If you could guess what customers want most from AI, what would you say?

If you answered “for it to be more human,” then you win the prize. (I mean, I basically gave it away in the title.)

It is a bit ironic when Computer Weekly promotes the humanization of AI, but that is exactly the message of this article: Human-centric AI drives customer experience loyalty.

The research study cited by the article “uncovered five critical trends that will shape the future of customer service.”

• Autonomous service accelerates with AI copilots
• Consumer confidence rises with human-like AI agents
• Personal AI assistants will shape the future of customer interactions
• Voice AI gains ground as the preferred channel for complex issues
• Personalisation will redefine customer loyalty.

So, what can we, readers of The Human Experience, take away from thIs?

It’s simple: Being more human, providing more human experiences, is always a competitive advantage.

For companies, using AI to serve customers, your blueprint is clear, though the execution may be less so. Start with the optimal end experience. How can you use personalization to wow a customer? How can you create an emotionally resonant experience? How can you create connections with your customers?

AI (currently) does not excel at any of those objectives, creating an opportunity for us to create better human connections. 

What our goal should be (whether we use AI to facilitate it or not) is creating experiences that are so good that AI can’t even begin to compete.

So, here are two quick tips for how to make your experiences more human than AI ever could.

Maximize In-Person Interactions. If your business model allows for it, in-person interactions is an area where AI really has no way to compete. In-person, human interactions are still the great differentiator. 

Use Video and Phone. While AI voices are incredible and avatars are on the way there, they still can’t have human conversations. Most people can tell they are talking with a robot after a few exchanges. How long will this continue? It’s hard to say, but it’s that way now. Use it to your advantage. Use phone and, even better, video chats with customers when the situation allows for or necessitates deeper communication.

Want to ramp it up a notch? Use familiar people or multiple people from your team on occasion. It shows extra attention and is virtually impossible for AI to mimic at this point in time.

Want to ramp it up two notches? Use multiple people. For video and audio, using multiple team members is inherently more human. Why? Because while AI can execute multi-person conversations, in corporate and customer service settings it isn’t even close to replacing flesh-and-bone humans yet. 

The pace of AI improvement is incredible, and I wonder if I’ll be able to write this same email in a year’s time. 

Yet, regardless of how much AI advances in the next year, being more human isn’t just about the experience, it’s about the relationships created by all of your more human experiences.

And solid relationships are not something that AI can easily replace, so take advantage of building them while the opportunities are there.

The post Customers Want Human AI appeared first on Customers That Stick.

In many organizations, employee onboarding is no longer just a how-to-open-the-register process. Modern companies with people-centric cultures have learned the importance of employee onboarding, of starting new employees off on the right foot and making sure that culture and experiential values are instilled from the start.

One of the most powerful cultural creation and reinforcement strategies organizations can implement is a fun, educational, and memorable onboarding process.

Let’s look at the employee onboarding process throughout the four key phases: applying/interviewing, pre-onboarding, day one, and the first weeks. 

THE APPLICATION/INTERVIEW PROCESS

Cultural expectations, particularly for brands that are not household names, begin with the application and interview process. How your ad is written, what is said and done during the interview(s), and the communication throughout the process will say more to a potential new employee about who you are than anything you say about your culture.

How is your employment ad constructed? Is it a laundry list of duties that looks like it was created by a lawyer or does it have personality and give potential employees a sense of who you are and what a day on the job looks like? 

Is the application process easy and clear?

What is the interview like? Full of personality and interesting questions or the same-old, same-old? Your interview is a chance to differentiate your brand or department and to make sure that the people you want to attract are attracted to you, and this is even more important in a tight labor market.

Is your communication throughout the application process clear and respectful? Do you try to communicate in a way that makes applicants feel at ease during a process that is full of stress and fear?

PRE-ONBOARDING

The pre-onboarding phase is crucial. What tone are you setting before they even “walk in the door” for their first day? 

Are you communicating excitement and instilling values, using tactics like welcome videos and personalized emails?

Are you making the required administrative, legalistic parts of the process as fun as possible or, at least, sandwiching them between more energetic and positive touch points?

DAY ONE

Many organizations have put careful thought into designing a powerful first day, with a particular focus on setting the tone for their brand and culture. If you must do an information dump, such as the history of the company, make it entertaining and interesting.

The most important target for Day One is making sure that new employees feel special and like they’re part of the team. 

