How can brands design and deliver seamless customer experiences?

Transcript

Robert Zirk: Have you had an experience as a customer that was way more difficult than it needed to be?

Maybe a restrictive return policy left you stuck with an item you can't use.

Or your self-checkout experience had multiple unnecessary interruptions of…

Self-checkout prompt: Please wait for an associate.

Robert Zirk: Or maybe you navigated all the right customer support telephone prompts, only to be told…

Customer service representative 1: That’s actually another department. Please hold while I transfer you.

(Hold music plays)

Robert Zirk: And then, after explaining the issue again...

Customer service representative 2: Sorry, I don’t know why you were transferred here. If I could place you on a brief hold, I’ll connect you to the right number.

(Hold music plays again for several seconds, then the phone clicks, followed by a dial tone)

Robert Zirk: And then... it's back to the very beginning.

Every time customers face obstacles like these, it erodes trust in the brand and opens the door for a competitor to win them over for good.

But the brands that deliver world-class customer experiences recognize that a frictionless customer journey builds loyalty and engagement.

And today's guests will share insights and strategies on how you can optimize your brand's customer journey to do the same.

So today on Questions for now, we'll ask: How can brands design and deliver seamless customer experiences?

Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS International where we ask today's big questions in digital customer experience. I'm Robert Zirk.

Robert Zirk: For brands to win and retain customers, they need to stand out in a positive way.

In the past, two common ways brands could do this were to offer an affordable price point or maintain a commitment to a high quality product or service.

However, customer expectations evolve with time. This begs the question: how can brands stand out today?

David Avrin: From a customer's perspective, as long as price is fairly comparable, we assume that quality is present. It's table stakes. Everybody's good. Where are the real opportunities for differentiation?

Robert Zirk: That's David Avrin. He's a customer experience speaker, consultant, and author of several books. His newest book argues that the real differentiating factor for brands is to be like the title of the book itself: Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With.

David Avrin: When we know everybody's good, everything is available that we can afford, who's easier to do business with? Who eliminates those points of friction, those points of frustration?

Robert Zirk: In Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With, David draws from a career's worth of experiences and more than 7,000 conversations with business leaders, identifying more than two dozen categories of frustrations along the customer journey that can lead to churn.

David Avrin: What really drove the book and writing the book was detailing those different levels and points of frustration for all us. What are those specific things that make us crazy, that make us wonder “What do they not get?” And then offering some solutions and some marketplace examples of those who do it right.

Robert Zirk: What he's observed over time is that some businesses that have historically succeeded in the marketplace for decades have since been reduced to a fraction of what they once were, or gone out of business altogether, because they failed to keep up with customer expectations.

David Avrin: Customers are prioritizing speed. Speed of response, speed of access, speed of answer, speed of delivery, of course. They're prioritizing simplicity of process, flexibility in your policies, and of course, convenience.

It is a great time to be a customer, right? It's a tough time to be in business because Amazon, to a great extent, has shaped all of our expectations. And companies will say all the time, “We're not Amazon.” Okay. But what are you? And what have we learned from that ? And it's changed all of our expectations for access and immediacy and flexibility. My last book was called Why Customers Leave and How to Win Them Back. And I would be asked the question “Why do customers leave?” And I said, “Because they can.” Because we can. And if you're a little bit frustrating, then it's just so easy to find somebody else.

And I'm not suggesting that customer loyalty is dead. I'm just saying it's a lot harder to earn and a lot harder to keep because it's becoming increasingly easy to leave you for someone else. And so when business leaders have this laissez- faire attitude about retention, “Our clients, our customers love us,” right? Yeah. But how easy would it be to draw them away? Because as we look at “How do we retain, how do we keep our customers happy?” There's a whole category of people out there who are trying to take your longtime customers and convert them into their first time customers. And so we actually, it's a great introspective exercise with organizations, say, “What do you think it would take to lure your best customers away?” And we’d better be able to address that and be able to have a counter to that because expectations are changing.

Robert Zirk: Jim Mitchell is vice president of customer experience and digital innovation at TELUS International, and he's observed significant changes in just the past five years with regards to customer expectations and how they relate to technology and business practices.

