Customer Support Experience and why we have to talk about it.
With too many products and services in our life, too many petty problems related to them arise. How has solving a petty problem become a huge task for the user is the question. And how do we make solving this petty problem pretty fast is the solution. But it is easier said than done.
So, what is “customer support experience”?
Imagine it’s your daughter’s 1st birthday, the hype is real and you have ordered biryani using an online food delivery app, for all your guests. It’s prepaid and all you have to do is wait for the doorbell to ring.
It’s well past its delivery time and everyone is getting hungry but there is no sign of the food. You open the app and check the status of your order, the status seems to be stuck at “ preparing food”. Worried, you try to contact support and are directed to a chatbox.
The chat greets you and gives you a set of options for frequently occurring problems.
The delivery person not picking up.
The food was spoilt.
The packaging was broken.
None of them is yours but you have to select an option as you don’t have the freedom to type. So you select the delivery person not picking up. The bot goes on to enquire about the order. Meanwhile, the children at the party are going restless and you still don’t know if you are waiting for late delivery or a reorder. The chatbot keeps sending the same message on repetition until u get an option. “ would you like to talk to an agent?”
And then you are transferred to an agent who then goes on to solve your problem. This is your customer support and the whole process from ordering the food until the end is your experience as a customer.
Customer experience is your customers’ perception of how your company treats them. These perceptions affect their behaviors and build memories and feelings to drive their loyalty.
This whole process often leads to a lot of frustration and irritation. this can harm the brand as well as the acceptability towards a whole product category. For example, people might stop trusting online food delivery systems altogether.
This is just an example. It is understood that when anybody contacts customer support they are always in a fix and need a quick way out. Any problem not a small problem, a broken laptop, an undelivered food package everything creates distress and creates an irreparable loss for the user.
While this loss cannot be avoided entirely, the process of getting help and problem solving can be made more pleasant and efficient than it already is.
So how does this system work?
Many companies have a combination of support channels for effective support. Most small consumer-based service companies have two to three channels that may or may not be internally connected.
So, a team of customer support agents work on the other end and try to remotely solve the problem when any user contacts them. They handle multiple complaints in a day as quickly as they can.
The user side has an interface through which they can contact the customer support agent directly or go through other self-help channels before getting in touch with an agent.
Research and Insights
For a primary research, I interviewed multiple people from different educational backgrounds and ages. They were asked to share their experience for three categories, dealing with an electronic gadget, a government asset, an immediately consumable good.
After the interviews, the insights were drawn from the common patterns seen in the user flow and the common pain points.
In conclusion,
The choice of channel and the user flow is different for type of products and services. Based on these user behaviors I made some user personas that would help design solutions for them by understanding the persona product matrix.
INSIGHTS FROM DESIGN RESEARCH
- Customer support type and the way it functions have two factors that affect user experience, the type of product, and the type of persona.
- The same persona might behave like another for a different product.
- Another approach to study user behavior can be based on the type of product or service.
THE ICEBERG MODEL
The Iceberg Model helps expand a situation and see an event as a whole system and not as the action itself. It helps one step back and identify the different patterns that the event is part of, the possible structure that might be causing them, and the mental model that is leading to these structures.
To understand the system better, I did an Iceberg Model Analysis of the different behaviors of a user hoping to understand what was the mental model behind it.
To understand more about the iceberg model, please refer to
INSIGHTS FROM THE ICE-BERG MODEL
- The user is dependent on a known person for a costly product needing urgent fixing.
- Calls are mostly done by a person who is frustrated and wants a human to do his job without question.
- Need accountability and answers in real-time
- The user feels treated unfairly.
GAPS IN THE SYSTEM
- Alternative until AI is advanced enough
- Visibility of status
- Agent ping pong
DESIGN OPPORTUNITIES
- A common Consumer product assistant for individuals.
- Customized support systems for specific industries.
- Participatory solutions, more self-help based solutions
- Humanizing the process for agents
The insights from design research gave information about how things work and how people react differently to different products and mediums.
The Iceberg model analysis gave a deeper understanding of these behaviors. It answered why the user behaved in a certain way during a given situation. By understanding the structure of the system, gave an understanding of why the system was functioning the way it is and how most of the gaps are actually in the structure of the system and can be changed.
Keeping this in mind and learning from the insights through these models, we can figure out the different ways in which the experience of this service can be improved. So that next time you face a problem, getting help isn’t another problem you have to deal with.
This project was done as part of the “Systems Approach to Design” module for Interaction Design at National Institute of Design, Bangalore under the guidance of Dr. Mamta Rao and Mrs. Jagriti Galphade.
We were asked to pick a topic that interests us. This topic was then used to learn the basics of Design Research Methods and later apply System Thinking Models to find insights that lead to design opportunities. The goal was to understand systems and spot and solve problems at a theme level.
To learn more about the course and the theories used in this blog, please go to the following link.
