n today's competitive business landscape, delivering exceptional customer service is paramount for success. As technology continues to reshape the way businesses interact with their customers, finding the perfect balance between automation and personalization has become a top priority. In this blog post, we'll explore how businesses can leverage technology to enhance customer service while still maintaining a human touch.
Leveraging Technology for Seamless Customer Interactions
In a recent episode of Stimulus Tech Talk, CEO Nathan Whittacre discussed the vital role of technology in shaping the customer experience. He emphasized that while automation can streamline processes and improve efficiency, businesses must not overlook the importance of personalized interactions.
Stimulus Tech Talk: Balancing Automation and Personalization: Crafting the Ultimate Customer Experience Journey
The Role of CRM Software in Centralizing Customer Data
A central theme of the discussion was the significance of customer relationship management (CRM) software. Implementing a robust CRM system allows businesses to centralize customer data, ensuring that every interaction is informed by relevant information. Nathan stressed the importance of having a centralized repository for customer information, enabling seamless experiences across all touchpoints.
Harnessing the Power of AI for Enhanced Insights and Efficiency
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the power to revolutionize customer service. From automated response systems to AI-powered analytics, businesses can leverage AI technologies to gain deeper insights into customer preferences and behavior. By incorporating AI into their customer service strategies, businesses can enhance efficiency and deliver more personalized experiences.
Embracing Flexibility: Providing Options for Customer Interaction
While automation can streamline certain processes, it is important to provide customers with options. Whether through automated systems or direct human contact, businesses should offer flexibility to cater to the diverse preferences of their customer base. By giving customers the freedom to choose how they interact with the brand, businesses can ensure a more satisfying experience.
Prioritizing Data Privacy and Security in the Digital Age
In a digital world, data privacy and security have become more important than ever. As businesses collect more customer data to personalize interactions, it's essential to prioritize data protection and transparency. Strict privacy policies and secure data storage practices are crucial for building trust with customers and mitigating the risk of data breaches.
In conclusion, finding the right balance between automation and personalization is essential for businesses looking to enhance their customer service efforts. By leveraging technology while maintaining a human touch, businesses can create memorable experiences that keep customers coming back for more. With the right strategies in place, businesses can navigate the ever-changing tech landscape and deliver exceptional customer service in today's digital age.
Concerned about how your business handles data and privacy? Check out our special presentation on compliance.
Stimulus Tech Talk: Balancing Automation and Personalization: Crafting the Ultimate Customer Experience Journey - transcript
Intro 00:00
You're listening to Stimulus Tech Talk. A conversation based podcast created by Stimulus Technologies that covers a range of topics related to business and technology.
Sherry Lipp 00:15
Welcome to Stimulus Tech Talk, I am Sherry Lipp, marketing manager at Stimulus Technologies. And today I am here with Nathan Whittacre, CEO of Stimulus Technologies. And we are going to be talking about technology uses for personalizing the customer service experience. Hi, Nathan.
Nathan Whittacre 00:36
Hi Sherry, thanks, everybody for being here.
Sherry Lipp 00:40
So when we're talking about using technology, how would you define that in terms of customer and interaction?
Nathan Whittacre 00:48
I think, in one way or another, customers are interacting with businesses digitally, all the time. And, you know, back in the day, you know, 20-30 years ago, it may not have been so much, maybe the most digital interaction would be over the phone. But today, you know, from from the initial search for a customer service provider, or a company or a service provider, all the way through the, you know, the service process, customers are working with companies digitally. So, you think about interaction through websites, interaction through email, mobile apps, chatbots, if you're getting a little bit more advanced, you know, in the end, you know, this customer interaction digitally allows for a much more seamless and easy way for a customer to connect to the right people at the right time inside your company.
Sherry Lipp 01:50
And you know, with increasing automation. What challenges do you think businesses are facing when it comes to personalizing customer service?
