How Customers Are Suffering From Experience Friction

I was talking to a customer experience head of a leading fintech service provider. He is an advocate of automating everything in customer experience (CX) with technology. He even says that customers don’t have a choice but to deal with technology.

According to him, the only way by which you can run your customer experience function is by converting 100% of your customer service and support to self-service channels driven by automation and intelligence.

They eventually managed to transition 85% of their customer service and support to self-service channels. The customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores dipped a fair bit.

They brushed off the dip in CSAT as a temporary setback, and they were hoping that it would increase and stabilize with time.

In a few weeks, they had an outage of their self-service channels. Because of the outage, the employees ended up talking to the customers – human interactions. To their surprise, their CSAT scores started to improve.

That’s when they realized that they could not take humans completely out of the equation. Then, they looked at their customer service and support profile. They segregated them into transactional and consultative issues.

The self-service channels handled all transactional issues, and the human agents handled all consultative issues.

They also added a feature that allows customers to choose to speak to an agent at any point in their interactions with the self-service channels. This helped reduce the experience function, and now they have happier customers.

What is Customer Friction – An Overview

All of us, at some point, have experienced holding the line when customer support transferred you from one extension to another till you eventually hung up.

Shep Hyken, the customer experience expert, famously calls this an ugly customer service experience that gives many customers FORO, or the Fear of Reaching Out.

FORO is the time-wasting friction that makes customers dread reaching out to customer service or support.

Here are the findings from a CX research that substantiate FORO:

• 43% of customers would rather clean a toilet than call customer support
• 60% of customers admit to hanging up on a support agent
• 34% admit to yelling at an agent
• 21% admit to cussing at an agent

This is how much customers suffer from the experience of friction.

How Do You Get the Customer Experience Friction Right?

I give this example very often to people around me. Let me recount one of those anecdotal examples.

Six of us were in a conference room at a customer’s location. I realized that all of us were carrying laptops from different brands.

When you look at the laptop’s components, they are probably the same. The CPU, motherboard, RAM, display, operating system, storage device, graphics card, keyboard, and touchpad – every organization sources it from the same players. It assembles them to be sold under their brand name.

When everything that goes inside the laptop is the same, why should they have different pricing, and why should one brand be preferred over the other?

It is because of the experience they provide and the perception we create in our minds about those brands because of the experience.

Now, every organization has to get their experience right. Your CX will be your biggest differentiator in a commoditized and crowded market.

The next two decades are going to be all about the end customer experience, and it is going to be a blend of AI, digital, and human support.

AI and Human Support

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation would handle transactional queries and help human agents access relevant information while assisting customers to resolve their queries. In contrast, human agents will handle everything complex, which requires empathetic human interactions.

Let us look at it from the perspective of what customers want.

What Do Customers Want?

Customers do not want to pick up the phone and call a human agent – in fact, that would be the last thing they would have in their minds.

Nobody has the patience or the time to go to your website or mobile app, look for the support number, and call up support.

Customers would ideally go to the self-service channels and ask the queries. They get their answers, and they are good. This probably is the best experience they look forward to, and there is nothing more to it.

The customer would appreciate not having to get on the phone and wait on hold to speak to an agent.

However, once they start interacting with the self-service channel and they understand that their queries are not being addressed properly, then they would certainly want to talk to a human agent.

Do your self-service channels have an automatic option for your customers to seamlessly transition to interacting with an agent?

This is an option that you should consider providing to avoid customer friction and frustration.

What about situations where the customer does not know if he should try reaching out to a human agent for their needs?

That’s a tricky one.

How Do You, as a Customer Experience Function, Automatically Transfer Interactions to Agents?

It is much like playing chess. Let us look at this analogy from the chess world, which is the threefold repetition rule.

What does the rule say?

When the same moves are repeated in chess, a player can claim a draw if the same position occurs three times in a row. This rule is in place to prevent games from going on indefinitely with the same moves.

Likewise, in customer service, the platform should recognize customer’s reactions when they aren’t getting the answers they need.

The easiest way to recognize this is by identifying the repetitions in communication. If something gets repeated more than two times, you should probably look at pulling in your human agents to assist your customers.

I will give you an example. I had booked a utility service through an app. The technician called and said that he had been hit by a minor accident and he wouldn’t be able to come and provide the service.

So, I decided to cancel the service request, and since I was doing this at the last minute, they would levy a penalty on me. I didn’t want to do that, so I tried explaining it to the virtual agent.

The virtual agent kept asking if I needed help by just qualifying the word “accident.”

After three such attempts, I decided to reach out to an agent and cancel my service request without any penalties. The platform should qualify this interaction as worthy of being handled by a human agent and transfer my interaction to an agent.

Providing a combination of self-service powered by AI and support by human agents will be ideal to avoid any experience of customer friction.

With this combination, you will allow your customers to choose when and how they want to communicate with you because, at any point, they have the option of talking to an agent.

Think of Amazon. You can do most things yourself – you can request a refund or return something you bought, change the delivery time based on your availability, and cancel the order. When you are stuck, you have the option of requesting a call back from an Amazon representative, and you’ll promptly receive a call to address your needs.

The best way to look at removing friction from the customer experience is by carefully assessing the customer journey and addressing all friction points.

Less friction results in better CX.