Jim Mitchell: The areas that I've noticed where speed is really becoming an issue is reduced tolerance in wait times. Historically, we may have seen customers that are comfortable with a five minute or more wait time, but now, if they're on hold for too long, they'll say, “Wait a minute, I have options. How else can I do this? And I'll hang up.” And they might move to the chat channel. They might move to email. They might move to self care. But I think the speed of mobile devices has really reset our expectations with instant gratification. We can bring something up. We can find it quickly. And they expect 24/7 today.

As a CX leader, make sure you are in tune with where this is headed because you need to adapt and you need to provide that low effort experience. And if you don't, your competitors will. And so, be very cognizant of that.

Robert Zirk: But before you go about making big changes to your CX delivery, there's another important question to consider: Are there generational differences in terms of customer expectations?

According to David, customer expectations are generally evolving in a uniform way, but the differences are more pronounced when it comes to channel preferences.

David Avrin: I think the comfort level with how we engage and pay and buy and return and communicate – all of that is different. Younger generations, of course, much more comfortable with the electronic versions of some of those processes and older people, as a broad generalization, are oftentimes less comfortable with that. They want the option of that real person.

Robert Zirk: A TELUS International survey found that nearly half of all respondents said that if there was only one option for customer support for the rest of their lives, they'd want to speak with a human over the phone. And, in a Statista survey of American consumers, 86% of respondents said it was either important or very important to have a human option available when interacting with a business.

David Avrin: I think there will always be somewhat of a generational difference, but I think right now we’re probably seeing the greatest chasm between the wants and the less comfortable than we probably will see because we've got technology natives and we've got some of those late adopters as well. I think there'll be a point in the next 10 years where pretty much everybody will be comfortable, at least familiar, with many of the mechanisms.

Robert Zirk: But it's important to understand your audience and their preferences and not to go by assumptions.

David Avrin: I was in the audience, getting ready to do a noontime keynote, but it was the morning session and there was a panel of these millennial tech entrepreneurs. And they're sitting there going, “Yeah, nobody wants to talk on the phone.”

We thought to ourselves, “You know what, you don't want to talk on the phone, but for all of us in business, I've got clients who are in their early twenties and I've got clients who are in their early eighties. And we have to serve all of them.”

You can talk to these prognosticators saying, “Here's how business is done, here's how you do electronic transactions.” But the reality is there will always be a portion of our audience – and those over 50 constitute the majority of the spending in America – who are less comfortable. I think the onus is on us to accommodate this as best we can. Doesn't mean we have to provide every option to every person across the board. It's not feasible, but I think we need to make an effort, whether it's how we pay or how we communicate.

Robert Zirk: A frustrating example David recalled was when he went to get breakfast at a drive-thru on the way to a speaking engagement.

David Avrin: I said “I'll do your $1.99 special.” And they said, “No, you have to use the app.” And I said, “I don't have the app.” And they said “You can pull over and download the app.” And I said, “Thank you for that permission, but…” and they said, “We can't do it without it.”

Robert Zirk: So David pulls over.

David Avrin: I filled out the form. I had to pull out my wallet. I had to enter my credit card information, everything had to be perfect. And then I had to go back in line. could have just given me the deal. Now I understand why they want to do it that way. But it makes it very difficult and very frustrating. And it was at the point of contact. They were about to make a sale and they added frustration to the process.

Robert Zirk: I asked David whether he's seeing an increase in the amount of pain points along customer journeys.

David Avrin: What we're seeing now is organizations adding friction to the process all with the intention of capturing your information. I think we're in a phase right now where I think companies are experimenting. How much are we willing to put up with in the name of convenience? Well, it might be convenient for them, but it becomes less and less convenient for us. And of course, it's the law of diminishing return. At some point, we'll get frustrated enough that we're going to say, “I'm done with this. I'm going to go somewhere else.”

Robert Zirk: He shared the example of Target, one of the largest retailers in the U.S.

David Avrin: They're bringing back checkers. They're reducing the amount of self-checkout. They're restricting the amount of items that you can do with self-checkout. And I think it's because we're just still trying to figure out – we have the technology, we have the ability to offload certain things to customers, but I don't know that we're clear on how much we're willing to put up with. And so I think we're still shaking some of those things out, and I think a lot of that will be clear in the next year or two.

Robert Zirk: When implementing technology, brands need to carefully consider how it might be used and how it will impact the customer journey. David notes that technology can be useful to help expedite or simplify processes, but cautions against it just becoming an additional point of friction.

