The Customer Experience Foundation (CXFO) recent round table event attended by CX providers and contact centres, titled “Understanding the effects and impacts of digital adoption” has revealed that customer emotion is impacting the business operation and customer experience. Keith Gait, MBA CCXP at CXFO discusses.
The discussion started with one organisation sharing that for them, having older generation customers has meant that the individuals are only just setting up things like Apple Pay, if they are at all.
This shows the impact launching new technology can have on our audience and the time it can take to onboard the older generation. It is important to keep these customers feeling valued whilst still staying up to date with the latest technologies.
Another organisation has implemented a customer onboarding process whereby the call handler spends time talking them through the technology by explaining how to utilise it and get started which means the customer is more able and likely to use it moving forwards.
Other organisations in the discussion felt they didn’t have this problem due to the brand and the products on offer provide a mixed demographic with the majority being online and tech coherent.
We moved on to talk about emotions and expectations. People’s emotions and expectations vary depending on their investment in the product and company. It is important to understand the customer’s psychology and sentiment to provide the right thought process and experience.
Customers often take time to purchase a product so when something goes wrong the organisation must respond correctly to ensure the service or recovery is above par and completed with the right training and support in place. Finding the right outcome for the customer has to be the main priority.
From the agent perspective, management must remember when a call handler deals with a difficult call and finishes, they are straight onto another call, where they cannot take their emotions with them and have to maintain professionalism.
Every call has to be handled as if it’s the first one of the day, so organisations must support call handlers through difficult calls. We then discussed the impact of AI. It was agreed that AI has changed a lot of company plans. Searchability is dead and now many find themselves focusing on findability. Technology brings new opportunities and can be looked at from an exciting perspective as it brings a moment to pivot. The call handler is still needed, but AI can support them and deliver better training.
This needs to cover both emotional support and product knowledge. Software can now monitor customer emotions and how the experience is adapted to provide the right call handler with the correct level of experience to support the customer.
This does not mean that every call handler is suitable to handle every call type. Discussion turned to how all this impacts our people. Soft skills are often still not considered now compared to product and technology training.
Organisations need to provide support to enhance soft skills from the offset and continuously develop these through progression programmes throughout an individual’s career. Our people are customer experience experts are emotionally talented.
Can emotional intelligence be trained? Yes, there is a natural flair of how people adapt but other people can enhance it. By recognising that emotional support and training is required by an organisation, will enable development and better outputs for our contact centre agents, who deserve the support and commitment.
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