New Research shows acceptance of an Emotional Experience

The biggest thing I have learnt in 15 years of working in Customer Experience is all about having the right mind-set.

I recently gave a key note speech at a Telecoms conference in Miami. It was a bit like coming home as prior to starting Beyond Philosophy I spent 18 years working at BT (British Telecom), my last role as SVP of Customer Experience. In talking with the various different companies in Miami I am sad to report, in general, the Telecoms industry has not improved its Customer focus very much at all since I left.

Why is this? It’s quite simple, the mindset remains the same – the internal focus on efficiencies and cost savings. Having said this we are now starting to see signs of change and some best practices emerge. Over the last 6 months we have undertaken research study in the telecoms industry to identify what makes a good CE program in Telecoms. We have identified

Seven Key Ingredients of a Successful Customer Experience Program in Telecoms. We will be conducting a webinar on this on Thursday April 26th. To register please go here

I thought it would be useful to share with you one of the areas that leading Telecoms Companies are now starting to move into.

Let’s look at one area that we will be discussing on the webinar: How emotions are emerging as a competitive differentiator to improve Customer Retention.

At the conference in Miami we heard from Senior people in Comcast (Cable operator in USA) and Tellus (Canada) about how they are starting to use emotions as a key differentiator. The concept of building emotions into a Customer Experience is quite simple but the implementation can be complex. Let me give you an example. If you want to show your Customers that you ‘care’ for them what do you have to do to evoke this emotion in an experience? It could be you need to spend time listening to your Customer complaints. It could be in the sympathetic way your employee talks with the Customer. Many different actions canevoke the feeling that you care for the Customer. On the face of this it’s easy. But it is not, otherwise many more organizations would be doing this.

For example to implement this it would mean Call Centre agents spending more time talking with Customers. This means the way they are currently measured would need to change, how people are paid may need to change. All this directly clashes with the efficiency and cost culture in telecoms. In addition, do you have the right people who are naturally focussed on evoking care with Customers? What is your training like? Do you have a caring culture within your organization? As you can see,simplicity can turn into complexity!

In a recent blog on How to map a Customer Journey mapping that improves customer retention.

I outlined that the devil is in the detail and it is the details that often get missed by organizations. I believe that many of the lessons we learnfrom the research with telecoms apply in other industries. I am also personally seeing a number of other companies starting to see the power of building emotions into their Customer Experience. Are you?