Meaningfully engage with consumers' emotions

Ahead of her session at CXN Live: CX APAC Online 2022, Yvette Mihelic, director of customer experience for rail and transport at John Holland, shares her top tips for introducing personalization and emotional engagement to customer interactions.

What has been your biggest CX success to date?

Yvette Mihelic: It is difficult to select just one success, it is like picking your favorite child. I think my favorite from the sheer scale of impact would be the introduction of electronic ticketing into public transport for rail customers for New South Wales (NSW).

Being at the helm of such a massive program was exciting and all-encompassing. The end-to-end program required changes to physical infrastructure, ICT, customer service strategy and delivery as well as change management, customer and employee communications and marketing. Having to work with a cross-functional team with multiple stakeholders for such a large change impacting so many customers was both challenging and rewarding.

What benefits can infusing emotional engagement into customer service have?

YM: We are all aware of the increasing importance that customers place on purchasing decisions that are driven by value alignment with organizations over other considerations such as price. So, from my perspective, the largest benefit of infusing empathy into customer service is the ability to meaningfully engage more customers, which will ultimately result in increased loyalty, advocacy and lifetime value.

Through frontline teams and digitized interactions that are personalized and contextualized to individuals rather than market groups, organizations are able to secure higher sales ratios through increased customer satisfaction – essentially demonstrating the monetization and commercialization of customer experience.

How can companies better understand the various customer mindsets? What metrics are helpful?

YM: I believe that organizations can understand customer mindsets better through a robust voice of customer approach. Basing decisioning and strategy on only one or two types of customer metrics does not provide a fully formed picture of what makes customers (and prospects) tick.

Undertaking the building of personas, mapping customer journeys, completing meaningful analysis on customer feedback, carrying out research needs to be completed constantly. But even then, that is not enough. Ensuring that actions are derived and implemented and results are measured is the only way to be sure that continuous improvement can be achieved.

When I think about customer metrics, it is the non-traditional CX metrics that I consider to be the most useful. Primarily, lead indicators rather than lag provide the most value as you have the ability to undertake course corrections prior to the delivery of results of a month's worth of customer feedback analysis.

In an operational environment such as public transport, it is metrics such as on time running and reliability that are the most helpful. Knowing that these metrics underpin the majority of customer satisfaction for commuters means that we can focus on the delivery of these ‘foundation’ metrics and improve customer satisfaction. 

Read: Customer Experience Predictions Report: 2022

What are your top tips for introducing empathy and personalization to boost customer advocacy?

YM: I have three top tips for introducing empathy and personalization to boost customer advocacy being:

1. Start small – whether it be a pilot of a small selection of customers, or a small change, ensuring that any project and program can be tested for success first is crucial for sustainable success. Big bang wholesale changes can be polarizing in their outcome. If you attempt a large piece without testing and it fails, the resulting fallout can be hard to rectify and subsequently impact advocacy more negatively than not making changes at all.
2. Outside in, not inside out – Use and harness human-centred design techniques and methods. Creation of projects and work that started life from an internal perspective may not deliver the outcome you are looking for. Through true customer-centricity, and leveraging customer input, the design and execution will meet the root cause of any problem or concern and produce the most benefit for customers resulting in maximized advocacy.
3. Understand the why, not just the what and the how – What is the deep reason for introducing empathy and personalization? Why will it make a difference to the organization? What are the fundamental benefits? Without sharing these important points within the organization, the belief in what our people deliver will never be achieved, and without that belief, our people will not maximize their efforts leading to unrealized opportunities and sub-standard performance.

Along with the above, authenticity is key. Trying to deliver a façade of what you are trying to deliver will inevitably fail and leave your organization with a poor reputation, lower trust index and ultimately fewer customers.

To learn more from Yvette Mihelic about customer advocacy, register for her session at CXN Live: CX APAC Online 2022.