Starbucks does a great job in this respect by giving new hires a green apron and a personalized name tag. 

Make it personal. Have a welcome sign, a personalized welcome gift, or both. Have people applaud when you bring a new hire into the break room. 

In sum, look for ways to send a signal to your employee that this job will not be like their last jobs. Your organization is different.

THE FIRST WEEKS

A lot will depend on your industry, company, and resources, but here are some key aspects of successful onboarding during the early weeks. 

Most companies focus on operational training; your goal is to make sure this training is holistically connected to your culture, your brand, and the customer experience. 

For any customer-facing roles, soft skills training is crucial. While effective training needs to continue over time, starting this training immediately after hire is essential to developing a customer-centric mindset, much less the skills needed to succeed with customers. 

(Of course, we do have virtual courses that can help you with this. Please check out our Rapid Hero training series, Employee Onboarding I, II, and III.)

Shadowing, having your new team member spend time with a more experienced team member, is an invaluable tactic. However, it is often done poorly. 

You must, must, must make sure that new team members are shadowing your star players. Shadowing should not be determined by who happens to be on shift at the same time. Shadowing must be arranged so that your team members are learning the right things from the right people. 

Finally, make it fun. Don’t just have a great first day and then a 180 degree shift in tone for the weeks that follow. Make sure to include fun and lots of positive reinforcement–all the time, preferably–but particularly in the first weeks.

This post only scratches the surface of creating a powerful onboarding process that is aligned with your culture and your customer experience objectives. Just remember, habits are formed fast, and a well-designed, strategically focused onboarding process is the key to instilling work and service habits that will make each new employee a valued and essential team member and a customer hero.

The post The Power of Employee Onboarding appeared first on Customers That Stick.

A few years ago, I was asked to give a quote for an article to answer this question: What is your favorite customer service metric and why? When the article came out, the great majority of answers were what you would expect NPS, C-SAT, CES, but my answer was different. 

I responded with one word: profit.

Let me explain.

I started the Customers That Stick blog in 2011. The blogosphere was a lot like social media is now. There were trends, and people tended to talk about the same things. 

A few years into blogging about customer service and experience, Tony Hsieh (may he rest in peace) and Zappos were all the rage for customer service experts and bloggers. 

But aside from one article about the User Interface of the Zappos home page, I never wrote about Zappos. Why? Because I was running a small business, and at the time, it was obvious that Zappos was delivering their legendary service without profitability. I was trying to talk about customer service in the real world and delivering service that depended on burning through an immense amount of venture capital money was not instructional.

Customer service must be delivered profitably.

Now, two big clarifications. 

First, I was and am a big fan of Tony Hsieh. I think he was a true innovator in customer experience, and I think Zappos is an incredible company with an amazing customer experience culture. I know people who have gone out to Las Vegas to do the Zappos Insights tours, and all have spoken highly of it. 

Second, believing that companies must be profitable does not mean believing in extreme versions such as profit-at-all-cost and maximizing shareholder value. Profitability equals survival, but after that, other things are important too.

So, let’s take a look at the three types of profitability you need to focus on as a customer experience leader.

Transactional Profitability

The fundamental measure. Is the individual transaction profitable? . The more complicated the industry and the larger the business, the harder this can be to calculate, particularly if you are trying to distribute pro rata non-variable costs like overhead. However, we generally have a fairly good grasp on this number. 

We sell the widget or a service for X dollars; it costs Y amount of raw materials and labor, and the transaction is profitable. But in customer service, individual transactions can quickly become unprofitable when there is a service issue. One refund or a service issue that is not resolved quickly can easily make a transaction unprofitable.

But of course, we are modern customer experience leaders. We know that sometimes you have to have an unprofitable transaction because what really matters is a profitable relationship.

Relational Profitability

Is the relationship profitable over the long term? As noted, we may sacrifice short-term transactional profitability to achieve relational profitability, to have a happy customer who continues to buy from us and whose lifetime value increases because they were happy across many transactions. 

Relational profitability is also why we have to sometimes say goodbye to problem customers. Apart from their impacts on team morale, habitually difficult customers are often unprofitable over their lifetime and are more trouble than they are worth.

Experiential Profitability

Obviously, organizational profitability is essential to the firm’s continued survival; however, it is also a broad, sprawling theme that involves things such as rent, debt, service, human resources, and so on. We want to know if the customer experience, including the sale of products and services, is not only profitable but sufficiently profitable to contribute what is needed to achieve organizational profitability. 

