In an on-demand economy where customers can have what they want immediately with a few taps and swipes, we’ve become increasingly impatient. An e-commerce app takes too long to load a page, so we close it quickly - or the Apple Pay button is missing on a favourite brand’s site, so we delay purchasing and often don’t go back.
The more people anticipate instant gratification as a standard consumer right, the more businesses must cater to ‘right now’ consumers or risk falling behind the curve. Recent Vonage research bears this out and shows that more than half (52%) of consumers are likely to stop engaging with a business when the customer experience is marred with frustration.
Solving this problem to deliver a superior customer experience effectively requires embracing this impatience as an opportunity for profitability and growth. Such a glass-half-full approach can help businesses discover new and more creative ways to navigate the shifting business-customer relationship by driving innovation in the direction of where it is needed.
Modern consumers try to be self-sufficient wherever possible and turn to their mobile devices to search for information with minimal effort. Consequently, business decision-makers need to understand that their target audiences are more empowered than ever to act instantaneously. Thus, if they are taking the time to contact customer service, they will expect to converse with agents who can provide immediate solutions and results which the consumer could not access by themselves.
As customers interact with businesses across different social media, sales, and customer service channels, the amount of data that businesses have at their disposal has never been greater. However, many organisations make information difficult for agents to find and deploy internally which results in disempowered customer service representatives whose quality of work diminishes.
For example, they may treat early adopters, who may have been with the business for years, the same as newcomers – making interactions uniform and inhuman. Similarly, they might suggest irrelevant products or mishandle important customers due to siloed data stores, which may result in churn. To thrive and retain customers effectively it’s clear that modern enterprises must allow their agents to see everything relevant to the person they’re assisting – no matter what channel that insight came from.
Businesses must understand changing expectations to create instant experiences of high quality and consistency. Empowering customer service agents to grasp consumer issues in-depth, will earn companies long-term competitive advantages and a loyal hyper-engaged user base.