Online Customer Experience: If You Think About the Customer, Success Will Come

No matter how much we talk about creating a consistent experience across channels and turning social media into a legitimate, seamless alternative to the traditional contact center, the reality is that online-based media are inherently different from voice and brick-and-mortar channels.

"Customers, as they are accustomed to either a face-to-face interaction or even a phone interaction, [typically] have some truly human clues to help them [engage with] the person on the other end," explains Mick Winters, senior vice president of e-commerce and customer experience, National Builders Supply. "When you’re online, it’s totally different."

Indeed, in a relationship-driven era of customer service, significant attention is paid to creating a human, experiential element within online customer care. Customer management professionals are willing to concede that the online experience cannot be exactly like a live telephone experience, but they want it to come as close as possible.

They want to assure the nature of online communication does not serve as an inhibitor to creating a personalized, "real life" customer experience.

In addition to opening the door for an improved, three-dimensional relationship with customers, this humanizing of the conceptually-impersonal online experience also builds the trust that is necessary for interacting with customers. Even though online and social channels are beyond familiar for many customers, the use them as a primary means of communicating with a brand’s support team remains unchartered.

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Says Winters, a speaker at the 2012 Customer Experience Summit in Miami, FL, "There’s a certain degree of ‘I don’t know if I can trust this’ [when reaching a brand via online channels]. Even though they trust the brand, they might be bringing an ‘I don’t trust this channel’ aspect to it."

Unfortunately, those who dwell on this element, on this desire to create "trust" in the online channel are making a mistake in how they approach customer needs. Instead of thinking about a big picture strategy for establishing a better customer experience online, they reduce the situation down to a more one-dimensional battle to better user experience.

"A customer is somebody that you are working with in the long term," notes Winters. "When you’re thinking about [experience] from a user context, you’re thinking about, ‘how are we helping this particular person solve a discrete problem?’ It’s so much more focused about are they solving this particular problem--can they move themselves through the system--versus what does it mean for this person to be interacting with our brand in this medium?

"Brands have a hard time seeing it from the broader aspect of what does the customer really want to get out of this exchange."

Assuring each user interaction is intuitive, efficient and simplistic is important, but the philosophical goal driving online engagement strategy must concern itself with the overarching customer experience. How are we transforming our brand via our interactions with this channel, and how is that transformation impacting our relationship with customers?

Once that philosophy is accepted and embedded within the company’s experience culture, it can better approach common challenges in online care, which include ROI measurement and staff performance management. Instead of reducing online interactions to a serious of transactions, and either celebrating or mourning on the basis of the intuitiveness of the brand’s online systems, the organization will focus on identifying true drivers for its online customer offerings.

By focusing on what the customers actually want and how the realization of those wants affects their overall perception and loyalty to the brand, organizations will better prepare themselves to answer questions like, "Should our social media strategy be a revenue center or a cost reduction center" or "Can we provide full-fledged customer care over Twitter and Facebook."

For as simple as this seems, even the experts often make mistakes. We see some aggressively advocate for social customer care without any context for the business’ customer base, while others rain on the social support parade by focusing on the logistics of Twitter rather than the needs of the audience. In all such cases, these experts are focusing on user interaction rather than customer experience.

Making each individual engagement a seamless, transparent, delightful one should be a key part of any customer service strategy. The important thing is to define that delight by its tieback to the overall customer experience.