Obviously, this is a wide-reaching and nuanced evaluation with many dynamics at play, but customer experience leaders should have an idea of the profitability of the hard and soft costs of delivering and executing the customer experience across the organization. 

Now, if the organization is not profitable or profitable enough, that does beg a further question about customer experience profitability, which is it profitable enough to contribute what it needs to the bottom line?

In conclusion, while profitability at each level can be challenging to ascertain with precision, we can often get a reasonable estimate of how we are doing. Just remember the following:

Every transaction does not need to be profitable, but most do. 

Every relationship doesn’t need to be profitable, but almost all do.

And unless you’re swimming in venture capital money and can lose money for years on end, your customer experience needs to be profitable. Full stop. 

Use NPS, use C-SAT, use CES. Use whatever you like. But just remember that at the end of the day the metric that matters most is profit, because without it, you won’t have a business to measure anymore.

The post Customer Service Must Be Profitable appeared first on Customers That Stick.

If you read customer experience news or trade websites, the percentage of articles that are in some way related to artificial intelligence is remarkable. While I haven’t counted them–obviously–it must be over 50 percent and could be as high as 60 to 70 percent. 

It’s not that AI is a new topic; it’s not. And it’s not that AI is not improving; it is, at a dizzying pace. It’s that AI can still only do certain things. 

And one perspective I’d like to share with you actually comes from our shared experience with COVID. 

I’m sure you remember the bold predictions that were flying around during the height of the lockdowns. We were told that people would not go back to stores, that people would become accustomed to shopping digitally, that people would not want to return to the office, and that we were transitioning to a new normal. Digital, supposedly, had finally killed retail and in-person business models.

Yet, these predictions turned out to be only partially true.

Yes, consumer shopping habits were forever altered. People who were not comfortable doing so before learned to use digital service channels. Business models that were already being pressed by a digitally-transformed landscape found their challenges multiplied and not all survived.

On the labor front, the prognostications were at least halfway accurate. Despite the cost savings, many companies found disadvantages in remote work forces, but their employees enjoyed the freedom and flexibility of working from home and did not want to go back. The heated discourse around forced RTO (return to office) in the last year is only proof of that.

However, despite the COVID-inspired push into more digital experiences, we also saw something on the consumer side that defied the predictions–something crucial to bear in mind as predictions about AI swirl around us. 

People could not wait to get back to being with other people. People could not wait to start having in-person shared communal experiences, whether it was bowling, going to concerts, going to parks, or going to cafes and restaurants.

I won’t drop 20 links here, but there is a mountain of evidence that we are social creatures and do not do well in isolation. In ten years. Who knows? AI may be so good that our brains receive what they need from interacting with robots. (Our brains aren’t really great at distinguishing reality, so this is absolutely possible.) 

But not yet.

Currently, we’re surrounded on all sides by the media telling us how important AI is and how it’s going to disrupt everything. And it is.* However, similar to the COVID-era predictions about future consumer behavior, I think that the predictions are over-hyped from the perspective of delivering the customer experiences we want to deliver. 

Today, right now, humans can connect and generate an emotional response that AI tools simply cannot. 

For the foreseeable future, a human experience is still the ultimate competitive advantage, and the more you can lean into human connection, relationships, and/or shared experiences, the more you can provide the rich emotional experiences that make customers stick and that permeate our human essence, making us want to come back for more.

* To keep this post manageable, I have kept it narrowly focused on AI and the human aspects of customer experience, avoiding AI’s impact on jobs, economies, and other areas of society. These impacts will be swift, sometimes miraculous, frequently devastating, and will affect us all.

The post Lessons from COVID for the Age of AI appeared first on Customers That Stick.

Note: This blog post contains information related to and provide by a client of CTS Service Solutions.

With our webinar upcoming this week, Hassle-Free CX: Define, Design, and Deliver, I enjoyed getting to talk to Dawn Varghese of Agara Labs about the role conversational AI is playing in today’s customer support environment and what the near-term future looks like.

First, Sign Up for the Webinar: November 19, 2020

This event has now passed. Sign up is no longer available.

An Interview with Dawn Varghese

Please tell us a little about the mission of Agara.