David Avrin: If technology gets somebody to a real person faster, helps direct them to the right answers faster then I think it can be embraced. But if it's a distraction, if it is adding additional barriers between what you want and being able to get it, then it causes frustration. Just give us an off ramp to a real person. Give us an off ramp to be able to exit whatever maze that we're in to get what we want quickly.

I was speaking in Bogota, Colombia at a customer experience event, and there was a company that was touting that, as a result of their automated initiatives, they had reduced the amount of actual call center calls and the length of those calls by 80%. And I had a question for them. Is that because people got quick resolution to their issues or that you just denied access to real people?

It's real easy to say to look how we've increased our numbers, but at what cost did it correspond to issue resolution or did it correspond to restricting access by the people? So yeah, people didn't need to talk to nearly as many customers because they weren't able to get to them. So we've got to be real careful with the measures that we're using. And are we accomplishing something that ultimately is preferable to the customers?

Robert Zirk: If measurements aren't connected with customer expectations and outcomes, it can have a negative ripple effect. Not only does success get benchmarked to ineffective metrics, but it can result in costly, inefficient investments while creating a wider gap between your business goals and what it takes to keep customers happy. When there's consideration for what customers expect and how they stand to benefit, alongside business objectives, it's more likely that measurements will have greater meaning and impact.

A brand celebrating some new automation and removing a customer service channel should be careful to review the change’s impact over time, asking questions like what impact did it have on customer effort scores, first contact resolution, retention rates and sentiment analysis.

Implementing generative AI in CX, for example, could boost certain KPIs. But you can't lose track of the customer. You need to balance the potential with satisfying customer outcomes. Today, many CX leaders are trying to do exactly that. I asked Jim about what he's seeing in the marketplace and he referenced an Everest Group survey supported by TELUS International, where...

Jim Mitchell: 200 CX leaders were surveyed and only 7 percent actually had GenAI in a steady state across the organization, meaning there's still a ways to go here. But what was interesting is that in the next 6 to 12 months, a majority of them have budgets and plans in place for getting into GenAI. Some of the hesitation we're hearing right now is legal, security, compliance, data leakage – those are all things right now that a lot of companies are facing. It's not just a matter of training the data and releasing the bot.

Robert Zirk: But while they may be holding off on deployment for now, many brands are busy preparing generative AI instances. The same Everest Group survey that Jim cited shows that 55% of CX leaders have allocated at least $1 million of their budgets toward generative AI in 2024.

Jim Mitchell: The wave is building. Quite often we'll get questions like, “So, how do I get started?” We developed an 8 week GenAI Jumpstart program that helps companies identify areas to get started, and during this 8 week program, we get on and we understand their business. But they come out of the 8 week program with a GenAI pilot. That's the whole idea. It's an eight week program to get you started. It might be something simple like a co-pilot or an agent assist or something of that nature, but it gets the toe in the water, gets things moving.

Robert Zirk: Jim went on to dive into an example of agent assist technology that TELUS International deployed in support of a North American client that was swamped with escalations.

Jim Mitchell: We went and we looked at it and we made one little tweak with what we called Intelligent Assist, better known in the market as an agent assist, but we focused on truck rolls…

Robert Zirk: …which is dispatching a technician to the customer's location…

Jim Mitchell: …meaning that the team member is trying to prevent a truck roll. In this case, redispatch of actions, they had service fee refunds, they had techniques for identifying high risk claims, Q&A for general account technical jargon, they didn't learn mechanical, electrical and plumbing codes. I only say all this confusing line of things to say the work was pretty complex that they were doing, in defense of the agent without the proper training.

After we deployed this digital coworker to really get in and address these areas, get this: we had a 40% improvement in CSAT, 9% reduction in average handle time, 90% accuracy in responses, which thereby reduced escalations.

Robert Zirk: David notes that although it might seem counterintuitive in the short term, businesses need to make the touch points that are traditionally tedious for customers, like returns, cancellations or reporting service outages, just as seamless as their initial purchase experience.

David Avrin: The reality is the world is different and today we have a bullhorn that reaches around the world. We grew up in business understanding what we used to call guest relations philosophy. And everybody's heard some version of it, right? And it goes: the average person with a positive experience tells two or three people, but somebody with a negative experience tells 10 or some version of that, right?

