With product distinctiveness rapidly disappearing and product pricing becoming the blanket differentiator, how can brands handle CX disruptions successfully?
The Gist
- Disruptions can impact a customer’s journey. Hiccups in customer service may frustrate consumers and drive them away from your brand.
- Although inevitable, disruptions can become revenue opportunities. Seamlessly solving customer issues offers a chance to not only win back but secure their loyalty.
- Creating a disruption plan is key. Coming up with ways to circumvent problems will better equip your CX team to deal with complicated disruptions.
Customers don’t want to be dazzled; they just want companies to deliver on the basics. Consider air travel, for instance; as competitive pricing and business models are relatively consistent among competitors, airlines don’t earn significant points for excessive service.
However, if an airline were to misplace a passenger’s baggage, the customer may seek alternatives the next time they fly. This type of outcome is the unfortunate reality for many brands these days. So, with product distinctiveness rapidly disappearing and pricing becoming the blanket differentiator, what can brands do differently to handle customer experience disruptions successfully?
Don’t Let CX Disruptions Stop You
The customer experience consists of consumers interacting with a brand, with a customer journey map acting as the blueprint to visually represent those interactions. A customer experiences a disruption when something unexpected occurs that significantly impacts their journey or their perception of a brand. Encountering technical problems with a product or service or dealing with late delivery times are common examples of disruption — even poor customer service can be a hindrance. These types of interactions can inconvenience and frustrate the customer.
When a disruption occurs, consumers may rate their interactions negatively, which begs the following question: When a single negative experience can ruin brand loyalty, how can you turn disruptions and their costs into revenue opportunities?
The answer is a customer-centric approach. Ultimately, customers have two primary expectations from brands: a swift and effortless solution to their problem. During a disruption, companies should amplify customer effort, prioritize proactive communication and empower customers to prevent brand disloyalty.
Furthermore, it’s essential for companies to respond quickly and effectively to minimize the negative impact. But where do they start? Recognizing signs of disruption is an important step toward remediation. Disruption may look different in different industries.
Creating Opportunities For Change in Customer Experience
Turning customer experience disruptions into revenue opportunities can be challenging, but it’s not impossible. Businesses should understand that during a disruption, every opportunity for engagement is an opportunity to increase brand loyalty. If your business is getting 6,000 support calls a day, you can have 6,000 opportunities to increase loyalty. Business leaders must motivate employees to understand and deliver on this expectation because driving this cultural change requires authentic leadership. So how can you make this happen?
Communicate, Clearly, With Your Customers
The first step during a disruption should be clear and effective communication. Customers want to feel valued and heard, and providing personalized support can help you achieve this. Businesses heavily invested in software are always collecting data about customer preference, engagement, history, buying patterns and so on. Use this data and provide personalized solutions that address specific concerns. Investments in data capture and analysis software is futile if your employees, especially frontline workers, do not have access to it. Without this information, employees are not equipped to use it to inform decisions to improve customer experience.
Create a Customer Experience Platform for Change
Always have a solution ready to solve CX disruptions. When designing customer experience software, it’s important to create a disruption management plan. This plan should be a living document that grows with every new encounter your business has with disruptions. Invest in creating a cross-functional team staffed with members from central IT, line-of-business (LoB) departments and digital innovation teams. These teams can help harvest reusable assets, best practices and promote consumption and collaboration to help drive self-reliance while improving disruption solutions through feedback and metrics.
Oftentimes, organizations already have these teams, but they don’t share the same goal. CX principles, processes and measurements are integral to successful CX implementations and disruption management. You cannot improve what you cannot measure. Leadership with a clear goal in mind can help build a more robust disruption management team with a clear vision and goals to equip them with the necessary tools to generate metrics for improvement.
Upsell, to Even the Unhappy Customers
Every touchpoint with a customer or potential customer is an opportunity to upsell. If a customer is dissatisfied with a product, offer them an upgraded version or a complementary product that may better suit their needs. By taking the time to listen to your customers and make improvements, you can build a loyal customer base that values their relationship with your brand.