Agara is an autonomous voice engine powered by Real-time Voice AI designed to handle customer support calls without any human intervention.

Focused on improving customer experience in the banking and financial services sectors, among others, Agara conducts phone calls in a natural, conversational manner while providing instant responses 24×7.

Agara’s mission is to drive better customer experiences, and act as a platform that offers credible and robust self-service over voice, power natural human-like conversations, and in the process, drive significantly better operational efficiency.

With the current state of the technology, where does Conversational AI add the most value both to the customer and the company?

Currently, there has been a growing awareness about what conversational AI is, and what it brings to the table. While chatbots have got more acceptance and have played a major role in this, given the rise of advanced speech recognition technologies, voice bots are fast gaining traction to become the most chosen customer self-service tool.

However, the state of affairs with voice support till recently was not great. Users had to go through a fixed tree of options, press preassigned buttons, and speak very scripted flows.

The users were led by the bot or led by the IVR, rather than leading the conversation. The technology was not meant to drive autonomous human-like conversation but was just to have the first level of interaction before it was actually passed on to an agent.

Today, the technology has completely shifted, where the first layer of conversation has itself become intelligent in recognizing the need of the customer, irrespective of the situation they are in.

The conversations no longer need to be linear and can be completely accomplished with no human intervention whatsoever. In contrast to what it was, today autonomous voice bots are capable of delivering highly personal, contextual, and frictionless self-service in a natural human-like, intelligent way.

What are the typical concerns you’ve received from C-Suite decision makers about integrating AI into their customer support journey? How do you answer them?

This is where our data comes in, where we have a promise of actually not leaving the customer high and dry in any situation. It could be the fact that the customer doesn’t prefer to talk or engage with the bot. Or it could be the fact that we were not able to recognize what exactly the customer wants, or there may be an error on the customer part.

Sometimes these things are possible, in say one out 20 calls, because of the variables involved in voice; it could be the accent, it could be intonation, it could be the speed, volume, or a noisy environment.

And in those situations, we will transfer the call to an agent if the agent is available or capture certain critical information so that we make the information available to the agent when the agent is back to do a call-back.

The other common question that we often hear is how Agara as a voice AI solution can exist in conjunction with their critical IT and telephony systems. Customers also ask how long it takes for such integration. API availability is something that fast tracks our implementation because we don’t have to build it from scratch; typically, there are also concerns and questions around training because the understanding of customers, with what they have seen till now is the fact that they have to train the system for a long duration for the system to get intelligent.

However, with us, because we are purpose-built for high-velocity use cases, we either come with ready-to-use cases or with use cases that we identify with customers. But in either situation, we believe that our architecture is structured to drive the reusability of our conversation blocks or component-based architecture 60-70% of the time.

So, a date is a date, a mobile number is a mobile number, a credit card number is a credit card number for a retailer, or for an insurance company, or for a bank. We are able to reuse a lot of things that we’ve already developed, we already take care of what we call normally a conversational explosion, which is about the 16 different ways in which you can say a particular date. 

This patented technology actually reduces the amount of training to actually meet customer expectations. This is a significant differentiator for us in terms of go-to-market. These are some of the specific questions that we get from customers, which we think are very strong differentiators for Agara.

Will AI become a source of competitive advantage for larger enterprises or will we see robust third-party solutions geared towards SMB’s (as exists in the SAAS sector)? With so much of the power of AI coming from specific learning, will these solutions truly be able to compete with the big players?

I believe that voice AI technology and companies like Agara are democratizing the acceptance of voice AI into the customer experience.

Fundamentally, from a technology perspective, Agara is suitable for both enterprises and SMBs. The way we have charted out our product strategy is the fact that for small and medium enterprises who don’t have a lot of dedicated teams internally, they will be able to reuse a lot of self-service features that we are building, which will enable them to get on board on the platform with very minimal effort from their side, of course, they will have the teams from Agara supporting them.

Whereas for enterprises, it may be a little bit more involved process, given their infrastructure, their processes, and systems, with which we have to coexist. 

So it may require two different approaches. But Agara is built to be suited for both enterprises, and SMBs, largely being driven through minimal amounts of data that we need for training, the ready-built modules that from a conversation block perspective, workflow perspective, the self-service tools, API integration, etc. The approaches could be slightly different, but our product strategy is geared to do that.

Where do you think the AI will be in five years, both capability-wise and adoption-wise?