Today, none of that is true. Today, we tell thousands. Today, we tell millions. Today, the ramifications of underperformance, of frustrating your customers, of being difficult to work with, the ramifications are profound. Because, as I said, we have the means and mechanisms to complain and reach people across the country, around the world. So I think, even some of those traditional frustrating things, I think it's really important that we allow people to leave if they want to leave because we're arming people who are very frustrated, and today getting more and more frustrated, to trash us online and otherwise.

There's always going to be a certain amount of people that are unhappy with something, but I address that in the book in multiple ways is make it ridiculously easy to cancel if they need to, or make it ridiculously easy to agree to a contract. We see people all the time that work out a great understanding and somebody pushes over their contract, and it’s 14 pages. And now all of a sudden there's some trepidation like, “Whoa, wait, what am I signing here?”

Robert Zirk: Jim shared an anecdote about a client that chose to pivot and make it easy for customers to cancel services.

Jim Mitchell: A very large subscription-based business had it set up to where the only way you cancel is you had to search around for an 800 number that was really hard to find. Otherwise, there was no chance of canceling. Then you had to call and then team members were quick to overcome the objection. “How can we save the customer?” And they found this approach was causing very high DSAT.

Robert Zirk: That's Customer Dissatisfaction score.

Jim Mitchell: And oftentimes numerous callbacks and frustrations and also folks asking for retro refunds. “I've been fighting this for two months and I want out of this.”

So they said, you know what, let's go ahead and switch this over to no-hassle cancellation. We're going to put this up, very easy to find, right on the opening page or in the app. Strategically, they made a decision. They said, “We need to earn the customer's business every day. We're not going to create all this friction in the channel.”

And what was very interesting, after they had 90 to 120 days of making it easy for folks to unsubscribe, they found customers were coming back because of the ease of being able to cancel, and the returning customers, make sure and hear this, the returning customers far outweighed the short-term gains that were being made through the frontline team members trying to save the customer.

So really, what was important here was really enhanced customer satisfaction. It built trust, reduces customer effort, decreases negative feedback and churn, really streamlined operations, but it did reduce costs.

Robert Zirk: David notes that the brands who are differentiating themselves through seamless experiences start by asking big questions about their customer journey.

David Avrin: The smartest companies are the ones who are taking very well-known points of frustration and asking a pretty basic question, which is, “If we were going to start over, would we design it that way? Or could we design it a different way?” That's disruption.

You saw that with SmileDirectClub and Invisalign as a different way of how we traditionally straightened our teeth.

But I think the most obvious examples are companies like Uber. They started small as well. What are the points of frustration, right? It's trying to get through on the line to order a taxi. It's sitting there, double parked in traffic, pulling out your credit card, and trying to make that payment, and getting a receipt afterwards. They eliminated all those things. The fear of “Who is it that's going to come pick me up?” so you can see who it is, you can see what they look like, what their rating is, you get in and you get out, and so they've done a very good job, but there's also smaller companies.

One I mentioned in the new book, Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With, is, where I am here in Denver, Colorado, we have a car dealership and you think about the traditional things that we all hate about the new car buying process, right? The time that it takes and everything else. And so it's a dealership called the Schomp dealerships and they have something called the one Promise, and it's “One price, one person, one hour.” If you look at the competitive marketplace and you're looking to buy a car, is that not attractive to you? The idea of A: we're not haggling, which is a huge point of contention. We're not gonna have to be there all day, which is that ploy that they use to try and get us to invest a whole day and then we don't want to start over somewhere else. And so the whole idea of that, that one Promise, that “One price, one person, one hour,” and yes, they did trademark that, is a brilliant example of what identifying all those points of friction, the things that repel us as consumers, and saying “Could we address it in a way that makes us not just competent” – and this is the key and it's throughout the book as well – “but preferable?”

Now, it's more than just the experience, because I don't think, even from a service perspective, right? ‘Cause I don't talk about customer service. I think we get that. I think we know how to be nice to people. We've been talking about it for 50 years, but the experience is different and sometimes the experience doesn't involve a person at all.

