Towing a career in business or entrepreneurship introduced many of us to concepts like the law of supply and demand and general market theories such as that product or service price and quality are more important than any other factors you can think of. Much of what we learned was right. They’ve led us to advance rapidly in our careers and even build successful businesses. However, new research seeks to burst our bubble about what really matters to customers - more than price and quality. The discovery will throw lots of companies aback but, at least, for a good reason. 

The research in question was conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a famous company made up of over 328,000 professionals in 152 countries. It involved a total of 15,000 respondents from 12 countries with the entire survey happening through online and in-person channels. The resulting research is tagged “Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right.” 

Many readers would likely address the phrase above as common knowledge. They wouldn’t be wrong - in some sense, since every business owner or employee is also a customer of another company, brand, or business. This situation teaches them what it means to be at the receiving end of a service or product. They would have one day, some time ago, felt the cramps of poor customer service or a bad product, and the excitement and ease of an upbeat customer experience. 

Having a good or bad experience with a brand impacts how we relate with them moving forward. Nevertheless, the gravity of our emotions toward the product or service at a company does not exactly translate into carefulness in the way we treat customers in our own businesses. PwC points to this through its research. It emphasizes that most people do not apply the experiences they have with other brands to the businesses they handle or the brands they are building. 

The Points We Miss In The Experience We Give Our Brand or Business Customers 

The deal about a good experience is summarized into five points. Speed, Convenience, Consistency, Friendliness, and Human Touch. An impressive 80% of consumers in the U.S. agree that this keeps them coming back.  

Speed:

Once a customer puts out a request or gets in touch to report an issue or express a form of complaint, they expect a swift and purposeful response. Underline the word swift, and put that to heart. Customers want to see some urgency and if the situation calls for it, rocket-powered reactions, toward completing their requests. For the success of your business, you need to treat this as a need and not a mere want. 

Convenience:

About 59% (on a scale of 70%) of the Gen Z population look out for the design elements in their customer experience journey. They are picky about the quality of brand designs, and this is tied to a desire for convenience, and ease.  A good design always makes it easy for new customers to find their way around, from browsing available products to making a purchase. 

Friendliness:

Warm smiles, polite greetings or conversations, and an approachable posture are all it takes to score high on friendliness. In case you are wondering, friendliness helps to bring unsure and hesitant customers to approach your business. Customers sometimes sit back and observe a business before making a move to patronize it or even make inquiries about their services or products. 

With this kind of people around, you surely want to put on your best behavior to build trust and capture their interest. Failure to do so will most likely translate into losing significant amounts of potential revenue - from their non-engagement with your business. Besides, PwC research showed that 60% (out of 70%) of the Gen Z population look out for the fun in a customer experience. 

Human Touch: 

The human element - that ability to create warm and genuine connections - is irreplaceable if you want to give customers a good experience. The major highlight here is that the latest technologies are embarrassingly flawed at replicating the charm of a human service representative. Both high-end and regular companies, therefore, find themselves in a race to source and train suitable human employees, rather than depend on their access to or their creativity with customer service technologies such as chatbots. 

Consistency:

You would be livid to go back to your favorite candy store only to hear that they’re now selling bread and on the day you want bread, they’ve switched to selling watermelons and the next time, automobile spare parts, and on and on and on. 

As annoying as this could be, many businesses actually manage to keep up with such inconsistency in their customer service delivery. Today you find them running at a professional, top-gear level, and tomorrow they are back to what they used to be. 

But It’s Not All About the Customers in A Customer Experience

We told you that this research was out to burst bubbles. Well, here’s one more needle to what you’ve always held to be true. Customers are not the only focus for a good customer experience. Employees are very much in the picture. 

Business ideas might come from the top management but employees do the actual work of turning the wheel and stirring the ship. In every sense, the ‘destiny of your young business rests squarely on their shoulders.’ Many business owners know and acknowledge this hard truth. According to the PwC research, employers believe that their employees have about 71% significant impact on customer experience and just over 7% insignificant impact (found in Figure 9). 