Nathan Whittacre 02:02
You know, I think it's a two edged sword, right? You know, the automation allows for faster response of common issues, you know, think about calling up a company that has an interactive voice response system, and you can get your account balances for your credit card or bank statements, or maybe pay a bill, or I think you Sherry shared a story not too long ago about being able to return an item with a chatbot. On the website, easily, you didn't have to interact with a human, and it was a seamless experience. So, you know, certainly there's ways with technology to allow for faster interaction without having to get a human involved. But it does the personalize the experience, or especially small businesses, a lot of times, I think, you know, people want to do business with a small business, because you get that personal interaction, that personal feel they're fine dealing with a large corporation. If and not be personalized, because that's kind of the expectation, you know, even if you got with a person, you'd never speak to that employee again, but with a small business, you're often dealing with the same people over and over again. And so if you d personalize that you lose that key aspect of being or working with a small business.
Sherry Lipp 03:31
And, you know, what, we know, there's a lot of technology for automation, obviously, we've talked about that on here, and just now but as far as their technology that might help businesses with customer service, because obviously people get frustrated, you know, when they're like they're trying to reach a person and they can't, or, you know, the choices on the chat, the automated chat are not giving them the right thing, and they can't seem to get anybody.
Nathan Whittacre 03:57
If any company is developing some automated interaction system, whether it's a chat bot on a website, or with your automated attendant on your voice system, I think there should be an immediate ability to get to a person, you know, don't let technology take over everything. Because that's, you know, that again, especially for small to midsize businesses, that takes away the advantage that those businesses have over the large companies. And so just getting to a real person as quickly as possible, if that's what the individual wants, is the best thing. But you know, the, I think in the back end, though, the customer service representatives or whoever is, you know, communicating with the customer can have some automated tools to allow the experience to be fast and seamless so that they can get information readily available about the customer and solve the customer's problem quickly.
Sherry Lipp 05:04
So, do you think there's what technology tools do you think are good for improving the customer, the customer experience.
Nathan Whittacre 05:13
So, you know, thinking, again, about the small to midsize business, you know, implementing a good customer relationship management, CRM software, I think really helps with that, you know, especially as you're growing as a company, moving from one person, to multiple people dealing with customers, having a centralized repository where all that information is available, really helps with the customer experience, because, you know, no matter who you're talking to, they have the same relevant information. And kind of extending beyond that, if you think about, as we've talked about on this podcast a lot is AI, is really helping with, you know, faster response times and be able to gather information quickly about issues. And so if you can incorporate some AI systems into your CRM, for those faster response times, it's great. I think the other thing, too, is, you know, as we think about growing companies, one of the things that I hear, you know, a lot and, you know, we experience as a growing company over the years is, is replicating the experience across to everybody inside the company. And that's, I think that's something that businesses growing businesses really have an issue with is, you know, the owner was able to serve the customer one way, you know, the sole entrepreneur, and then he hired a few people and then gets frustrated, because those new employees aren't serving exactly the way that he would. But that, you know, solo entrepreneur had all that information in his head, and has a difficult time, relaying that to his entire team. So you know, whether you have like an internal wiki system, you know, or a database system that contains a lot of information, so that you can disseminate that to the entire team as the company grows. So you don't always have to be going back to that one person that has all the knowledge and, and then also, you know, if you just have one person that has all the knowledge, it really limits the ability for the company to grow. So, you know, as you think about developing and growing a business, you also have to think about data, dumping people's heads into some type of repository that's searchable. To get that information out, I think the other thing is, is developing good policies and procedures in place and, and developing some automation around those. So for example, if you have a procedure on a new customer intake, how to put them in there, in the CRM, you know, information that you need to gather, you know, that should be documented, you can use tools like Visio, and, you know, a Word document to describe that process. And as you develop those systems and processes, you know, it does, it does lead to a similar customer experience, no matter who is, is talking to the customer. So those are some great, you know, especially when dealing with growing companies, I think that customer, a company, especially the entrepreneur needs to think about how they can get that stuff out of their head, and into everybody else's hands.