We think about the banking sector. For eons, if you asked them what their competitive advantage is, they would all say the same thing: it's the relationship, right? We know our customers by name. 99% of my transactions now, my interactions are on my cell phone. I get done with speaking at an event or they hand me a check, I sit in the back of the Uber and I take a picture of it and I deposit in my account.

There is no customer service, but there's absolutely an experience, isn't there? And so companies that are really smart, and most of them are very smart, are looking at ways: How do we shave off time? How do we simplify a process? How do we take a 14 step process and turn it into a five step process? And what we become in that process is preferable.

Robert Zirk: Jim noted that to begin any type of process improvement, you need to start by understanding and mapping out the customer journey.

Jim Mitchell: You have to highlight where the easy wins are. What areas can you easily grab? What's your short and long term roadmap? Where are your self-serve options? As a customer coming in, how can you provide the easy route for them to get their problem solved from a self care?

But mobile optimization is another big part. You've got to look at what mobile tools. Quite often companies are saying, “We're putting this on the website.” “Well, we haven't got to the mobile yet.” We need to get to the mobile, get to the app part of it.

Basic examples of reducing a customer effort comes into live chats, proactive, reactive chats. Offer callbacks to reduce effort. I know it sounds basic, but offer callbacks. Don't let callers wait on hold too long if there's long hold times. Not a lot of companies deploy it, but it's something that's easily deployable.

Proactive notifications. Let them know about service updates, order status issues that have been resolved, prevent that call, inform them, bring them up to date. A large furniture, online furniture retailer – I love it now when you order from them – they show you exactly where the truck is, like, on a map on your phone. So I get this push notification that shows I'm out for delivery. It shows exactly where that truck is and it shows when it's in my neighborhood and when they're going to make the delivery. I love stuff like that. Again, proactive. Does that prevent a call? Heck yes, it does, because I know exactly where my order is.

Robert Zirk: Robust internal processes can help team members address many of the unknowns that customers are looking for answers to, which, in turn, creates seamless experiences for both your employees and customers.

Jim shared the story of when he was visiting the in-house contact center of a logistics company.

Jim Mitchell: I remember within the first half-hour, I'm sitting there and I'm doing side by sides and I have the headset on and the agent looks down and he pulls his drawer open. And he's got these spreadsheets laid out in his drawer. And on these spreadsheets were the most commonly asked questions. So after the call, I said, “Hey,” I said, “you opened your drawer during the call. What was that all about?”

He said, “The knowledge base is just so vast. You get in there, you can't find information. I have to put callers on hold. So we have this, like, under the waterline cheat sheet when new employees come on. Really not supposed to have paper on the floor.” Again, this is not our call center. This is a client call center. He said, “We're not supposed to have these papers on the floor, but we still hand them out for survival. We have to have them.”

I said, “That's got to change. You have to have a better access.” He said, “I've been here four years,” and he said, “we just have learned to adapt so we can take care of the customer experience.”

Robert Zirk: So once TELUS International partnered with the company, it deployed speech analytics to identify the most frequent reasons for calls.

Jim Mitchell: We narrowed it down to about 50 knowledge base articles, which comprise about 90 percent of the call volume. And then what we did is we summarized those articles. Some of those articles were like five pages long. Put yourself in a frontline team member’s position. Somebody's asked a question. You're not sure of it. You’ve got to read five pages to get to the answer. That's just not right. So we summarized these articles down to just the concise information. What is it that they actually needed?

From there, we then put it into a knowledge base chatbot and then we bolted it onto their current chatbot. Their IT department said, “Oh, we don't have time for any technology changes.” We said, “No, we got this. You won't have to do anything. We're just going to put it right on top of your current knowledge base.” They said “Hey, more power to you if you can do it.”

We did it. And almost overnight, we saw a change in this. And so what happened was now imagine you're sitting at a frontline team member’s desk and a question is asked. You drop in just a couple of keywords. The right side of your screen, the knowledge is summarized right there, and the coolest thing is the team member can actually respond to questions, oftentimes without even breaking stride in the conversation, because the customer is asking a question, they're putting a couple of words in. Boom, it pops up. They look to the right. They grab the information.

