15 Dec Customer Service Crack

After three years of research and writing my book What Customers Crave I discovered some very shocking things. One pervasive phenomenon I entitle, “Customer Service Crack” (CSC). So what is CSC? Simply put, it’s when organizations try to leverage technologies to gain insights about customers hates and loves so that they can set around a conference table and look at beautiful graphs and charts about customer satisfaction. I call this crack because it’s a bizarre addictive behavior that produces a mood altering mindset that everything is going to be okay because we have great data from these technologies. These technologies are like the automatic vacuuming robots that are sold in stores like bed Bath and beyond. The technology is awesome the the only problem is they don’t really work.

Bathroom experience rating systems are well… crappy – pun intended!

I travel to about 70 events worldwide each year and of noticed the newest form of CSC is a bathroom rating kiosk that allows you to let them know if your experience was great or well… crappy, sorry I couldn’t help myself. So let’s break down this new technology and ask yourself some very basic questions. First, if you’re anything like me, I have but one objective when I go to a public restroom and that is to, never touch anything, I mean anything! So why would I be inclined to touch this kiosk that is likely teaming with microbes? The other question is is there any prayer that this good/bad insight could in any way provide actionable insights? Hell NO! So what if they hate your bathroom? The question then becomes why do they hate it? Who hates it? What parts did you hate? The opposite is true if they loved it? What did they love? Who loved it? Why did they love it? My point here is pretty straightforward, let’s stop trying to use technology to get fractional and non-actionable data. How about we all get out of our cubicles, live the experience, feel the experience and then invent around the experience. Give me a break, let’s not ask our customer to do our innovation for us, and let’s certainly get over this addictive crack and moved towards productive behaviors that gain actionable insights about our customers across their entire journey, across a range of customer personas and in both digital and nondigital channels.

Footnote

Are all technologies bad? Absolutely not, great technologies like salesforce, social analytics tools, data analytics tools and the list goes on and on, do provide us information that we can act upon. My point here is if were going to use technology lets make certain that the insights we get are actually actionable. Let’s use these technologies in concert with a well-defined Customer Experience Strategy that creates the life-support system to ensure success.