Satisfaction among US consumers is in decline and, according to Jeff Toister, is due to frustrating experiences, self-service dead ends and unmet expectations.
Speaking to CX Network, the keynote speaker and author explains how customer experience managers can buck the trend and win customers.
CX Network: How would you gauge the state of customer centricity across the B2C space at present?
In the US, the American Customer Satisfaction Index is a broad index of customer satisfaction across all industries and it is at a low point. The decline started in 2018 and it has continued to nosedive over five years.
I do not have data for other countries, but friends and colleagues in other countries are painting a similar picture.
There are a few things driving this. One is quality and, in the broadest terms possible, product quality. Does it work and does it work as advertised?
I have been researching fast-food restaurants and if one advertises a new sandwich, the picture does not look the same as the item you are served. That distance between expectation and execution is big. Now also think about service quality – are employees genuinely helpful? Are they genuinely friendly? In many cases, they are not.
We are also seeing companies overtly trying to cut costs by making it more difficult for customers to get assistance. If you are on a website and you need to talk to a live person, you may see a chat signal, but it is not a live person. Instead, it is a bot and it is often an incompetent bot. Now I am frustrated, not just because of my first problem but I am being forced to chat with a robot that still does not understand my answer.
There are multiple areas of opportunity for companies to improve and the big problem is they are making customers more frustrated than ever before, rather than making their lives better.
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CX Network: What does it take to be a customer-centric company in a trading environment of reduced customer spending and widespread employee layoffs, for example in ecommerce, retail and grocery?
Jeff Toister: If we look specifically at employees, we either have too many people or too few people. If I have too many employees, obviously that costs the company money. It means the company is not running efficiently and employees are probably a little bored or are not doing meaningful work.
If I over-adjust, however, and have too few employees and customers cannot get the help they deserve, things run inefficiently. It takes too long to solve issues and customers are really bearing the brunt of that.
A great example is the retail experience. A retail customer needs an employee who is readily available and can assist them. They help to ring up the purchase and find what the customer needs by lending their expertise to educate them on product selection or helping them make a better decision.
An employee who is present and able to do that is probably increasing sales and making customers happier at the same time, but when there are too few employees, there is a huge queue and customers cannot get the help they need.
You need to have the right employees at the right place and at the right time to serve your customers. That is a challenge that organizations face.
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CX Network: Many aim to build a great customer-focused culture, but what is your advice for achieving it?
Jeff Toister: You have to be absolutely committed to a customer culture. If it is a side project or an exercise that you are doing for a short duration, or if you tell yourself this is the year we focus on culture and next year we focus on something else, do not bother.
Many organizations make the mistake of going through the motions and employees – rightly – perceive that as “the flavor of the month” and next time there will be a new initiative so we do not need to invest ourselves in this one. That is a common attitude when an organization is not committed.
Leaders who are truly committed to building a customer-focused culture can take three steps to get there. The three steps are very simple but they take a lot of effort.
Step one – Define the service culture
How do you boil your culture down to one simple sentence? Everyone in the organization should have one statement that describes with absolute clarity what they are trying to accomplish for their customers.
Step two – Engage people with that statement
Everybody has to be able to explain what this means and how they contribute to it. Do they understand the goal and are they working towards it?
Step three – Alignment
We have to make sure everything we do in an organization aligns with that statement. We have to make strategic decisions around that statement so everything we do consistently reinforces the culture that we are trying to build and grow.
That is really it.