Message Me - The Future of Customer Service in the Era of Social Messaging and Artificial Intelligence

Chapter 1

We Live in an Effortless World… Almost

I’ve never met anyone who likes calling a business.

—Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, at the 2016 F8 Developer conference1

When I landed in New York recently, where I’ve lived for the last five years, a notification popped up automatically from my Delta app telling me the carousel where my bag would arrive. After picking up my bag, I ordered a Lyft that arrived in minutes to whisk me home. During the journey, I opened Postmates and ordered dinner, which arrived just minutes after I walked into my apartment. And while eating dinner, I opened up the Salesforce app to check on the progress of new sales deals while I’d been traveling.

It’s now possible to do almost anything through a smartphone app. You can run your business, you can control the lights in your home, you can order almost anything to your door in minutes, and you can even—with Tinder—find true love (or whatever kind of love you’re looking for).

The world is forging ahead. But customer service hasn’t caught up yet.

According to dialahuman.com, to speak to a live customer service representative to resolve an issue with one brand’s 401(k) plan, you’ll need to call their 800 number, press 1, then press the pound button (#) 17 times. Not once, not twice, but 17 times to get an actual human.

Not exactly effortless.

Unfortunately, for too many companies this is the norm and not the exception. Reaching an actual human being to resolve an issue is now so cumbersome and difficult, an entire service ecosystem has emerged to assist consumers in navigating the maze of phone tree prompts. Dialahuman.com is a self-service directory of phone tree hacks. GetHuman.com is another “it’s-crazy-we-need-this” website squarely aimed at taking the sting out of navigating customer service phone trees. In an era where consumers have powerful handheld smartphones that get reception nearly anywhere in the world, it should be easier than this to get the solution you need, when you need it, with as much effort as it takes to send a text message.

There’s a disconnect between the mental models of today’s service teams and the evolving service expectations of consumers.

There’s a disconnect between the mental models of today’s service teams and the evolving service expectations of consumers. Service teams gaze into the rearview mirror, giving lip-service to delighting customers while often just making it as hard as possible to actually get an issue resolved—while consumers have ever increasing expectations of instant answers, whenever they want it, delivered in the same way they now interact with their friends and the world around them: through beautifully designed, simple to use mobile apps and effortless mobile messaging.

In a survey in 2016, the analyst firm Ovum found that “easier access to online support channels” was the biggest request from consumers, of all ages. Consumer preference is clear, but companies still have to catch up.2

The problem with today’s service model

The Effortless Experience authors asked a key question at the heart of modern competition: “Should companies try to create differentiation and build customer loyalty by delivering superior service?” It’s a crucial question in an age of product and service commoditization and razor thin margins. Given the cutthroat and expensive competition to acquire and keep a customer, the authors wanted to know to what extent customer service impacted loyalty, and what service leaders should be focusing on in order to make the most impact.

They discovered powerful insights that profoundly impact the future of customer service, and underpin how brands can leverage social messaging and AI to deliver easy service:

A strategy of delight doesn’t pay

The authors’ analysis and data showed that customers who are moved from a level of “below expectations” up to “meets expectations” offer about the same economic value as those whose experiences were exceeded3. From a customer’s perspective, when something goes wrong, the overriding sentiment is: just help me fix it.

Many companies today are stuck between the pressure to decrease service costs (usually by making it hard to reach an agent) and the pressure to maintain customer loyalty (by attempting to make the service experience, when you finally get to it, as “delightful” as possible). But they’re focusing on the wrong things.

Customer service interactions tend to drive disloyalty, not loyalty

Customers go to a brand because of product features—but they tend to leave a brand because of poor service experiences. Unfortunately, the authors noted that “any customer service interaction is four times more likely to drive disloyalty than to drive loyalty.”4

According to Dixon, Toman and DeLisi, key drivers that impact disloyalty include (in order of impact): more than one contact to resolve, generic service, repeating information, additional effort to resolve, and transfers between agents or channels. Sound familiar? Making a customer jump through hoops and repeat themselves to finally get through to an agent creates a hugely negative experience, no matter how great that final agent ends up being.

The end result is that it’s now easier to order a competitor’s product on Amazon Prime than get a solution for the broken widget in our hand. What should companies do instead?

Easy is everything

In order for service organizations to catch up, executives need to put “customer effort” at the core of their experience design. This is the key measure to ensure that service interactions are not driving disloyalty. As Dixon, Toman and DeLisi noted in Effortless Experience: “Companies should focus on making service easier, not more delightful, by reducing the amount of work required of customers to get their issues resolved. This includes avoiding their having to repeat information, having to repeatedly contact the company, switching channels, being transferred and being treated in a generic manner.”5 In our own consumer research, more than two-thirds (67.8%) of respondents agree that the easier a customer service interaction is, the more likely he or she would be to engage that brand again.6

These findings provide clear and compelling guidance for service leaders. Consumers expect service to be easy: and easy is defined as fast, convenient, and delivered in the original channel (don’t ask me to phone or email when I message or tweet you!).

The end of waiting on hold

Customers don’t want to use the phone. In Effortless Experience, the authors found that, on average, 58% of a company’s call volume is from customers who tried to resolve their issue digitally first. Almost two-thirds of all phone calls could have been deflected with better digital care.

At the same time, companies in America spend tens of billions of dollars on answering customer service phone calls every single year, and are under constant pressure to do whatever they can to reduce this number. But despite everyone’s best efforts, the mainstream digital channels available today have only made a minor impact on the number of calls made every year. It takes days to get an email response from most companies, so consumers will never use it for anything urgent. Chat is great if you’re sitting at your desktop computer, but requires constant attention—and if you lose your session you have to start all over again. And traditional self-service forums require a lot of manual searching—i.e., effort—to discover answers. So customers pick up the phone instead, and the cycle continues.

Messaging is the first channel to emerge that can change this, by combining the in-the-moment speed of chat with the asynchronous convenience of email.

Delivering in-channel resolution wherever the customer is

The traditional approach to service has been to funnel requests into the channels that are easiest and cheapest for companies to deliver—regardless of how easy or convenient they are for consumers. If you’re a monopoly provider then you may still be able to get away with offering limited phone support only, 9–5. But for everyone else, convenience is key—and this means delivering service wherever your customers are, whenever they need it.

Once customers started tweeting complaints, the standard response from most companies was to ask them to contact customer service by emailing or phoning. The thoughts and tweets from consumers in return were … “What? This is me contacting you!” Deflection to other channels is the worst possible response to give to someone who has reached out—especially if...