I think nobody knows the clear answer to this, but you know, if you ask RPA companies, automation has become very much commonplace today and there is a full suite of providers who have evolved quite fast in the last five years or so; they are still targeting the processes to automate that were typically run by ERP companies.

But with AI, we will see more and more processes coming into the automatable bucket, hyper-automation, or autonomous AI. The technology is set to evolve, with more robust and complex language models becoming commonplace.

As we move forward, we will definitely see improvement in the kind of sophistication and the depth of use cases. Largely, IVR based one-level interaction will be completely taken over by speech-based technologies, and evolve into delivering seamless customer experience over voice.

The post Conversational AI in Customer Service: An Interview with Dawn Varghese of Agara appeared first on Customers That Stick.

Chip Bell innovates the world of customer service with the best practices of customer-centric organizations and provides powerful cutting-edge ideas and unique strategies that business leaders can immediately act on.

Getting Inside Your Customer’s Imagination

Did you know that some of your favorite products today were ideas from customers?

Customer co-creation has been around since the 20th century — minus the fancy name. Brands have been observing customers, listening to what customers want and creating new products and services based on their ideas.

Vans, Starbucks, McDonalds — these are just a few of the companies that have successfully co-created with customers. Take inspiration from these stories and start engaging your customers in conversations that let their ideas flow.

In this fun interview, Chip talks about his new book Inside your Customer’s Imagination and how to utilize one of your business’ greatest innovation asset — your customers’ ideas.

Some of the highlights from my conversation with Chip are…

• What it means to co-create with your customers,
• Customers’ involvement in the designs of Vans shoes and
• The results of these customers’ ideas in business and our lifestyles

Make sure to learn more about these topics and get other great insights from Chip in the video below.

To learn more about Chip, check out his bio beneath the video.

ABOUT DR. CHIP R. BELL

Chip R. Bell is a renowned keynote speaker and author of several award-winning, best-selling books including Take Their Breath Away, Service Magic, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service, Magnetic Service and Kaleidoscope:  Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles. His newest book is Inside Your Customer’s Imagination. Dr. Bell has appeared live on CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg TV, CNN and his work has been featured in Fortune, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Businessweek, Entrepreneur magazine and Inc. magazine. Global Gurus in 2020 ranked him for the sixth year in a row in the top three keynote speakers in the world on customer service.  

CONNECT WITH CHIP

Web: https://chipbell.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/chiprbell

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiprbell

The post Popular Products Co-Created with Customers appeared first on Customers That Stick.

Empathy requires more than a shift in mindset; it requires a specific set of skills

As a customer experience strategist and customer service trainer, empathy has always been a cornerstone of our approach to customer experience and service.

Customer experience is difficult and is defined more than anything by human emotion. Having teams that understand how to both have and demonstrate empathy is essential to delivering Hero-Class® service.

Listening to much of the talk about empathy in recent weeks, I’ve noticed that a key piece of the empathy puzzle is often missing, a crucial aspect of helping others become more empathetic.

Most of the discussions I have heard lately have focused on shifting mindset, simply trying to have more empathy by attempting to understand the other person’s perspective, their journey, and most importantly, their feelings. 

This openness and willingness to understand others is a crucial first step to empathy.

However, once a person commits to this mindset, they are confronted with the very real challenge of how to approach this change.

For, empathy requires not only a shift in mindset but a specific set of skills that help facilitate the changes in perspective and understanding that lead to empathy.

Empathy requires not only a shift in mindset but a specific set of skills.

Let’s look at three crucial skills for facilitating empathy:

• Countering Instinctual Reactions. Part of the ways both implicit bias and confirmation bias distort thinking and impede empathy is through their automaticity. They are ingrained reactions based on beliefs, both conscious and not. Someone observes the action of another, then automatically creates an answer for what it means without trying to really understand where the other person is coming from. Counteracting both implicit biases and cognitive biases is not easy. Getting people to interrupt their automatic reactions and to open themselves to an alternative explanation is not something that the average person will be automatically good at just because they are told to “have empathy.”
• Practicing Self Awareness. Understanding not only one’s biases but how their experience might be drastically different than someone else’s requires self-awareness. One needs to understand how to approach self evaluation. What are the questions one needs to ask to better understand what their beliefs are, where they come from, and how those beliefs might be completely changed if they used a different lens to try to understand the person in front of them?
• Asking Effective (and Nonjudgmental) Questions. One thing I’ve seen in the training room is that many people find asking questions difficult, at least when the subject is delicate or emotionally charged. What do I ask? How do I ask it so it doesn’t seem judgmental? How do I ask it so they know I really care? Questions are crucial to empathy, because you can’t properly give or demonstrate empathy if you don’t know what it is you need to be empathetic about. 

