Businesses must remember that customer experience is the driving force behind digital transformation says Richard McCrossan, Head of Digital EMEA, Genesys…

Poor customer service recently caused me to end a longstanding and valued relationship. A supplier, who had provided excellent service for many years, began to fall short of my basic expectations when it came to their customer service. Simple requests, such as requesting a call back, were seemingly too much to handle. For me, this was reason enough to seek an alternative supplier. Frankly, businesses can and, more importantly, should be doing better.

In the age of digital transformation, every customer-facing business should be putting customer service first. After all, improving the customer experience is the biggest driving factor of digital transformation. If businesses lose sight of this, they are failing their customers and themselves.

A post that recently did the rounds on LinkedIn summed this up perfectly:

“Amazon did not kill the retail industry. They did it to themselves with bad customer service.

Netflix did not kill Blockbuster. They did it to themselves with ridiculous late fees.

Uber did not kill the taxi business. They did it to themselves with limited the number of taxis and fare control.

Apple did not kill the music industry. They did it to themselves by forcing people to buy full-length albums.

Airbnb did not kill the hotel industry. They did it to themselves with limited availability and pricing options.

Technology by itself is not the real disruptor. Being non-customer centric is the biggest threat to any business.”

While there has been some debate around these assertions, the general theme is spot on and the last line sums up nicely what many businesses are getting wrong today: Every business needs to constantly re-evaluate how customer centric it is. Even ourselves in Genesys – Amazon has entered our market now. If we remain customer centric, Amazon may challenge us, but we will continue to thrive.

In my case, my supplier was not customer centric in a couple of key ways. They did not keep a promise. They promised to call me back on a certain phone number at a certain time. They did not. Their chat and voice teams were not connected. When I contacted them via chat to ask what happened to my call back, they admitted the error but were not able to re-arrange another call back because “I’m in the chat team; I cannot arrange call backs”.

Both are easily solved by technology. Digital brands do it by default but all brands need to ensure these basic customer-centric needs are met.
I will say that this was not a digitally-born company. Organizations born in the digital age have a different DNA than companies that have been around a lot longer. Their DNA is digital, easy, and frictionless. However, brands that pre-date the digital age have a much greater advantage that they squander by not getting the basics right.

Businesses are under constant pressure to innovate and differentiate with digital technology. However, consumers just want brands to answer their questions in the easiest and least effort way possible; no matter how they ask it. I believe the solution is omnichannel and a focus on personalised customer journeys is required.

By personalising the retail experience and predicting its customers’ needs and desires, while curating the shopper’s experience via customer reviews, Amazon stripped out the need to suffer the poor product offerings and dodgy customer service in bricks and mortar shops. Similarly, the likes of Netflix did not kill Blockbuster’s success – Blockbuster simply didn’t put the customer first. Never forget that Blockbuster once passed on the opportunity to buy Netflix for just $50 million – and the idea for Netflix came from a $40 late fee on a DVD from a Blockbuster store.

In today’s world every brand should constantly reassess how customer centric it is – what do your customers want and how are you servicing their needs? It boils down to their basic human desire, for clear, easy and engaging communication and the superhuman provision of what they want, before they want it. This means a seamless omnichannel is essential, with real-time abilities and analytics to turbo charge customer engagement.

It’s so important to get the basics right – put in place a single customer engagement platform for all customer engagement, all channels, across marketing, sales and service. Do that, then you earn the right from your customers to experiment with new innovations.