In this article you will find out…
- The importance of customer experience
- How personalized branding improves the customer experience
- What is predicted in the future Customer Experience
Quicksearch has been conducting relationship surveys for over 20 years and are experts in statistics, survey methodology and analysis.
I think everyone agrees that service is an important, and increasingly important, part of the customer experience. It is the customer experience that can differentiate different suppliers and for which most customers are willing to pay extra.
We see how industries have been divided more clearly into premium services and budget services and often the budget services hijack our opportunity for human interaction. If you book a flight ticket by phone, it costs more than if you book yourself online. In many cases, you also get a better loan interest rate if you belong to a group that does its banking online themselves.
The human interaction is expensive for the companies, but an important factor in the customer experience.
The Importance of Customer Experience
Customer Experience includes much more than the customer experience itself, it is not only about the customer journey but also the environment in which the customer finds himself during the experience. All touch points must match the customer's expectations.
The hard part is that every customer is different and their experience is always unique and personal. So how do you succeed in making every customer journey successful? How do you get the customer to like, maybe even apply for, the company's marketing? And who should be distinguished as the first to meet the customer?
Personalized branding improves customer experience
PwC's Study if the customer experience of the future shows that personal interaction is becoming increasingly important. Generation Z has higher expectations for fast service, friendliness and that service is personal both in terms of treatment and brand personality.
Some that have received a lot of attention in recent years for the brand's personality are the American hamburger chain Wendy's, which does not hesitate to be a bit rapping in its comments both with customers and with competitors.
They have managed to create a friendly, but cocky personality for their figurehead Wendy. Apart from the fact that they received a lot of attention from the followers, their rap comments are spread between private individuals on communities such as Imgur and Reddit, where you create your own tributes or interpretations of ’Sneaky Wendy’.
Wendy's has succeeded very well in creating a personal brand and we will see how more people follow suit and how it becomes part of the personal meeting when it is no longer difficult and stops being expensive.
Because today it is expensive to deliver a personal touch and not always easy to bring the personality of the brand into that interaction, but Google recently showed that it is not far away.
New customer experience with the technology of the future
Last week, Google showed off its service Duplex. If you haven't seen it, you should take a look. The service will be rolled out gradually starting in the summer of 2018. Google showed that they are now at the forefront of AI assistants by presenting a personal assistant that sounds completely human and can interact with people without us thinking that it is a machine or changing our behavior in the interaction.
We often find human machines scary and the more human they are, the scarier they are. If we discover they are not human that is. We won't be able to do that much longer.
PwC's study also shows that the desire to talk to a real person differs greatly between different cultures, but it is likely that this will cause a rapid swing. To draw a parallel, it was discussed 20 years ago whether there could ever be self-driving cars. Now they are here and we are instead debating whether people will be allowed to drive themselves in 20 years. We are still unfamiliar with the technology and many people find self-driving cars unfunny. But they are in traffic and we have probably already met them. We just need to cross the threshold.
Google's demonstration shows how technology is now tearing down the last walls for us to easily welcome AI into our everyday lives.
Until last week, all assistants were still somewhat canned, command-driven interactions. We have seen how Amazon with Alexa and Apple with its assistant Siri in competition with Google pushed the trail for easy interaction between man and machine. Now, Google definitely took the lead as Duplex picked up on human features like filler words, pitch rises, and even the ability to hear breathing between words and the smacking of lip movements. There are big steps forward and you can really hear how stunned the audience is at Duplex's first "M-Hmm..".
Anticipate the Customer Experience of the future
I am convinced that the future leads to shorter customer service queues and being able to meet a new level of personal customer service employees who can also carry the brand's profile. The rapping Wendy, friendly Robert from Boxer or why not ICA's proper ICA-Stig might make a comeback? Here in Scandinavia, as usual, we may have to wait longer than in the English-speaking countries.
Of course, it becomes too obvious if these are exactly the characters we are interacting with, but having their digital cousins in customer service is more likely. Cousins with names other than Judit, Stig and Robert, but who behave like them. Digital cousins that quickly become more numerous when more people call customer service and fewer when there is less load. Their brand personality will be as obvious as the choice of the stores' decor, lighting, playlist and perfume.
From Quicksearch's perspective, we naturally see this interaction as a completely new source of feedback. These digital cousins of customer service will be able to gather more about what constitutes customer needs and be able to gauge the tone of the conversation with the customer, but it will also be more important to follow up with these agents.
Partly to train them and make them better, but also to give them the right conditions in the customer dialogue. Therefore, we follow this development with excitement.
Contact Us if you want to know more about our services.
The images that illustrate the post depict well-known and in some cases trademarked characters that symbolize or have symbolized Wendy's burgers, ICA, Boxer, Com Hem and Comviq.
