Customer Trust: The Forgotten Heart Of The Customer Experience
Not long ago, the face of customer experience (CX) for a services company was a human agent. And the best agents held the line between customer trust and customer attrition. Today, increasingly, we’re greeted by technology that has the potential to build or break customer trust. And as every brand goes after scale, it becomes more critical than ever for brands to understand the importance of using technology correctly and as an enabler of customer trust. Today, I would hazard a guess that we fail more often in this regard than win.
Imagine a scenario in which you’ve been a loyal customer for many years, and you miss a bill payment deadline due to unforeseen circumstances. You expect the brand to understand, but instead, automated programs now bother you with messages and calls. And in many cases, a service shutdown follows.
How do we create moments of delight when our customer least expects it? How do we ensure technology comes to our aid in removing customer irritations versus creating them?
Ingredients Of Building Customer Trust
The best CX organizations always work “customer back” when they solve problems. In the previous example, if a brand chooses to invest in technology systems such as a data management platform (DMP) and build customer-centric business policies, we could create moments of delight.
Let’s discuss this further:
Customer-Centric Business Policies
In the age of large language models (LLMs), the reality is that in most enterprises, business policies are still a set of rules. Over time, revenue-related pressures typically result in these rules being revised in customer-unfriendly ways. Here are a few recommendations on how to ensure business policies reflect customer trust.
Cohort your customers for a more segmented business policy. For high-value customers, ensure the policy rolls out the red carpet with ample empathy built in. For new customers, ensure they’re treated very well for at least 90 days so they fall in love with your service. For customers who cost more to service than the value they bring, policies can be strict and may even lead to letting go of the customer.
Ensure transparency in your services. There’s no better way to lose customer trust than to confuse them into buying a service. Imagine credit cards advertising a 23% interest rate and suddenly you see a card with a 0.6% interest rate. It makes sense that customers will prefer the latter card. The only problem here was that 23% was the annual percentage rate and 0.6% was the daily percentage rate written in fine print.
Give customers an experience instead of a hard sell. Imagine you’re flying premium economy with an airline and the customer service executive upgrades you to the business tier to offer you a more enhanced and exclusive experience at no extra charge. Wouldn’t this delight you as a customer? If organizations can let customers experience an upgrade at a marginal cost, discerning customers would consider paying more for the services they love.
Technology Systems That Drive Personalization At Every Touchpoint
A technology stack acts as the orchestrator of business policies laid by an organization. For instance, imagine you renewed a subscription at a brand’s physical store. The next minute, you're bombarded with renewal offers from different touchpoints (e.g., SMS, WhatsApp and telemarketer calls) of the same brand. Wouldn't this experience irk you as a customer? This is where the technology stack comes into play. To build the right stack, organizations will need to consider investing in the following:
Data Management Platform (DMP): This is the differentiator that helps build a compassionate technology system that can be programmed to serve the customer and create moments of delight. Having a unified customer master that serves as the singular data source is the right starting point for building a DMP. This data source enables the DMP to understand the identity, preference and intent of the customer to deliver a personalized CX.
Channel Automation: Today, customers interact with brands online and offline. Online systems (such as apps and websites) need to be connected to the DMP to provide a contextual experience. Similarly, offline channels (such as retail stores and customer service agents) need to be enabled with tools (such as field-workforce apps and contact center suites) to provide the necessary context and intelligence to assist customers. Such systems can deliver simple yet delightful experiences such as a customer being addressed by their name on every channel.
Marketing Tech: Once you have the DMP and the right tooling in every channel, the connective tissue is a mar-tech platform that ensures the intelligence in the DMP can be delivered across channels in a personalized manner with minimum latency and maximum throughput. In other words, a mar-tech platform deeply integrated with the DMP and channels helps ensure that customer communication is relevant, contextual, on-time and optimized to increase customer lifetime value.
The Journey Ahead: A Mindset Of CX Innovation
Implementing these "ingredients" has become table stakes. For brands that have reached this milestone, there's no time to rest. Just as the concept of 10-minute food delivery was unheard of a few years back but is now a reality in many parts of the world, customer expectations will continue to evolve.
Continuous innovation is the only way to stay in the race, and I believe that technologies like deep learning, the metaverse and blockchain will play a critical role. Imagine a future in which you're purchasing a new home, and the real-estate company leverages AI to recommend paint colors based on your tastes. Furthermore, using the metaverse, the company showcases the final paint output to you as a 3-D model and this entire experience is offered in a privacy-safe manner using blockchain. Wouldn't this experience delight you? Such cutting-edge experiences are bound to become commonplace in the future.
In conclusion, building and maintaining customer trust has become more critical than ever in today’s omnichannel world. Thus, customer-centric business policies, the right technology systems and a mindset of continuous innovation can allow organizations to consistently deliver a delightful CX.