Tech has raised the bar on customer experience higher than ever; here's why you should care

As head of a company that provides customer engagement solutions for service and sales, I keep a steady eye on trends and innovations in the customer experience ecosystem. While we’ve seen several quick-moving companies embrace amazing customer experience in recent years and build lasting, trusted relationships with their customers, we’re also still seeing a number of older, slow-moving companies continue to fail on this front.

With the various technologies available to companies today, the competition to understand and serve your customer better than your competitor does is getting fierce. Enterprises should care now more than ever about providing a great customer experience.

I recently sat down with Alfred Lin, partner at Sequoia Capital, Michael Moritz, chairman of Sequoia Capital, and George Shaheen, former chief executive of Andersen Consulting and Siebel Systems, to gain their insights on what enterprises should be aiming for when setting their customer service goals. Here’s what they had to say.

Q: What is the status of customer service today?

Michael Moritz: Most consumers probably dread intersecting with their cable company, telephone company, credit card company, or utility company. It’s the nightmare experience of hold lines and rude, arrogant, ill-tempered agents on the other end. For most consumers, customer service is a horrific experience most of the time.

Having trouble or needing help with a product and getting hold of customer service is a very important part of the whole consumer lifecycle. If customer support can make the experience easier and more pleasurable so that the consumer is left with a fantastic experience, that accrues to the greater glory of the company selling the product.

George Shaheen: There are a lot of consumers and users who are frustrated with the customer service experience today and don’t know what to do about it, so there’s no question – customer service today is in turmoil. There’s a lot that can and will be done, and I think we’re all looking forward to seeing that change take place.

Q: How would you size up the consumer experience market opportunity?

Alfred Lin: I think if companies start reinventing themselves and focus on the customer experience more, they will win out in the end. This is a world where winner takes most, if not all. Businesses are not just local or even national anymore – good ideas are immediately global. So the market opportunities are much larger than we’ve ever imagined or seen.

Q: How does today’s world of instant gratification impact the customer service experience?

Moritz: When you go to Amazon, you expect to be at the product that you selected within a fraction of a second. Those are the same expectations that people are going to have when they are demanding customer service from a company. The challenge for customer service companies is to be able to bring that Google or Amazon-like experience to their customer service.

Q: How important is customer service to a company’s success?

Shaheen: Customer service is the granddaddy of differentiation. We all know the cheapest customer you can acquire is the one you already have. I think customer service is really the most important aspect of getting customers, and keeping them.

Q: What’s at stake if companies can’t quickly address customer service issues?

Lin: Today, the customer’s attention span is much shorter, so if you don’t solve your customer’s problem immediately, they get really annoyed and then end up looking for another channel to get their problem solved, or another website to purchase their product, or another company to sort out their problems.

Q: Why don’t companies deliver a better consumer experience?

Lin: Large enterprises today tend to put different departments in silos. Customer service becomes an afterthought because they have to go build the product, then they have to market it, and then they have to get people to their store, or their website, or to the channels that they sell through. They go on and on and on and then the last thing that they talk about is customer service, and yet the customer service experience is part of the product experience, and it’s hugely important. I would suggest that some companies turn it upside down and have their customer service department define what they will provide to the customer at the very start.

Q: What is the secret to building a positive consumer experience?

Shaheen: The customer experience cannot start when there is a problem. Customer experience needs to start when the company is making contact with a customer for the first time. So if companies look at the customer experience beginning at initial contact and going all the way through to the use of the product, then I think they will have a good chance of keeping a very loyal and happy customer base.

Q: What type of technology or trends will transform the consumer experience?

Moritz: Software can intelligently predict what it is that the consumer is likely to want, and it can also provide the answer in whatever way is best for the consumer.

Shaheen: A lot of us are control freaks, so when we can do it ourselves, we can do it faster; we can do a better job of making things go our way. I think the trend in the future will be taking charge of your customer service experience yourself. The true test with technology advances is how much more of that is transferred to the individual consumer and how much easier and how much better they can do it themselves. We’re going to see that trend hit the heart of customer service because that is where it has to go to meet customer expectations.

Q: How will big data, analytics, and prediction improve the consumer experience?

Shaheen: Every time an enterprise interfaces with a customer, they learn more. They have to be able to capture that data in a form that it can be looked at, analyzed, and then used to help predict what type of service, what type of product, what type of enhancement would that customer want and need to satisfy them. It’s all about differentiation. The enterprises that can deliver on that promise have a bright future. Those who don’t or can’t will not prosper let alone survive.

Q: What does “customer service nirvana” look like in the future?

Lin: It would be great if companies could just magically know what I’m looking for on their website or what I’m coming to the website for. Or in another instance, if I’m calling a company, ‘nirvana’ would be them already knowing what page I’m visiting on their website or mobile app and having a solution to my problem. This sounds a little bit like reading my mind, but that’s probably what will carry us into the future.

PV Kannan co-founded [24]7 in 2000. In 1995, PV’s first company, Business Evolution Inc., developed the first generation of email and chat solutions. The company was acquired by Kana in 1999 and PV became part of the management team. PV’s experience extends from building contact center agent services to developing a big data predictive analytics platform to creating omnichannel solutions for the web, mobile, chat, social, and speech IVR, to innovating mobile-centric applications.