It reduced average handle time by 38 seconds, which was a 19 percent reduction. But here's the really important part: CSAT went up by nine points. Why? We weren't putting callers on hold anymore. We had the information, we were making it effortless, but one of the key parts that I walked away with: frontline team member satisfaction went up because everybody wants to do a good job when they're taking care of the customer, but now they had the ability, especially the new folks in their first 90 days, to where they could actually respond quickly, respond promptly, get off the call and say, “I did a good job,” and the customer was happy. And the final result was lower attrition.

Robert Zirk: Though traditional success metrics like CSAT and AHT are important, David advises CX leaders to also adopt additional approaches to understand customer sentiment, like social media monitoring and direct response questions.

David Avrin: I think smart companies have strong voice of the customer initiatives where they're proactively asking the kinds of questions that are really important. And so I think there's no shortage of mechanisms. The question is what are we asking? Who are we asking and why? And then, of course, there's frustration points that can come from asking too often. And so I just think it's important that we prioritize as an organization, whether small business, larger business, that we're hearing back from them and we're not becoming a frustration point.

We've all had situations where we make a purchase and then we get an email saying, “Please take our survey.” And then you don't, two days later, you get a reminder about doing it. By the fourth time they've asked you to take their survey, your experience might've been fine, but now you're frustrated because you've been asked so many times.

So I think we're still, once again, learning about where the public's tolerance is for that. I just think it's important that we have an organizational commitment to listening and a mechanism to do something with the feedback that we've received. And it doesn't mean that everything that somebody wants is something that we're able to provide, but I think early intervention is really important for those who might get frustrated and very quickly go in and share something online.

Every time I'm traveling, if I rent a car, I go back to Enterprise and they say, “Welcome back, Mr. Avrin. How was the Camry?” or whatever. I said, “It was fine.” And then they ask me the same question every time: “Is there anything we could have done to have made this a more outstanding experience?” And what they're really saying is, “Please don't go on TripAdvisor and trash us. Let me fix it now.” I think it's super smart, right? I've seen that in the middle of tables and restaurants saying “If something isn't right, don't tell Yelp, tell us and let us make it right.”

I talk about the company HappyOrNot. We've all seen those little kiosks with four buttons from a smiley face to whatever. It's a way for people to say very quickly, did you like this? Did you not? And then further questions, if you feel like it, but their response rate is 10 times the industry average because of the simplicity of the process. Nobody has to do anything onerous to give them the kind of feedback that they need.

Robert Zirk: In other words, don't forget that the customer journey doesn't end once the sale is made. Brands shouldn't expect customers to take 20 minutes out of their day to complete several pages of a survey. Instead, David advises leaders to make it easy for people to provide feedback and streamline your questions to the few that matter most.

David Avrin: There's a lot of data out there and there's actually a chapter where I talk about it in the book about saying, based on how many questions you ask, the response rate. And how simple it is – people don't want to engage in something if they think it's going to be onerous. Look at it from the perspective of a book. If you pick up a book and it's got 800 pages, you don't even want to start because it's daunting. And so that's a bad word in business. If something seems daunting, they're less likely to embark on the process. And so, smart companies are expediting, they're simplifying, they're cutting out process. And some still have to figure that out, but the marketplace speaks pretty clearly.

Robert Zirk: In a PwC survey of American consumers, efficiency was identified the most in terms of its importance to the customer experience, as well as what consumers would be willing to pay more for. And a Forrester report shows that when companies solve customer problems faster, they’re 2.4 times more likely to retain those customers.

If you don't know where to begin on streamlining your processes and creating effortless experiences, Jim notes that a partner like TELUS International can help from the first stages of customer journey mapping to strategic digital transformation and beyond.

Jim Mitchell: What a lot of clients like is with us having over 650 clients, we can come to them and say, “This is working with other clients today, we can reduce your risk, this is known, it will work for you,” and because the conversation so often goes back to ROI, “If I invest in this, how long will it take for me to get a return on my investment? Will I see better CSAT?” If you have those case studies, that really helps.

Robert Zirk: Thank you so much to David Avrin and Jim Mitchell for joining me and sharing their insights today. David's new book, Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With, is available now from Classified Press and can be found on Amazon and Kindle, with an audiobook version coming soon. You can find the link to it in the podcast description as well.

Thanks for listening to Questions for now – a TELUS International podcast, and be sure to follow on your podcast player of choice as we have lots of great episodes on the way.

I'm Robert Zirk, and until next time, that's all... for now.