From phone monkey to keyboard gorilla. How customers evolved and changed the Customer Service industry.
“Thank you for calling Maxis. My name is Joshua. How may I assist you?”
These words were drilled into my skull during my first employment with the giant telco, Maxis. We were taught to listen to customers attentively, understand their underlying issue, check multiple systems for answers and most importantly, not provoke the customer — because the customer is always right!
Back in those days, we answered the phones because someone wanted to speak to us and — let’s be honest — sometimes shout at us simply because they’ve had a bad day. This was what customers wanted back then; to have someone help them understand what on earth was going on and provide a solution. Is it the same with customers today? Let’s take a look at how customers have changed over time.
“Please stay on the line.”
Traditional call centers consisted of a group of people sitting at their desks, wearing a headset and peering at their PCs while dealing with a barrage of calls. I should know; I did this for the first four years of my career speaking to untold numbers of people in the process.
Customers took the effort to call and even wait on the line for 10 minutes, listening to some elevator music that’s jarring to the ear due to bad quality of the audio file, just to get to speak to someone on the other end. Well, if it was a 10-minute wait, then you know that there is a chance that you will be ‘fingered’.
Why were they willing to wait that long? The answer is simple. Back then, customers only had two channels of communication: to phone up the call center or walk into a service center, seeking assistance.
There was another less-used channel, which garnered very little traffic called fax (those of you who are millennials might not have even heard of this). And no, it’s not a swear word though it might sound like one if a Scottish person said “fax”. So yes, customers did not have any other option; they would not go to the press about a minor issue because it required too much effort and wouldn’t result in a fast resolution. This was the age where online media was scarce, the “lightning fast” Internet access in Malaysia was through the use of a 56.5k modem and I believe not everyone had access to it. Can you imagine a world without SOCIAL MEDIA?? OMG! We’ll come to the social media aspect a little later.
The “Golden Era” of customer service
The “Golden Era” of customer service came about in Malaysia when call centers were deemed a cost center and not a profit center. Efficiency levels were taken much more seriously (how much blood can you squeeze from one call center agent), which gave rise to more communication channels with customers.
From just being an inbound call center, organizations moved towards introducing more channels for customer to reach them. And voila — emails!
Emails seemed like the perfect solution for customers as they wouldn’t have to call the company to pour out their grievances. No wait time to start the communication, customers can do it whenever they are free without waiting for the 9am — 6pm business hours as most call centers operated within this time period. Sounds perfect, right? WRONG! Customers would still need to wait for someone to respond to them and then the entire conversation just goes back and forth until the matter is resolved — or until they get frustrated with the back and forth and finally dial the call center. Back to square one.
At this point, call centers were coined “contact centers” because it was “multi channeled”. Based on my experience, it was during this time that customers were pissed off with many organizations because of the long wait time to receive a response.
It was also at this time that I started working as an Operations Management Consultant in VADS where I came across tools that I used daily to communicate with friends around the world (MSN, ICQ, IRC, Yahoo Messenger) and applied these to business. I did bring this up to one of my superiors, saying that we should look into providing a new ‘chat’ feature and generate more new business by way of a new channel for the company. Of course she said, “It’s not going to fly la. Focus on calls.” Note: If that superior is reading this, “I TOLD YOU!” I’ll get back to chat later.
The ‘K’ word
The emergence of new technology changed customers’ demands. They now demand instant communication with instant result, at their convenience. From being at the mercy of organizations, customers now dictated what they want and organizations HAD to deliver. It’s so Generation Y right? Me, me, me, now, now, now!!! But this is exactly what it was — a generation that could not wait and if you don’t give them what they want, they jump ship. With this in mind, the breakthrough to serve customers at their convenience was the big ‘K’ word — Knowledgebase, a set of commonly asked questions that were answered and posted online for all customers to see.
This kick started the self-serve culture within the customer service industry. There was no need to wait for someone to pick up my call, no need to be on hold, listening to boring instrumental music (it would have been good if they gave you an option to choose what music you would be listening to while on hold. I’d pick AC/DC’s Thunderstruck), no need to wait for a response to the email you sent out. This ‘empowered’ the customer to troubleshoot things himself. I use ‘empowered’ here cynically because all it does is actually reduce the number of customers wanting to call in or email by presenting them the solutions to 80% of the common issues they might face. Basic 80–20 rule of Operations. It’s perfect — customer wins, organization wins.
