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The Future Of Communication In Customer Service

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There’s a story I read on the internet (so you know it has to be true!) awhile back about a major snowstorm in Pennsylvania that occurred near the holidays. As a result of the blizzard, an 89-year old man, living on his own, got snowed in at his apartment. His daughter was concerned that he would run out of food, so she called a number of stores to see if they’d deliver.

No luck... until she called Trader Joe’s. Now, Trader Joe’s doesn’t normally deliver, but after hearing this woman’s story, they agreed to do so. In addition to taking the woman’s order, the Trader Joe’s employee also suggested food items that would work for her father’s low-sodium diet. Half an hour after the call, Trader Joe’s had delivered about $50 worth of food to the man’s apartment.

And to top it all off, when the woman went to pay Trader Joe’s for the food and delivery, they told her not to worry about it and have a Merry Christmas.

Now, maybe this story has been “embellished” a bit for the internet. Maybe not. But the point I want to make is that the interaction centered on real communication between two people.

Systems that deliver a world-class customer experience start with people. And those individuals need to be great communicators. But further than that, the systems in which they work need to be designed to facilitate and promote communication. You can’t have great communicators working in a system that thwarts their ability to achieve that goal. On the flip side, you don’t want to spend countless hours building a system that promotes great communication and then staff it with people who don’t communicate well.

Either error is a recipe for disaster.

At a hotel where I once stayed, I heard about a guest who was working out in the hotel gym and pulled a muscle in his neck. A trainer at the gym recognized the injury and suggested a massage. The massage therapist knew about the guest’s problem even before meeting the guest because the trainer had already filled him in. Finally, when the guest got into bed at the end of a long day, he went to sleep on fresh, firm pillows. The hotel had switched out his old pillows, knowing the firmer ones would be kinder to his pulled muscle.

The open lines of communication facilitated by the hotel and executed by its staff created an amazing customer experience.

Communicating is easy to overlook because it happens all the time. We do it all the time in a variety of ways. I’m communicating via the written word right now. When you sigh after a big meal, you’re communicating. When you ask your teenage kids how their day went, you’re communicating…or at least trying to.

Both the overt and subtle forms of communication are always at work in the relationships you have with your customers. Displaying attentiveness and a positive attitude, for example, goes a long way toward creating the kinds of relationships we’re all after. But at the same time, today’s customers are creating a paradox. They are demanding the best experience while they overwhelmingly prefer self-service.

This preference for self-service, combined with the company’s desire to reduce costs, has spurred companies to incorporate interactive voice response (IVR) into many of their products and services.

One of my contacts at Microsoft brought up this point the other day when she was filling me in on their new entry into this area. She said they are the first to employ deep neural networks

(DNN) technology in the company’s enterprise IVR to boost its accuracy to 95 percent.

In fact, you may have already been engaging with Microsoft’s DNN speech recognition technology without even realizing it. It’s incorporated into Cortana, Microsoft’s competitor to Apple ’s Siri, and enables players to communicate with each other on Xbox games such as Call of Duty.

The hope at Microsoft is that their technology, when applied to a company’s existing IVR, will deliver the level of accuracy required to successfully fulfill the customer’s desire for self service. It will be interesting to see if that will also translate to the world of customer engagement for service and sales.

Even if this technology is successful and is adopted wherever it’s applicable, there will always be a need for people like the observant hotel gym trainer. And what about the interaction the woman had with Trader Joe’s? Would she have been able to connect with DNN technology like Cortana on as deep of a level?

Of course not! Technology is helping to change the future of customer service for the better. But there will always be a place for people, especially good communicators.

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert and New York Times bestselling author. Find more information at www.Hyken.com.

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