The PwC research also turned to customers themselves to see if they shared the same views. It turns out that they do. Customers largely see the impact of business employees on the quality of their experience with the brand.

They were asked, “Which of the following would stop you from doing business with a company?” While daring options like inconsistent store experience, product unavailability, and lack of innovative purchase processes were all available for the pick, most customers pointed to “bad employee attitudes” and “unfriendly service” as being the two things that could drive them away quickly (found in Figure 8). 

‍Ticking The Employee Box

Circling back to what we said in the first paragraph of the previous section; employees are very much in the picture for building a smooth customer experience. Business employers have to tick this box. Here are a few points for going about that:

Train Employees

If speed, convenience, and friendliness are super important, then your employees need to build their skills around it. This is where the idea of employee training comes on. Access to course materials, books, quizzes, and physical or demo training must be provided for the purpose of learning and evaluating individual and group performances. 

Trained employees are a recipe for good customer experience for two reasons. One, they have better intuition and can handle unforeseen customer situations, including those that pass as unprecedented. Two, they are more equipped to handle a bad situation turned crisis and can help reduce the impact and range of damages. 

Empower Employees

Empowerment involves providing access to necessary resources, which could be operational or financial in nature. Employee empowerment should follow the successful completion of a well-planned and laid-out training and evaluation process. Doing it the other way around creates a risk where employees mismanage resources. They may hold on too much, overuse, or direct resources into unauthorized or inappropriate activities.   

The process of empowering business employees might be expensive, especially for small businesses. Nevertheless, it’s totally worth it.   

What More to Understand About Creating The Perfect Customer Experience

Customers desire human interaction - no matter how far technology develops. In the PwC survey, nine out of 12 countries had at least 74% of respondents affirming that they “want to interact with a real person more as technology improves.” 

You would agree now that there is customer experience, there is human service representation, and then there is tech. Technology cannot be sidelined. In fact, it is only becoming globally inclusive with things like AI, computing, and IoT, sneaking into all aspects of our natural lives so businesses are better off embracing this new reality. They must see how technology can improve their customer service speed, quality, and consistency, rather than view it as a replacement for human employees or a cause for laziness or less creativity. 

For example, businesses can take advantage of chatbots and automated answering machines in their customer service process. However, they must have a real human person on standby to answer questions and speak to customers whenever the need arises or such a request is made. 71% of Americans reportedly prefer to speak to a human service agent over a chatbot. 

The blend of human touch and machine or technological power is magnificent - and this is true no matter the business setting or environment. For the sake of the customer experience in your business, you would want to create a merger between both sides. This would mean:

• Understanding what a bad experience means for customers using your products or services. For example, it could be a slow-loading website, a poorly functioning match-making software, a mean-looking receptionist, or a careless waitress. 
•  Understanding the technologies that are available for your service or product niche. For example, if you’re a service provider, you want to get access to reminder and scheduling software and the like. 
•  Encouraging your employees to upskill and become familiar with the use of relevant technologies. 
• Putting out speed, convenience, consistency, friendliness, and human touch. Always remember that the whole essence of introducing technology into customer experience is to better the delivery of these five factors. 

The moment you put these three pieces together, you will essentially be setting up your business for growth and showing your customers just how much you want them around. 

Final Word

PwC highlights that “64% of U.S. consumers and 59% of other consumers feel companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience.” Meanwhile, 17% of U.S. customers and 34% of customers globally will dissociate from a brand just after their first bad experience.

The realisations then become that; some companies pay attention to product quality and price but neglect the customer experience while others that care about customer experience only do so minimally. This does not sit well with responders of the PwC survey - and from all indications, businesses could either act fast to improve their customer experiences or risk losing customers by the chunk. 

We’re sure you don’t want to be in the position of losing customers. Of course, they are golden. So how about taking some more time to digest this article and read more interesting pieces from our blog? We would love to hear your thoughts and customer success stories in the comment section below. 

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