Customer Experience during 2020 – Year In Review #11
Customer Experience during 2020
Next up in this series of posts on Year in Review, let us focus on the customer experience or CX. It is one of the critical drivers of any business, especially consumer facing business. During 2020, both the organizations and their customers faced unprecedented disruption. In this post, we will take a look at Customer Experience during 2020.
Why Customer Experience
Customer Experience was probably one of the worst hit segments, after the frontline workers. The entire global population aka the customers have been facing anxiety and mental health issues. Their lives have been disrupted and so have been your services or product deliveries. Guess who bears the brunt of all this? Yes, it is the customer experience team or the CX operations. Let us look at Customer Experience during 2020 from each of the 4 lenses of Process, People, Technology and Strategy.
4 Pillars of CX – Customer Experience during 2020
#1 – Process
The basic challenge of Customer Experience during 2020 was to ensure business continuity. On the one hand, the core services to the customers were impacted because of external factors. Whereas on the other hand, there was also rising anxiety among the customers, which resulted in a spike in volumes of customer queries.
Many businesses took the opportunity to move their CX operations to automated and impersonal channels. While on the one hand, this was very much required to manage the volume with a complete disruption in physical infrastructure. On the other hand, did this approach do justice to the customers? These were times when the human touch was needed the most and most organizations replaced the human element with the robotic element.
#2 – People
The people component of customer experience probably required the most attention during 2020. At its core, experience is a feeling and not a physical or digital attribute. One could not have possibly created a delightful (or soothing) customer experience during 2020 without touching the emotional chord.
This is where I think most businesses missed the bus of superior customer experience in 2020. There was extreme economic uncertainty and severe risks of operating from existing physical infrastructure. Since the CX teams did not have a full scale Business Continuity Plan for such an extended period, they had no option but to automate and dehumanize the customer interactions.
However, automation and left brained systems are typically not geared to handle uncertainty. They work well when they follow rules under predictable conditions. We all realize that no one could have predicted the future in March 2020 and no one can predict the course of the pandemic in December 2020 as well. What we need as humans under these circumstances is not a robotic intervention, but a human one.
#3 – Strategy
With this thought, let us look at the implications on the organizational strategy and the downstream implications on various functions. As we are nearing the end of a tumultuous year, it is a good time to take a strategic look at customer experience during 2020 and beyond. The pandemic is a once in a century event that will shape the future in irreversible ways. Organizations need to understand the impact of such changes and need to tailor the strategies accordingly.
It is difficult to paint all consumers across all industries with one brush. However, certain common themes underpin a lot of changes that we are seeing across industries.
For one, health and safety are on top of the pecking order of customer experience during 2020. This trend will continue in 2021 and beyond and brands and organizations will need to take these factors into account while designing their messaging and customer experience operations.
Another aspect that has skyrocketed in importance is that of consumer trust. In my view, brands that have been perceived to be fair and empathetic during the pandemic will create tremendous brand equity.
#4 – Technology
Customer Experience platforms need to be nimble and fleet footed to be able to support remote operations and hybrid operating models. This has been the biggest learning for technocrats to support customer experience during 2020. It is very tempting to achieve this and save costs by dehumanizing and automating customer experience operations. A balanced call needs to be made, in alignment with the organization’s strategy and brand positioning.
One thing, though, is quite apparent. Organizations need to adopt modern cloud based solutions that enable seamless operations across multiple channels. The multiplicity of channels will not come down and new social media channels will also keep emerging. Brands have to be agile to meet the changing needs of the customers, including the generational shift to Millennials and GenZ.
The future also has a lot of promise for intelligent technologies to provide experiences that was not possible earlier. We had undertaken a project around 3 years ago to optimize content generation using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The algorithms did the ground work and came up with recommendations to improve the customer experience. However, these were not put into production until the team members understood and appreciated the intuition behind the recommendations.
These intelligent solutions will need to take the form of Augmented Workforce in the next few years. One needs to take a look at the underlying business benefits of AI before investing in these technologies. AI solutions need to augment the ability of the human workforce to better understand the customer needs and effectively create a highly customized market segment of one customer in each segment.
A Discussion on Customer Experience during 2020
Here are some snippets of a roundtable discussion that cover a few of the above pointers and more with examples. This discussion was organized by Freshworks and Programic Asia and took place in October 2020. Below is a snipped version that is available on YouTube.
Outlook for 2021 and Beyond
I have already covered some pointers relating to the outlook for customer experience in 2021 and beyond. However, one cannot take a cookie cutter approach and the CX model needs to be customized. This customization should depend not just on the industry, but also the various customer segments of the organization.
Before we conclude, here is a moonshot view on the future of customer experience. Mankind and marketers have keenly followed the field of psychology to learn how to influence the minds of the consumer. What will happen when technology meets psychology and in fact, the brain itself? I am talking about BMIs (Bi-directional Machine Interfaces) that can engage in two way communication with the brain. Technology has played its part in dehumanizing customer experiences, as we all know from our experiences with customer service teams. With BMI and other leaps in technology, who knows what could happen next?
Well, thank God for small mercies that we had to deal with only limited complexities of customer experience during 2020! In the coming times let us focus on humanizing customer experiences in 2021 and beyond.
Year In Review 2020
Check out the master article for the Year in Review 2020 that contains links to all the other posts in the series. Also, bookmark the master article on the browser to read more about each of the 20 thoughts from 2020 and lessons for 2021.
Editor’s Note:
This article on ‘How to re-design and re-imagine your CX (Customer Experience) strategy in the New Normal?’ has Google feature snippets from it along with four ads vying for your attention.
About The Author
Rajiv Maheshwari is a business and start-up advisor, and the co-founder of From The Experts Mouth. He is a management professional with over 25 years of experience, and worked as CEO for a decade, and in leadership roles with NYSE listed companies such as Accenture and WNS.
He is a Chartered Accountant and MBA (Director’s Merit List from IIM Bangalore) and an autodidact, who is on the path of self-directed life long learning and sharing. He is a thought leader, author and keynote speaker and has developed several frameworks to bridge the gap between academia and industry.
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