We, humans, are an interesting lot; creatures of habit who are incredibly adept at pairing “needs” with sources of satisfaction based on prior learned experiences. As masters of pattern recognition, we detect effective and frictionless solutions and then store them away to be revisited automatically upon the next “context match”. As soon as we find ourselves in a familiar quandary, we’re quick to call upon the solution that worked last time for us or our friends, adjusting as we go in order to achieve the ideal outcome.
Ironically, we do this well as families or other small, self organizing groups, but seem rarely able to do it from within large bureaucracies . Customer service is an excellent example of this. Companies, which are groups of humans, are able to quickly detect patterns of dissatisfaction in their customer base. Instead of addressing the concerns with adaptive solutions for specific UNIQUE customer groups, they force all customers, regardless of their concern, to run a maze of rigid (and often non-sensical) processes. The customer inevitably becomes dissatisfied because they didn’t achieve their desired outcome, had no voice, or otherwise suffered great angst in the process. At least that’s been the status quo until the rise of social businesses.
Today, companies are learning the hard way that customer service is not ‘one size fits all’. Customers want to be involved in the resolution process and, at a minimum, be continually informed. When they are not, they broadcast their displeasure across the social web, exposing both the process and the outcome to thousands of their followers. Companies that understand this and redefine how customer service is delivered realize both cost savings in deflected calls as well as increased customer loyalty and revenue. These companies have not tossed out their processes and procedures with reckless abandon. Instead they have leveraged the terabytes of information within and without their walls, in a model that trains the customer to repeatedly experience them as a source of satisfaction. The customer and company join in a symbiosis to solve the concern, and most importantly, the customer feels met, as a distinct human. They remember this experience more than anything, and the company that provided that feeling will become a place to whom the customer returns again and again.