Of course, the above ideas do not encapsulate everything that is needed to be better at empathy; but they are three big rocks that, if not innate in a person, must be learned for someone to practice empathy well.

At the heart of the above three ideas is an old principle from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. In fact, I often use Covey’s famous story of the screaming kids on the subway in our trainings. 

A group of kids were screaming and acting rambunctious one morning on a subway car, and the father didn’t seem to care. Covey got in a huff, assuming the worst, and said something to the distracted father. When Covey learned that the kids’ mother had just died, he had an immediate change of perspective and heart. 

This story perfectly captures the links among automatic preconception, listening and understanding, and empathy.

The openness and skills to have and demonstrate empathy are distributed much like any other characteristic in a population. Some live their everyday lives as open-hearted empaths, some lack the capacity to feel it at all, and the great majority are in the continuum between. 

For most, empathy is not a switch you can flip. True, it requires an opening of the mind and of the heart, but it also requires a set of, sometimes, unfamiliar skills.

If we want to increase empathy in this world, we have to help people acquire the skills to both hear the stories of others and to understand how to quiet their own stories long enough to do so.

The post Empathy Is Not Just a Mindset; It Is a Learned Skill appeared first on Customers That Stick.

Prior to the current situation, the ability to work customer service jobs from home was increasing both as the technology and benefits of a distributed workforce increased.

While the demand side of the equation is likely to be uncertain for some time, we believe that we will see the ability to work customer service jobs from home increase over the long term.

ORIGINAL POST:

If there is one thing that has changed in modern customer service is the impact of technology not only on customers but on how organizations deliver customer service.

Many organizations have contact center employees both phone and chat, distributed throughout the country and the world all working from their homes, working flex time schedules or working full time.

In fact, there are software vendors that I know from the conferences I speak at who do nothing but provide the technology for these distributed teams.

If you have decent Internet and a suitable environment, there are a ton of opportunities to find a customer service jobs you can work from home. 

The post Can I Work a Customer Service Job from Home? appeared first on Customers That Stick.

Yes, no, and maybe.

If you’ve studied statistics at all, you may have heard of something called statistical significance. That means there is enough of a sample set enough data that the data can be judged as being a fairly good indication of the truth.

So, one of the first questions when asking if reviews are reliable is simply how many reviews there are. You’re much safer trusting large number averages than you are individual reviews.

Individual reviews can be biased in both directions. Individual reviews can be interactive, inaccurate, and they can be misleading.

And this is one of the reasons that review sites are often unfair to small businesses because they tend to only get a small number of extreme reviews based on the research available.

I would say that online reviews should be always viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The post Are Customer Reviews Reliable? appeared first on Customers That Stick.

Now, I don’t really rant for the sake of ranting, because that makes these posts about me and not you, and that’s not what we’re about. However, I’m okay ranting with a purpose — when there is an underlying lesson that can help you improve your approach to customer experience.

So let me tell you a bit about this company we’re dealing with right now, and in doing so, hopefully help you pay more attention to this critical moment in the customer’s journey – the end of the journey.

We have a SAAS (service as a software) provider that we’ve used for the past year or two. They’ve been nice in trying to help us get the product set up and worked with us to try to use the product more. In the end however, we just didn’t use it. Okay, that’s on us. We’re not asking for a refund. We paid for it; we didn’t use it. The product was there to be used; they held up their end of the contract. We’re all good.

Except…

Now, we need to cancel the product before we get charged for another year, and it’s not a small amount. So, we went to make sure that we canceled before the product renewed. Within this one process, this company transformed itself from a nice, helpful little startup to one of those sketchy tech companies that makes it almost impossible to get out of their service. 

Let me tell you a little bit about what we went through first — and I want to break down a few of the details in case you find that your organization has some of these things. 

