Why DIY is The New Best Customer Experience
More people go to modern market nowadays, instead of traditional market. If you ask them why, many of them will say because of its cozy ambiance. And if you’re one of them, ADMIT IT, deep inside your heart, the real reason you go to modern market is so you won’t need to talk with strangers just to get your milk. But, it all comes down to one thing: time spent.
Objective Time vs Psychological Time
There are a lot of reports showing that the need of speeds is increasing. There are so many factors that make this happening right now. The biggest factor among them is (in my opinion) is ‘Load Time’. On recent reports made by Awwards.com “Brain Food Vol. 3: Speed Matters”, there is a big gap between older & younger generation about how they perceive speed. Younger generation tend to expect an ‘instant’ load time when it comes to opening a web page.
Why is that? Why do people have different perceptions of speed? There are two kinds of ‘time’ we’re going to talk about. This is the basic principle on why DIY (Do It Yourself) Customer Experience will be the new best customer experience. Objective time is a time that can be measured by a stopwatch. People may acknowledge that 5 seconds is super fast. But when it comes to online browsing, that 5 seconds time span is arguably SLOW this time around. Why? Websites and apps keep improving their loading time, so people perceived it as slow. There is a new standard of speed installed on people’s mind. So, in psychological time, there is CONTEXT. This context is created by what people have been experiencing and understand in their life. When Usain Bolt broke Men’s 100m record by 9.58s, people amazed and goes “Whoa, that was frickin fast”. But, most people will go crazy when your web or app opened in the same amount of time Usain Bolt’s had to win his gold medal.
You see, the younger generation time is mostly spent online, and clearly more than any older generation. What’s the correlation between time spent online and the perception of speed?
People Are Demanding
Have you ever heard of Omni Directional Chunking? It’s a theory in Neuro Language Programming (NLP) that explain how people constructed their own perception of the world. People always use their past experience to judge their current experience, even if it is something that is entirely different. People have the tendency to generalize everything, like, if something is possible, then other things should also be possible. You probably have this question too before: “Why can I catch Pokemon while travelling around?”. And you know what happened next. Or let’s go way back, when people were asking, “Why can’t we fly like a bird?”. Airplane was born. And so on.
So, spending time online, with all the speed provided, greatly affected their perception of time. Because it is human nature to compare everything, always asking to have the same ‘good experience’ on everything. Even if it’s not apple to apple.
Technology Growth
These days, more and more app is born. So many young generation can easily claim to be a CEO or CMO (well, that’s another story). The thing is, most of these apps, require users to do everything on their own. The most terrifying fact (if it’s not funny) for me, is that in my country (Indonesia), if you can’t use the app, your friends will label you as ‘uncultured swine’ or ‘Ndeso’ in my native language.
Before the era of GO-JEK (Indonesian’s Uber), customers just had to call and tell them where they are, and the driver will search the way. Now, customers are required to pin their exact location so the driver can pick them up easily. The other example is on online shopping. Before marketplace apps is booming, customers just need to contact customer service, ask for pic variant, send data, confirm payment. In market place, customers are required to search, picking products, add to cart, picking shipment, picking payment method, provide data, etc. before they can use the service: The product itself.
Hey! Don’t get me wrong, yes of course, I LOVE IT. Because it’s faster, simpler & better that way. I just want to point out that you can ‘tell’ your customer to do something, in exchange for faster, simpler and better product delivery process.
People changes. So are the way business works. Thus, customer experience also need to change it form. I’m not talking about getting rid of all the old ‘best customer experience’, but how technology changed our surroundings need to be taken for consideration to add more ‘sauce’ in them. Just because your business is not ‘digital’, doesn’t mean you don’t need to change your customer experience. Remember, people love to generalize everything, even if it is an entirely different thing. As far as I understand, there are 2 core principles that you can’t afford to miss.
Don’t Make Them Wait, Don’t Make Them Think
Clearly, millennial (as far as I think it just a buzzword), will be our top customers one day (if not already) just like any other generations. Business need to change the way their service works, from just ‘usual services’ to VIP Services. There will be no doubt that business should always give the best service to the customer. One thing to note, you cannot afford to not provide ‘human customer service’, ever (I will explain more of this later on this article). What needs to change is the complexity of how customers can be served. Business need to simplify their service process. People value their time, their perception of speed is becoming faster and faster. That’s what these new ‘Digital Startup’ were tackling: The simplicity of their business process. Simple means faster. Simple should be easy to use.
Many people are already packed with their complex life. Don’t give them more headache when they interact with your business.
Speed of Service is Important, But…
The last time I visited a travel agent, the customer service are the one who do all the clicks and keyboard taps and I just sit there waiting and drink the coffee they served. Today, I don’t want to spend hours just to get my tickets, even if they do all the work and make a cup of coffee. I want it in a minute, even if I have to do all the work. This is the key to what I like to call ‘DIY Customer Experience’.
The perception of speed have a very high impact on this ‘DIY Customer Experience’ era. In that travel agent case, maybe the amount of time for me to input my flight information is the same as when the agent do it. But the amount of time wasted for driving, parking, waiting are making me stressed without realizing. And when the customer service do the work for me, it feels like forever. Remember what kind of time is that? Yes, psychological time.
So, if you’re confident on how fast your speed of service is, I want to ask a question: Have you calculated on how much time or effort your customers put just to be able to use your product?
This article series is continued on this article:
Improving Customer Satisfaction by Making Customers Do It Themselves
NB: sorry for my bad English :)
