Is Your Business “Moving” or “Pivoting” to Meet Customer Needs?

Remember when UPS was going with the slogan, “Moving at the speed of business”?

It wasn’t a bad slogan. However, marketing experts say that when UPS dropped “Moving at the speed of business” and adopted “What can brown do for you?” as a slogan and center of its marketing campaigns, the company hit a homerun.

I think there are important points every business can learn from the evolution of those slogans and the results of the recent [24]7 Customer Engagement Survey point to some of the ways this is true.

First, the idea of business “moving” along a linear path is off point today. This especially applies to how your customers interact with your business. Picture your customers who have questions they need answered or problems that must be solved. They do not want to “move” through a linear help system; they want to “pivot” to the place where they can get their answers. They want to be able to turn immediately and find the resource that will solve their problem.

Related Article: 5 Things Successful Companies Do to Retain Customers

Here’s what the [24]7 Customer Engagement Survey found: Nearly two thirds of all customer service inquiries start at a website, 64 percent, in fact. The first thing most people do is find a self-service system through which they can resolve their issues. If that doesn’t deliver the desired results, they want to immediately pivot to a higher-level system that is convenient, such as an online-chat system.

Consumers don’t want to start plodding along a trail that might eventually lead them to the answer they need; they want “customer service system number two” to be instantly available—at their fingertips.

“Companies need to provide robust self-service in the first channel and make it easy to get assistance and task completion in a second channel,” the survey concluded.

“For companies this means that escalation from self-service channels (website or mobile app) to assisted-service channel (chat or phone), requires new capabilities in a world of effortless customer engagement (my emphasis). Chat and voice agents must be equipped with knowledge and context to understand what the customer did in prior channels,” according to [24]7.

Don’t make your customers retell their tales of woe at every stop along their customer service journey!

Consumers want to seamlessly pivot to the channel that will solve their problems. Companies that force them to march through routines that require them to start sending emails or navigate through a legacy interactive voice response (IVR) phone system are in trouble. Consumers switch brands. For example, among the survey’s 3,500 respondents, two out of five said they had ended a relationship with a company because they were frustrated with its self-service phone system. Ouch.

This trend will only intensify in coming years. Millennials are officially the biggest group of consumers today and they have been raised on efficient omni-channel customer service solution delivery systems. If two out of five consumers are dumping brands today because of an antiquated IVR system, it will be four out of five very soon.

The future belongs to companies who can raise their game to meet sharply rising consumer expectations and implement online customer service systems that pivot in sync with customer needs.