First, when you’re logged into your account, there is no support phone number or way to just click a button and cancel. Literally, it is very obviously and purposefully not there.  You go to all the different accounts screens, there’s nothing! So, how does one cancel you might ask? Well, you have to find a help article on how to cancel your account, which is essentially a short version of a terms or conditions – literally, thick legalese mostly about all the ways they can charge you and you don’t have recourse. 

Now, once you get there, the fun starts, because you can only cancel two ways – and they’re very emphatic that these are the only two ways — you can cancel using the form when you’re logged into your account or to speak with an individual on the phone. You absolutely cannot cancel your account using an email.

Okay fine, they have their systems. Of course, if these are the two ways to cancel you would think that the form would be easy to find and the phone number obvious. Not so much. 

Okay, I’m going to bring this home without walking you through every last detail.

Here’s where we are: we filled out a form (which was at the bottom of the cancellation article but not in the account where, the one we are told we must use to officially cancel, is supposed to be).

We received no autoresponder or email confirmation that the form was received.

We found a phone number for someone who had helped us with product set up before buried in a calendar invite and canceled with her via phone. She was not the correct person but said she would get the info to support. It is now 12:30pm and we have not heard from them.

Now, it’s a Friday as I write this and we will be charged on Monday. They very clearly say that you have to cancel 24 hours ahead. We’re way ahead of that but have no confidence that they won’t charge us, and we won’t have to deal with getting it reversed and all of the fun that comes with that.

So instead of focusing on important things, when we finish this post, guess what we’re doing?

Here’s the thing – they ruined this relationship by treating me differently as an exiting customer than as a current customer.

This is a service that I and a number of professional speakers use. I would have recommended them. I would have said, they were good to work with, we didn’t use the product ourselves, but if you think you will, definitely check them out. Now, I absolutely cannot recommend this company anymore. Why? Because they tried to hold me hostage at the end. 

And for the record, I’m not somebody who thinks you should just let customers skate in every situation. There are memberships and contracts for a reason; often companies incur upfront costs and the contract terms are reflective of that. Each case is different, but this is not that. This is purposely creating Byzantine hoops for someone to jump through to cancel a product that you have the right to cancel. They’re just making it difficult. 

In my keynote on customer experience leadership, Be Your Teams’ Hero, we talk about a 3E process for customer experience leadership. The first E is Embody, do leaders walk their talk, do they support customer centricity with their actions? 

One of the best ways to tell if a leader walks their talk, if an organization is truly customer centric, is how they treat you when you’re going to no longer be their customer, how they treat you, when say you don’t need the product or service anymore, because some of the companies that are customer centric when you’re their customer change when you tell them you’re not going to be their customer anymore.

Here are three ideas I want to offer for your consideration:  

First, it’s okay to ask a customer why they are leaving. It’s more than okay, you should ask them. “Hey, why are you leaving? How can we help? Is there anything we can do better?” This both gives you intel on why they are leaving that can help you improve and gives you the opportunity to resolve any issues that might be behind the defection.

Second, it’s okay to prioritize paying customers over exiting customers. In fact, in our post a few weeks ago, Is Your Baseline Experience Best In Class, we discussed that it’s okay to prioritize certain paying customers over others based on lifetime value.

For example, platinum status customers versus silver status. However, as we mentioned in that post, there’s a baseline for how you treat the customer. And if you’re truly customer centric, then part of that baseline is you treat them with dignity and respect and value when they decide to not be your customer anymore.

And I’m not talking about the small percentage where there’s a “bad breakup” so to speak; I’m talking about what is your standard experience for a customer who is exiting? How do you make every customer parting a positively memorable experience?

Finally, it’s just bad business. It’s like investing in a great mutual fund for years and then throwing it all way on one roulette number in Vegas.

If an organization’s built brand equity, brand deposits, as we discussed recently and then they’re going to make the last interaction a negative one — from what we know of the peak-end rule, this will be the experience that defines the organization for the customer, generating both a peak negative emotion and being the last interaction.

You don’t want to kill any chances of the customer coming back or referring you, because someone in your organization who isn’t customer centric thought it would be a great idea to hold your customers hostage and make it really painful to stop doing business with you.

Just remember if you’re designing experience, if you’re leading a customer experience team, make that last interaction a positive one.

Make it hassle-free. Be supportive. Be service-focused.

Because if you lead a truly customer-centric organization, then you care about customers, no matter what stage of the customer lifecycle they are in.

The post How to Destroy a Customer Relationship in the Final Moments appeared first on Customers That Stick.