Bad news for Business Process Outsourcers (BPO) though. Less headcount meant less charges to client. A perfect example of this was when AirAsia launched their Knowledgebase called “Ask AirAsia.” Launch day of their Ask AirAsia saw a picture of Tan Sri Tony Fernandes saying, “Hate the call center? Ask me for answers”. Most of us in the industry had a good laugh … except for the BPO that was handling AirAsia’s call center, of course. That period of time saw more and more people swaying towards having their own Knowledgebase as it was a good way to reduce cost and customers would get their answers on the spot … well, 80% of them anyway. So, why does a perfect solution need evolution then? It had the me, me, me, now, now, now element. We still had phones and email as a backup if customers couldn’t find a solution. So, what gives?
The introduction of in-app chats
Human behavior is as such — nothing is ever fast enough, good enough, cheap enough. The emergence of Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many more opened up a new can of worms for almost all businesses. Posts and comments had to be dealt with on the fly. Someone could tag a company about a complaint and the whole world could see it. The more recent evolution of customers is in fact that they want to be able to have all of the above accessible at any point of time without having to search for it and without having to squint to find the answers (lengthy Knowledgebase, small screen).
Knowledgebase is good, but scrolling through the questions via your smart phone can be tedious and sometimes painful when you have to read through a long list. “I’m not gonna run through all your questions in your Knowledgebase. I give you the question, you give me the answer”. That’s the thinking the next generation of customers had. It is easier for them to post a public comment on Social Media than it is for them to search for an answer. #yousuck #CEOpanics #somebodygonnagethurtrealbad #reactiveresolution #mightjustbetoolate. This is where my previous statement to my former supervisor comes into play, “I TOLD YOU!”
With the emergence of technology going to a nano level, customers expect to be serviced within the mobile app that they use. OK, I might have skipped a stage or two in the evolution where chats were incorporated into company’s website first but you get the picture. As I was saying, chat within a mobile app gives you all of the elements a customer of this generation needs. Giving them the option to actually type out their grievances to you directly reduces the number of possible public comments on Social Media, reduces stress on the organization and the Head of Marketing’s ass isn’t gonna be on fire. If a customer has a problem, he does not need to call someone or launch his email client and send out an email just to wait for the response or post some nasty comment on Facebook and Twitter. He simply clicks the chat button and he’s connected to someone who can give him some assistance immediately. All within the app itself.
Rise of the ‘bots’
So, what’s the next step? Is the evolution of serving customers done? Of course not! The Customer Service industry is ever evolving, making things ‘easier’ for customers. When chat was introduced as a Customer Service tool, the players in this field realized that there are similar questions being asked over and over again by multiple customers. The creation of ‘canned responses’ came about, making life easier for Customer Service agents to respond to customers with just a click of a button and a predefined answer was submitted to the customer. Much more effective, efficient and less errors in grammar and information. Now, incorporate this feature with a search engine that feeds on key words and you eliminate the need for the agent to even click that button. You get an automated response engine that reads through your query, matches it with the predefined rules and sends the right answer to the customer. How cool is that? Lightning fast response to customer’s enquiries, less human resource used and the customer is satisfied. These are called chatbots.
Chatbots (bots for short) have been around for quite some time and even the big boys such as Google and Facebook have been using them. You didn’t notice that, did you? Though not fool proof, bots are controlled by the logic you feed them. They are brilliant for handling basic enquiries. The response and logic, for both text and speech bots, always has to be reviewed periodically and even measured for accuracy. The more effective way to do this is via a Customer Satisfaction poll/survey at the end of the conversation with the bot. That way, you hear what your customers say about the predefined logic and responses and you as an organization would need to tweak it to ensure your customer is satisfied with the answer he received. At the end of the day, implementing bots is an initially tedious process but once you get the matrices right for measuring its effectiveness, it does indeed help the organization spend less time responding to customers and more time focusing on their core business. If the bot doesn’t give you the right answer, customers can always say that the response did not solve their problem and can be directed to a keyboard gorilla, a Customer Service agent who is ever willing to assist you further via chat.
The best of all worlds
At HelloGold, we utilize all of the above forms of contact with our customers and moving towards incorporating bots. To date, in-app chat has proved to be the preferred channel for our customers, getting 5 times more interactions with customers as compared to phone calls or emails. For our in-app chat solution, we use Intercom. Intercom is one of the fastest growing tech business in the US and it allows customers not only to initiate chat with us but allows us to send out broadcast messages and even track events that customers execute within our app. Yes, our Knowledgebase sees a decent amount of traffic but as mentioned before, people still like to know that they are being responded to ‘personally’.
At the end of the day, automation and some cool Artificial Intelligence tech would assist to make things more efficient but, sometimes customers need to be handled by a real person. Until we reach the age of technology that comes close to R2D2, I for one still find the need to have the keyboard gorillas attending to customers, bringing that personal touch to a business. Why I say this is because I have been through the entire evolutionary cycle of Customer Service, and at all points of the cycle, you need to have a primate somewhere in the process. I should know for I never forgot my roots; being a phone monkey.
