When was the last time your CMO spent an hour or two handling calls on your customer service line? Or your CEO? Or any other C-level executive? The answer is probably “never.”
A big reason both employee and customer experience often include unnecessarily effortful or annoying processes is because key decision-makers don’t have to put up with those processes. Rather, they look at high level metrics like Net Promoter Score, J.D. Power ratings, and so on. Even when these scores are less than ideal, it’s easy to blame other factors, like the difficulty of hiring and retaining good customer service representatives.
Top level executives may not even use the company’s products or services. Or, if they do, they are insulated by assistants who make the purchases and deal with any problems. I’ve long felt that airline websites would be better and easier to use if the airline CEOs had to search for and book their own flights. (Ideally, those reservations would be for basic economy seats to create the most realistic flyer experience!)
Empathy Deficit
This lack of direct exposure results in an incomplete understanding of what both customers and front-line staff experience. It’s hard to be empathetic without undergoing the full experience.
One way to create empathy is to drop leaders into a simulated or even real customer situation. I wrote about Martin Lindstrom’s unusual “workshop” that made executives suffer a lengthy wait in an uncomfortable, noisy room – exactly what the firm’s customers had to deal with on a daily basis.
A conversation with U.A.E.-based experience designer Sherwette offers another path to understanding the real experience of customers and employees. She suggests appointing CEOs who began their careers in customer service.
There’s little doubt that CEOs with a couple of years spent handling customer problems would have a far better grasp on real customer experience than other executives. Unfortunately, the pool of candidates with both CEO-level skills and significant time in customer service would likely be small. But there may be another way to achieve similar outcomes.
An Easy Way to Build Executive Empathy
Years ago, I co-founded a catalog business that grew to include a small call center. In the first days after a large mailing, our customer service reps would be overwhelmed by incoming calls to place orders, ask questions, and solve problems. Hold times were long, and many calls were abandoned. That was a terrible customer experience, and we knew we lost both orders and customer goodwill during those stressful times.
We created a predictive model that showed how many people we needed to have answering the phones to keep up with the volume, hour by hour. During a few peak hours, practically everyone in the office, from the receptionist to the purchasing manager, jumped into the queue. I took calls too.
The plan actually worked. Wait times were reduced to seconds, and abandoned calls went to nearly zero.
We were delighted that we had improved what had been an awful customer experience. There was another benefit, perhaps just as important. I, and other people in the company, became more empathetic. We understood what customers were experiencing, and also what our beleaguered CSRs went through as they helped our customers.
Complaints about a difficult process to look up a customer order, for example, took on a new dimension when I had to go through the process myself. I saw both the delay in responding to the customer and the wasted effort required of the phone representative.
Software changes that I had previously dismissed as not particularly important became high priority when I experienced the frustration first-hand. I got on the phone to the software supplier and explained what had to be done. It cost some money, but created long lasting benefits in shorter call times, happier customers, and less frustrated CSRs.
Similarly, purchasing staff who took calls from customers whose orders had been delayed by lack of inventory directly experienced the emotions of those unhappy callers. Avoiding stock outages and backorders had always been a key priority, but now they went the extra mile to expedite orders and find new sources.
In each case, an intellectual understanding of a problem was augmented by an emotional and empathetic understanding.
Create a Routine to Keep Empathy High
After that experience, I made it a point to take calls for an hour or two even at times when it wasn’t essential. I knew I’d learn from it, and also better understand what our team members and customers were experiencing.
This concept isn’t new. Jeff Bezos once said, “Everyone has to be able to work in a call center.”
When Bezos was actively running Amazon, he required thousands of managers to undergo call center training. That direct experience with callers needing assistance gave managers a more visceral understanding of the customer, famously represented by an empty chair in every meeting.
Create Aha! Moments
Putting the CMO on the phones will likely create new insights and maybe even an “Aha!” moment or two. When she asks why are so many customers calling when they could perform the task themselves, she may hear, “Because they can’t figure out how to do it on the website. We’ve been complaining about this for years.”
AI-Driven Customer Service
There’s little doubt that AI will change the nature of contact centers. We already have tools like conversation intelligence and smart chatbots, but much more dramatic change is on the way.
While the volume of human-processed contacts will go down, continuing to involve executives in direct customer interactions will be no less important. Combining the insights from AI tools with the empathy from actual conversations will drive better customer and employee experience.
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