Change Your Customer Service Grade from D-ecent to A-mazing

Consumers don’t want customer service that’s only okay. Why would you?

By MICHAEL DEMERS

The big box didn’t seem damaged. All the packing material was still inside. Somehow it hadn’t mattered. The beautiful bed frame my fiance and I had ordered was delivered damaged. Our original week-long wait for its safe delivery had been in vain, but our waiting hadn’t ended. Now we needed to begin the process of returning what we had purchased.

She called customer service. After navigating their IVR system and waiting on hold for 15 minutes or so, someone finally picked up. The agent was kind and pleasant to talk with, but couldn’t take our return right away.

“Please email us a photo of the defect,” they told her. “Once the complaint is filed and we receive the photo, we can begin the returns process.”

Not the most difficult task, but certainly an unwelcome delay. I used my phone to take a picture of the bed frame and its broken leg. Then I hit another snag. I wrote out a quick email to their customer service account and sent the photo to the pleasant agents. Then we waited again.

“That’s our goal at Zappix: to give the customers of our customers a better experience.”

A couple hours later an email notification popped up on my smartphone. According to Sarah, a new agent we hadn’t spoken with before, our return had been accepted. She had sent along a shipping label I could print and use to return the infamous bed frame.

As consumers, we see this scenario play out all the time, but these decent interactions can be improved. As Customer Success Manager at Zappix, I help our clients improve their customer experiences. A bit of waiting is par for the course when it comes to traditional voice-based IVR, but visual platforms like Zappix completely transform the user journey and would have greatly improved our bed frame experience. That’s our goal at Zappix: to give the customers of our customers abetter experience.

A Faster Experience

Our 15-minute call navigating traditional IVR before eventually being funneled to the right agent is an example of the cumbersome IVR user journey. Luckily for us, there is a better way. We use our smartphones every day through visual user interfaces and rich, interactive touch screens. Visual IVR brings that proven functionality to customer service. By letting users read their options and tap through intuitive menus, visual platforms let customers access their solution usually before a traditional IVR counterpart has even finished listing a few options. Zappix customer self-service interactions lastunder one minuteon average.

Thanks to omnichannel technology embedded within the Zappix Visual IVR, my fiance and I wouldn’t need to interact with an agent for our service call. Half our call time was focused on simply navigating to someone with the ability to solve our problem. Visual IVR skips the hassle of lengthy IVR menus and handles our queries itself, without the need to be forwarded to a live agent.

A Personal Experience

Our lengthy phone call was not connected to my fiance and I. We felt like just another customer being walked through a prewritten sequence of events. Personalized Zappix user journey and interactive smart forms would have made our interaction more impactful and enjoyable. With Visual IVR, we could have been automatically shown our order and return options if the number we were calling with matched one associated with the account we used to purchase the bed frame.

Customer service is a critical area of improvement for enterprises. According to the 2017 State of Global Customer ServiceReport,96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice of or loyalty to a brand. At the same time, 65% of customers have a more favorable view of brands that offer a mobile-responsive customer service support portal. Modern customer culture demands modern customer service solutions.

Omnichannel options like Zappix smart forms serve consumers answers through whatever platform they use. Self-service Visual IVR would have allowed us to submit the photo of damages with our initial interaction, simplifying the process and avoiding my need to remember any order number to include in a disconnected email. The technology puts consumers in direct contact with the solutions they’re looking for. No email, no extra steps, no waiting. Exactly what we needed to solve our problem, immediately when we call.

A Delightful Experience

Customers are eager for options like Zappix platforms. We use our smartphones everyday and know how powerful and useful they can be. When applied to a user journey as cumbersome as IVR, our platforms earn a Net Promoter Score(NPS) as high as 90.In a recent survey by CFI Group,55% of respondentssay they would use Visual IVR if given the choice.

So stop giving your customers a decent user journey. When they call your customer service give them the option of Zappix Visual IVR. The faster, more efficient, amazing customer experience.