We did some research recently. We asked participants to recount a particularly frustrating experience with customer service. Almost every single one said, “I felt like they didn’t listen.” and something in the vein of, “I need to know that they got my back, that they understand.” Isn’t it quite profound? Don’t you just want to call customer service and have someone tell you that everything is going to be okay?
Empathy is a very human concept. It’s important for us to know that the other person understands what we’re going through. “Hey, I’m sorry, that sounds frustrating!” and suddenly everything is just this little bit better. So why don’t we have this in customer service? A business function that’s designed to make customers’ lives better?
Imagine my surprise then when most participants then proceeded to say that they don’t actually don’t care much that they don’t speak to someone as long as the thing they came here to do is done. I understand the sentiment. Sometimes you just want to get a thing done.
There is nuance of course. Some things you just need to speak to a person about. Especially when it’s something complex or sensitive.
So the point is this:
Speaking to a human is important, but not as important as getting shit done.
Great, Arty, thanks for this pearl of wisdom. So what?
The so what is that I see a lot of companies make it impossible for customers to get shit done. They add pages and pages of searchable help articles that are as ignorable as they are useless. They add inefficient systems that take customer information only for the customers to have to say it all again when they get to an agent. They make agents life hell with 17 (yes, we heard this in our research too) tools to search for information.
The so what is that businesses need to prioritise getting shit done over anything else. Name change, renewal questions, basic stuff, it can all be automated. You don’t need an offshore contact centre. You don’t need to spend millions on training. You just need to make it easy for people to achieve their goals, and if that goal is to speak to an agent, then so be it.
How do we make it easy for people to achieve their goals? That’s the million pound question. Every business is different. Perhaps a talented (hint hint) designer can help you here. You could introduce Agentic AI, you could add a self service flow to make easy changes to the account, you could make your human agents’ lives simpler by automating parts of their workload. The solutions are many, the question is how do we find those solutions.
