If you have nothing better to do sometime, pour a nice glass of wine and curl up with Arizona State’s Rage Study. The most recent edition is from 2013 and it tells us that almost $76-billion in revenue is at risk thanks to “extremely” and “very upset” U.S. households who called to complain about something.
That’s a lot of dough, Lords and Ladies of the Spin Cycle, and that’s just consumers. It seems likely there is a fair bit of rage going down in the B2B world too; indeed, we know that B2B purchases can be more emotional than consumer purchases.
But the rage isn’t just the horrible stuff Porcupines are shouting through the phone, though that continues to be our favourite tool for expressing it; the Rage is also almost twice as likely now to find its way to a social media site than it was just two years ago. Now that’s fun.
Customer problem rates are up five points in just over two years and this has much to do with terrible Customer Experience Management (CEM). You’d think after a few thousand years of commerce, we’d be in a rather better place. I’m thinking we owe this deplorable situation to three things:
- We suck all the emotion out things.
- We focus on the problems.
- Nobody owns CEM design.
Let’s dig in!
Reason #1: We Suck The Emotion Right Out Of It
Marketers love emotion. We spend unhealthy amounts of time peering at data, just begging it to let us know where that magic emotion button is hiding in a given part of the market. And once that insight pops up, our job gets a lot easier.
When we can figure out how to build an emotional bond between our brand and our customer’s brain, the wallet, friends, will surely follow. Dove and Jeep rocked this at the Super Bowl this year. Budweiser’s friendly horses have been making us tear-up over a six pack for ages. All good.
Even the purchase process can be meticulously engineered to engage us emotionally. Whether it’s helpful geniuses at the Apple store patiently explaining how stuff works or the just-in-time container of ball bearings, it’s all about how we make our customers feel.
But before the debit card can even cool off in our new customer’s wallet, marketing has packed up the tissue box and headed back out to make someone else feel, well anything.
Now comes the big let-down – like a Boxing Day without end. Now, when our brand engages with our customers, it’s clinical, process-driven and comes with an automated voice system.
As we let simple product or service issues go from inconvenient to horrible to rage-inducing, we double down on the mechanics of making our customers go away instead of looking for the emotional salve we ought to be offering.
The Rage Study is pretty clear on which emotions are in play once the purchase is done check out their “Double Bupkus” (sic) chart.
Looks to me like a little reassurance, sympathy, empathy, respect, gratitude, regret and humanity will go a long way to improving the customer experience at the point where it is under the greatest pressure. You can read the whole presentation here.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Three Reasons Customer Experience Management Fails
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