Sherry Lipp 08:24
They are training employees so that everybody is capable of helping reminds me that there was a Saturday Night Live sketch a little while back, and it was somebody was trying to call to cancel service and they got transferred so many times, they ended up at Domino's Pizza. And I'm sure we've all kind of had that, that feeling before so yeah, I definitely think you can't automate, can't automate everything. Ya know, there's, there's difficulty and
Nathan Whittacre 08:52
you know, another thing that we did when we were growing is again, I, you know, I was running the company for so long, I had a lot of information in my head. And, and we used to joke because we didn't, we didn't have 20 years ago, we didn't have a documentation system. And we used to call it like our tribal songbook. And, you know, we would sing songs to the other technicians as they came on board, because, you know, the only thing we can do is, you know, transmit that information verbally. We wouldn't literally seeing you wouldn't want to hear any of us doing that. But that's what we would joke about it. And then our first, literally our first manual that we wrote, The, our team member that was helping us put that manual together came back to us and said, Well, what do we call the manual? I said it's got to be called the tribal songbook because that's what it's been. That's it. Those are our songs that we would sing tradition. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it you know, it's the first thing whether you're going to automate anything at all you have to get the information documented somewhere. And there's some great tools to do that. Some of them are very Are industry specific, we use some, you know, it's a company, we use some industry specific tools. But, you know, there's software like internal wiki software, you know, like Wikipedia, but for your internal site and only your employees can have access to it. That's, you know, that's a great repository, or if it's even just like Word documents that are stored in a SharePoint site that everybody has access to as another way to do it.
Sherry Lipp 10:26
And so to keep things, you know, to make things personal, some businesses might want to collect some some personal data on people that have birthdays, or anniversaries or even like, favorite things. Are there, privacy issues, businesses should be aware of when they're doing that? Yeah, definitely. So there's their state and federal laws around collecting private information. Because hackers do want that, you know, even birthdays are key
Nathan Whittacre 10:57
key pieces of information for hackers to use, because those are often used as those are often used as secondary authentication into different systems. So it's really important that any data that you store that you haven't encrypted and secure, and you need to ensure that you've you've, most of these laws require you to have a published privacy policy. You know, we all get those letters in the mail from random companies, or insurance companies or banks that say, this is our privacy policy. And they're doing that they're sending those out, because there's legal requirements for them to send those out. You know, most businesses, you know, you can post them on the website, refer people back to that, and any policy changes that you need for the privacy, you can update the website, but it's important that you develop those privacy policies to be legal. You know, there's, there's, California has some really stringent ones. And then if you're doing any business overseas, GDPR in Europe has some really stringent policies to so you just have to have transparency on how you're collecting information and how it's stored and how it be used. I mean, you can't just, you know, share that information with a marketing vendor to you know, to market to people, or to their spouses, or their kids or whatever it may be, whatever information you've collected, you have to be really careful about how you're dealing with that.
Sherry Lipp 12:31
And, you know, a lot of businesses and we've all experienced this, too, you know, there's a way to kind of have that personalized, like we know you without being creepy, like, calling you five seconds after you visit their website, or what kind of tips do you have on that?
Nathan Whittacre 12:49
I think as personally, you know, I think whatever you want to define as a company, just have a consistent, I think it's, I mean, it is kind of creepy. But it's also interesting that, you know, companies can identify that through cookies to, to know that you've visited their website, and they call you up, I certainly have had it a number of times, and there's, you know, the, from a marketing standpoint, you and I think you've talked about that in the past as well, that would be amazing. But it certainly freaked people out. So you got to just have a policy, I think it should be a natural flow. And you have to be accurate on it. I mean, I think my personal opinion is unless you're sure that that person really visited your website, it makes you look bad. I know, I've received a number of calls from companies that said, Oh, I see that you've reached out to us for XYZ product, and I have no idea who they're talking about. You know that that is an issue is you have to ensure that they've really, you know, attempted to contact so you don't have an easy form to fill on your website, or maybe a chat bot or something like that. So that they've had some type of interaction before reaching out to them via email or phone call. Because if I think I think those systems that allow you to contact people is it feels like an invasion of privacy for the individuals.
