Delivering immersive customer experiences

They might not remember what you say, but they will remember how you made them feel. It’s an observation often credited to the American writer Maya Angelou and it is one that rings true when reading customer experience research both in New Zealand and overseas. It’s exactly why the service your company provides needs to be as strong on the ‘soft skills’ as it is on the technical smarts, if it aspires to provide a truly immersive customer experience.

An industry research report by Customer Contact Network New Zealand (CCNNZ)¹ found that such is the value that customers place on world-class customer service, that 62% surveyed would pay extra to receive it. In addition, customers cite the two most important factors when dealing with an organisation, after having an issue resolved, are a quick and easy process, and fair and honest treatment.

These findings locally, chime with customer studies globally, and point to the value of providing an immersive customer experience that is memorable for the right reasons. An experience that becomes a key differentiator for your business, to help with customer loyalty. To achieve this however requires a combination of efficiency and empathy. Unfortunately, many organisations focus on the former, at the expense of the latter, and in doing so risk losing competitive advantage.

Research firm Gartner^® notes in its recent report² ‘Increase Customer Loyalty by Adding Empathy to Your CX Strategy’, that “customer empathy can – and should – be applied to all four customer touchpoints: people, processes, technology, products and services”. 

Gartner recommends creating “a customer empathy strategy with three types of empathy”. These are cognitive, emotional, and compassionate. This strategy must be consistent across every channel, from in person to on the phone, via self-service platforms and when developing products and services.

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Setting the customer context

At its core, achieving empathy is about understanding the customer – what they need and what they are trying to achieve when they contact your organisation. To do so effectively, you must first understand the situation they are in when they make contact, such as their physical environment, mental attitude, if they are alone or with people, and so forth.

By understanding context, it’s then possible to design customer experiences that respond to the customer’s needs. Contact centre technology is evolving to include AI-driven tools that help the agent to focus more on responding to a customer’s emotional state. By ‘listening’ into the conversation, contact centre tools can rapidly surface information that will solve the issue, leaving the agent free to focus on developing a rapport with the customer.

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Building empathy into self-service

Self-service technologies, such as chatbots, can be hugely cost-efficient but sometimes come at the cost of delivering good customer service. The CCNNZ report¹ found that while 45% of organisations surveyed believe customers want more self-service channels, only 13% of customers surveyed actually do. Instead, customers were more in favour of the organisation improving its services and products. 

To help resolve this disconnect, it is key to embed all three types of empathy recommended by Gartner, Inc into your self-service channels as well as people touchpoints. In its report, Gartner identifies that “Organizations can exhibit empathy through their self-service technology in three ways:” 

1. Identifying points of friction in the organization’s technology and removing them 
2. Inferring customer intent based on behaviour
3. Making real-time presentation layer changes to incorporate next best actions

At Spark we work with a number of organisations to build self-service experiences. We use Conversation Design principles, which includes developing customer profiles or personas and from these, mapping out various customer journeys in a self-serve online environment. A key part of creating natural and useful experiences is to continually test them throughout the design process using roleplaying.  That is, we have someone pretend to be a customer and another to be the system and have them ‘converse’. In doing so our pre-conceived ideas of behaviour often go out the window and we get a truer picture of how our customers will potentially behave. 

Many organisations are now experimenting with incorporating Generative AI into their chatbots. The risk with using large language models to provide responses to customers is they can produce ‘hallucinations’ – that is, the information is untrue, wrong, or even offensive. Its why current best practice is to use Generative AI to assist with authoring the chatbot, and to build in variation so it can deliver answers more ‘naturally’, but ultimately there is a human involved in signing off on everything the chatbot says. 

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Embedding empathy into products and services

When building self-service tools the most value is generally returned by focusing on the core use cases, representing approximately 80% of customer journeys. The remaining 20%, which we refer to as “the long tail” often provides diminishing returns and frustrated experiences. For these cases we recommend escalating to an agent. But what if your customer didn’t need to contact you at all?

There are many who consider the best service is no service – that is, the customer never has a reason to contact you. Gartner advises this can be achieved in part, if not completely, by considering its three empathy stages. ‍

1. ‍Cognitive Empathy: listening to the customer and understanding the context‍
2. Emotional Empathy: understand the impact this issue has on the customer‍
3. Compassionate Empathy: work with the customer in finding the best solution for them.

In its report ‘Increase Customer Loyalty by Adding Empathy to Your CX Strategy’², Gartner cites the example of bank customers. Gartner, Inc states:  

“A product manager at a bank may observe from application analytics that when customers land on the bill pay screen, most immediately go back to the account balance screen before returning to the bill pay function to make a payment. In response, the organization can update its mobile app to include the account balance on the bill pay screen to streamline the payment process. This product update shows both cognitive and compassionate sympathy.” 

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Measuring the success of the immersive customer experience

There are plenty of metrics available to determine how an organisation’s customer service is performing, and they each have their place. While iNPS indicates customer sentiment at a given point in time, First Call Resolution points to the effectiveness of the conversations that are taking place.

Taking a scorecard approach to metrics provides a more holistic view of how your immersive customer service strategy is performing. By considering the entire customer journey and the different contacts a customer has with you, organisations get a better picture of the customer’s true experience.

Customers expect great customer service and are prepared to change to businesses where they get it. Companies need to be responsive to the needs of their customers. By deploying empathy through all aspects of your customer service journey, you can know that you did everything possible to leave a great lasting impression.

To learn more about how your business can deliver a more immersive customer experience, get in touch with one of our Spark specialists.

The full Gartner, Inc. report ‘Increase Customer Loyalty by Adding Empathy to Your CX Strategy’  has been made available to Insight Engine readers for a limited time here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ramon is a customer experience specialist who works with enterprise and government customers to deliver innovative solutions in Australia and New Zealand. His experiences as a software engineer, business analyst and solutions consultant give him the ability to understand an organisation’s needs spanning people, process and technology. He passionately believes that it is all about the people, who are enabled by technology.^‍

¹2022 CCNNZ Industry Research Report^‍

²Gartner, Increase Customer Loyalty by Adding Empathy to Your CX Strategy, Penny Gillespie, Leah Leachman, Kathy Ross, Maria Marino, 3 November 2023.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.