Yo!
It’s been a bad week for me on the shopping front, with two major snafus across the online portals of two very different product categories. In both the cases I tried the ‘official’ customer response channels – phone, email, chat – and the answer was the same. It was the, “We’re so sorry but there’s nothing we can do”. In both the cases I spend at least a couple of lakhs with them each year, and have been their customer for a very long time. Because they are online the folks saying no ought to have been able to see that. But there is a happy ending to this story – I tweeted and my problems were cheerfully and efficiently resolved in a few hours. Sure the number of followers I have on Twitter may have influenced these responses, but I ought to get a decent customer ranking even without that on these sites given my frequency and volume of spend. The difference is that the goal of the Twitter team is to make the problem of negative sentiment go away whereas the other channels are just operating on a checklist of responses. You also have really smart people in charge of the social media response teams and you are getting the personal attention of one of them which is what most of us really want.
Scaling that level of personal attention for a B2C brand is tough, which is why technology has to be woven into the customer experience journey. Our first-ever certification workshop on Role of Technology in Marketing: Foundation Course co-presented with Microsoft India is on this week and it’s great that we’re talking about customer experience and the back-end processes required to enable it. Much of the focus so far has been on improving efficiency or keeping the lights burning without re-looking at the entire customer journey. And that’s now become critical as customers wonder why the good experience they had on one channel isn’t being replicated in another. This would involve a shift in thinking at the organizational level, and also a drastic shift in the stance towards IT. Instead of looking at a single master solution the answer may be in multiple smaller, cloud-based solutions as each piece of the process gets aligned.
A couple of months ago I received a Yogg device at a Siemens conference. It’s a watch-like activity tracker which syncs to your phone. I wasn’t looking at buying a Fitbit or similar but since I got this one I tried it out. It’s nice and functional though there aren’t too many apps that use its data yet. If you thought IoT is big-scale industrial automation, nope, it’s the little band on your arm. As for personal data privacy debates, currently, consumers are cheerfully trading their body stats in return for insights. Imagine that getting hacked. Or being tied to undeclared paid advertising. We live in exciting times!
Have a great weekend!
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