Enhance your customer’s digital retail experience
My wife loves shopping at Amazon:
- They make it easy and convenient to order and even re-order from them.
- They have a very large product range.
- They keep to their promised delivery times.
- …and they are great at solving issues as we recently found out.
During a recent visit to London, she had ordered a bunch of stuff (stuff that we probably didn’t really need) and one of the items was partially delivered (we received one item instead of two). We’ve never had an issue with Amazon previously, so my initial thought was that it was probably her mistake and it was meant to be just the one item and not two.
Key takeaway 1: When you’re consistently meeting customer expectations, they’ll question themselves when you mess up and even perhaps, give you the benefit of the doubt.
Quick check on the order history via their app, confirmed that they were supposed to have delivered two items and not one. It was very easy to find their support centre. I started the chat with their bot and straight away it asked me if I had an issue with the order I was previously reviewing. This was pretty impressive and meant that they were really utilising tech to understand their customers better and make their journeys easier.
Key takeaway 2: Somewhere down the line, things will go wrong. It’s your ability to recover from those situations that can have a significant impact on your customer. Poor issue resolution is one of the biggest frustrations for the Kenyan consumer at the moment. How easy is to get in touch with someone within your brand when things go wrong? How quickly can a customer get to a customer agent, or do they get bogged down with IVR options? Do you offer multiple channels for the customers to get in touch and interact with you?
Key takeaway 3: If you’re offering digital services to your customers, how are you monitoring how they use those services?
The chat bot then switched to a human agent, who straight away apologised for the incorrect delivery and offered a solution. I was also happier that I received the apology from a human and not a bot. It felt more genuine. They indicated that due to the way in which their logistics processes worked, they would not be able to ship out the missing item; and indicated that we could keep the one item that was partially delivered. We did not even have to return it to them (although, am guessing if it was a high value order item it would have been different scenario)!
They then gave me a discount code equivalent to the total order value and indicated that I could either use it to re-order the item or it could be used against any other purchase. The agent then asked me if I was happy with the resolution of the case — and I perhaps should have said “No!”, just to see what would happen next!
Key takeaway 4: A lot of buzz at the moment on how AI and chat bots will enhance customer experience. Yes to some extent and if done well but has to be balanced with human customer support dependent on complexity of the problem or whether the customer would like to deal with a human agent instead. The transition between the two has to be seamless.
Key takeaway 5: A great digital experience can only be provided by robust people, processes and of course systems. The off-line world has to support the on-line world.
Key takeaway 6: Things go wrong and customers expect you to resolve them as quickly as possible. Do you have a framework to quickly help your employees to deal with issues? Issue resolution however, does not build loyalty. What does build loyalty is when you do a little bit more and give them something unexpected.
Many thanks to Akshay Shah for this story.
