Why customer service is worse in the digital age
Recently, I wanted to pay a company for their services. But I couldn’t figure out how to the software was so poorly designed at the very place it needed the best UX design — to collect money. On their website was no logical process of payment, no “buy now” button. I was urged to change the credit card on file, which had changed. But it gave no indication the change was saved and no button that said “update payment” followed by an emailed receipt at the very least or an acknowledgement by a pop-up that said thanks for the payment. The company is Buffer. An excellent tool, a terrible customer service experience in which it took over a day to resolve via Facebook messenger as Twitter failed to work, there was no support email and no phone number. This is not the exception today, it is the rule, especially for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies.
Internet based companies delivering products via the browser are often the worst for customer service. From Facebook and Google down to small fledgling companies like Buffer. But large companies are even worse.
There are two factors at play here. The primary being the objective to bring more customers in; the obsession with funnels and getting to the paid customer in an era of too many channels to reach customers. The second is that most companies judge customers rather than understanding them.
Tech startups and companies tend to see customer service from their own view. The assumption that because they use Facebook messenger, Twitter and Slack that so do all their customers. This is making a judgement, not an understanding.
Most companies tend to judge customers, rather than understand them.
Such tools are perceived as being lower-cost and reducing friction. Yes, a phone conversation is the most expensive way to engage with a customer. Up front. But may in the long-term reduce churn and lead to a higher profit level from retention.
By alienating customers, churn becomes higher and loyalty fleeting. By constantly focusing on mitigating the cost of customer engagement, it actually results in higher marketing costs to replace lost customers and lower loyalty. Because it then becomes ia higher cost to acquire a customer.
Alienating customers actually increases front-end marketing costs so cost savings on customer service are lost.
Tech companies perceived solution to this problem has been creating FAQ’s for support and these massive databases they force customers to search to find answers. Such FAQ’s can be invaluable and work very well, but companies, once they put them up, spend little time then analysing how customers use these tools.
For businesses, customer service is expensive. It’s always been seen as a cost centre. For some companies, they’ve turned customer service functions into a system to upsell the customer to other products, often frustrating and alienating the customer. Again, this is a judgement of the consumer, rather than an understanding. The problem is, reducing customer service costs can result in lower customer loyalty, which then means spending more to acquire new customers to counter churn rate (especially in SaaS and recurring revenue models.) So you end up spending more in marketing and negating the cost savings on the customer service end.
How often at a drive-through when you just want a coffee are you confronted with the dreaded question of would you like a cookie or donut to go with that? Perhaps most eloquently refined with the iconic statement “do you want fries with that?”
These are judgement based decisions. Firms spend little on research to understand their customers, and not much more on market research to acquire customers. If a company spent more time understanding their customers, they would be able to design better customer experiences, which would reduce marketing costs, decrease churn and help them understand which digital tools actually make sense.
