer business processes. Companies must therefore ensure that their customer interaction management, workforce optimisation, and back-office systems are designed to provide a customer experience that keeps clients loyal and increases business profit."
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