Customer experience causes trouble. As soon as you start asking customers for feedback, and letting them have their say, in their own words...they have a tendency to tell you exactly what they think.
And what most customers often think is – make it easier for us to do business with you.
I’ve already blogged about why it is important to put Easy on your agenda1 so it is probably time to start having a look at how to achieve this. How do we make it easier for our customers?
Professor Moira Clark (Henley Business School) identifies 4 main drivers of customer effort: physical, emotional, cognitive and time. So the Easy challenge is – how do we make it quick, simple, comfortable and personal for our customers...across EVERY touchpoint and EVERY interaction?
Organisations often reach for very complex, or very expensive solutions to this problem, and they may be overlooking a channel which is right under their nose.
In fact, it is a channel which is right under everybody’s nose!
The humble mobile telephone. It has been around since 1973, and has grown up a bit since the Yuppies of the 1980’s. Today, in the UK:
- Eveybody’s got one - there are more mobile phones than people
- Everybody uses them – the average mobile is looked at >100 times/day
- Everybody carries them – the top 3 items that we don’t want to leave the house without are keys, a wallet/purse, and our mobile
And the simplest channel through this device...the text message (or SMS):
- The average SMS is read in under 4 minutes
- SMS is the priority channel – if you have a voicemail, an email and an SMS on your mobile I bet you check the SMS first!
- Gartner describe SMS as “the single most powerful real-time engagement channel on the planet”
Using mobile as the bridge between the digital and physical worlds of our customer journeys helps our customers have a single, seamless and simple experience. Serving up relevant, timely information, through their channel of choice, to the device that they always have with them, can enhance the customer experience and reduce costs. Just have a look at the experiences of DPD2 or Papa Johns3.
If you don’t think that this is a transformative technology, that has changed our world in less than the space of our own lifetimes, then the links below give you a video4 (or if you prefer, a list5) of the huge range of items, gadgets, devices and tools that the smart mobile phone has simply replaced, in just the last few years!
Find out more about why the mobile phone can enhance your Customer Experience in our Infographic:
Sources
1 - http://www.rantandrave.com/creating-a-great-customer-experience/
3 - http://www.rantandrave.com/news/papa-johns-introduces-rant-rave-improve-customer-experience/
4 - http://www.nerdist.com/2013/11/30-things-your-smartphone-replaced/
