What could go wrong in tackling customer interaction

There are many ways where customer interactions could go wrong and come short in fulfilling the desired expectations.

Customer Interaction is a by product of dealing with your client, and it could take three major formats:

- Ignoring it, and dealing with it as an area of cost with no strategic value. In this category you go with what the circumstances dictate as a means to communicate or as a way to exchange Data and documents with no consideration of the level of sensibility of this type of data and document. You are going with the trend of using for example social platforms to exchange data and documents, or using emails and messages [Scanning or texting], or even handling it in a physical format of paper. And here we can talk about the level of risks that goes with having a weak level of security around your exchange and to some extent the level of availability of the exchanged Data and document to you as a business in standard format where it could be reusable and easily referenced.

- Handling it as an interface with customers by adopting applications or platforms to standardize the format of exchange and taking the security component more seriously to protect the business and the customers. This approach represents a big leap in comparison with the first approach. Though in this context, due to the fact that not all clients are confident in those public solutions in terms of security nor all of them feel comfortable giving access to their bank accounts to retrieve required information for accounting purposes for example, your business ends up adopting different channels based on the preferences of your customers. The shortcoming of this approach besides the fact that may come with some level of overload of work and extra cost, they are narrowing the focus of getting benefit from the customer interaction in smoothing the exchange only one way [From Customer to the business] or two ways when using different platforms. This approach responds to the need of interaction in the operational level and as a commodity.

- Third approach is getting in control of customer interaction holistically where the business as a whole is getting benefits by embarking in it. And here, the business brings the channel of exchange by covering both sides of standards Security and Availability for both business and customer. Here the interaction translates into a journey of exchanges customer-centric focused and propagated to be reflected in the workflow of the fulfillment model to bring overall benefit and alignment. This approach takes the customer interaction to the next level to empower the user with self-service capability and personalized relevant information that support the customer experience as a whole.

Here we can see that customer interaction as an area of focus could go beyond the limit of communication to guiding the growth of the Business and the satisfaction of the customer.

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