Revealed: 5 Most Important Elements Of A Customer Interaction
The following excerpts from Call Center IQ’s Executive Report on the Customer Experiencereveal why businesses most commonly interact with customers and which factors are most pivotal to the success of those interactions.
For a complete analysis of the findings from our annual CX study — as well as in-depth expert commentaries and case studies — download the complimentary Executive Report on the CX right now.
Reasons To Interact With Customers
Customer engagement is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Each individual interaction is unique, and the best organizations will aim to consistently accommodate those nuances and intricacies.
Big picture strategy must, however, start somewhere. In the case of customer engagement, that starting point is an assessment of the types of interactions in which a business most frequently partakes.
A business will absolutely engage in certain types of conversations more frequently than others. Those commonplace interactions come with core expectations and required skillsets, and it is in accordance with those central requirements that an organization is wise to begin developing its big picture customer engagement strategy.
For today’s businesses, the most frequent form of direct customer engagement involves providing general support and information.
Respondents rate the frequency of such conversations a 4.16/5.
Other comparatively commonplace interactions involve feedback regarding a specific product issue (4.08), feedback regarding the overall experience (4.05), support related to the overall service experience (3.88), billing (3.63), and technical support for a specific product issue (3.63).
Comparatively uncommon conversation topics are support for legal and compliance matters (2.93), outbound sales (3.22), and up-sell initiative (3.43).
The responses once again reveal the multi-faceted nature of the customer experience. Customer feedback and support engagements may represent the most common forms of interaction between brand and customer, but many forms of interaction are fairly common. Businesses do, on a fairly frequent basis, engage customers in regard to legal matters. They do, an on even more frequent basis, communicate up-sell opportunities.
Anatomy of a Great Interaction
For today’s businesses, accuracy represents the most important element of an interaction.
It is not the only extremely important element.
Asked to rate the importance of a variety of customer interaction elements on a scale of 0-5, respondents rated four – accuracy (4.83), quality of resolution (4.76), consistency across agents (4.65), and ability to reach a live agent (4.51) – above a 4.5. With a score of 4.48, friendliness just narrowly misses the 4.5 threshold.
For each of the five elements (friendliness included), at least 60% of respondents provided a 5/5 score.
Equally telling is the fact that the comparatively least important elements — memorability/creativity (3.65), the formation of a personal relationship between agent and customer (3.86), and channel options (3.96) – possess solid scores in absolute terms. Not one garnered a score of 2 or lower from more than 5% of respondents.
Because businesses operate in an impractical world governed by practicality, they will naturally need to prioritize certain components. Those priorities, based on the aforementioned performance rubric, should include accuracy, resolution quality, and consistency across agents.
The data, however, reveals that they should not be ignoring any elements. Memorability and creativity will rarely be the first priority for an interaction, but they are absolutely factors that matter to customers. They, consequently, must absolutely be on the radar for customer experience strategists.
There may be hierarchies when it comes to constructing customer interactions, but there are no shortcuts. Great interactions fire on the full spectrum of cylinders.