Sherry Lipp 14:15
They definitely doesn't I know, we all think that, like, we talk about something and then we get online and there's an ad for it right away.
Nathan Whittacre 14:24
Even though they claim there's no way that could be but oh, yeah, I'm happy. Well, actually, you know, Siri, that's one of the big things that Apple recently did is, you know, they've there's been some restrictions that have been placed on that, that the cross app communication. You have to opt into that now to allow those apps to share and you know, Apple and Android has that ability in their phones to say well if you know if Siri heard the talk about Domino's Pizza, and then suddenly, you know it's advertised to your on your social media accounts. that you just discussed Domino's Pizza. And now suddenly you're gonna get ads for Pizza Hut and Papa John's and Papa Murphy's and you know all the other pizza joints around or maybe Domino's and that's cross app sharing. So
Sherry Lipp 15:15
you know that that is a concern, I think for most people from a privacy standpoint, but it is, you know, from a marketing standpoint, it's a great thing to collect that information. So there's, there's a balance, right? Yeah. And of course, yeah, it always asks your you can ask your app not to track your what you're doing. And, and so people, people kind of take advantage of what they what they can put up with. Yes. So how can smaller businesses use technology, customer service technology to kind of compete with the larger companies while still providing that personalized service?
Nathan Whittacre 15:53
I think, you know, again, I mentioned the CRM, make sure that you have something like a CRM in place, I think you can be more personal on social media, it's a great, great use of technology, you know, have different postings about the team and what the team's doing maybe newsletters about an information, you know, about what, maybe a project maybe if you have an employee that has a special nonprofit that they're working with, and feature that. But I think the personalization around the people that you have inside your team, so that they feel like they become part of the team is a huge advantage. I mean, if you, you know, dealing with we mentioned Apple just a second ago dealing with a company that has, you know, 10s of 1000s of employees feels very different than, you know, a company with 10 employees, or 20 employees. So, you know, having that personalization, getting to know, through social media, through newsletters, and things like that, I think helps that personal feel. And, and you can also, you know, if you can collect information about what your customers interests are in the CRM, and then you know, put together programs, again, maybe community engagement programs around other your customers interests, is a good thing. So if you can collect that information somehow, through regular communication, you know, your account managers, salespeople, your customer service, people putting that information in your database, and then you can identify ways to interact with your customers, that would be better. And you can do things like targeting specific email marketing, that is around your, your clients interests, maybe even like, if you have custom integrate, I'm just thinking off the top of my head here. But if you have customers that do a certain line of business, and you can make introductions with other customers, if they have that same interest, I mean, I'm, I have a passion for aviation. And, you know, if I have a company of, you know, vendor of mine that also, you know, deals in the aviation field that's more interesting to me than somebody that doesn't. So, you know, if you can personalize the content around your clients interests, I think that that makes that interaction even better. Yeah, definitely. And just a note on CRMs.
Sherry Lipp 18:23
We've seen this on the news from time to time, but do not put notes about customers in the fields than the merge fields that might get pulled for letters or email or something. But every once in a while, like pops up on the news.
Nathan Whittacre 18:36
You know, it's usually if it's a negative, but negative or positive, no notes in the field. Yeah, you definitely want to don't want a letter going out saying, Dear, really bad, angry customer, you know,
Sherry Lipp 18:52
about that aspect of it, but yeah, yes. And what kind of KPIs do you think should be measured around this this type of technology?
Nathan Whittacre 19:05
I think there's a lot of KPIs that you can gather from a customer service standpoint, the two big ones that are really big right now are your CSAT your customer satisfaction score. And that's usually, you know, a performance score. Heck, I've, I see him in, even in bathrooms and in in airports. Now, you know, you're traveling along and there's a little kiosk as you leave the bathroom where you're happy with your bathroom visit today. And that's a weird place to put it, but you can see it all over the place that you know, companies are looking for response on, you know, how the, how the customers are satisfied. So collecting CSAT scores as a company stimulus technologies, we post our C current CSAT score on our website. So if you go to stimulus tech.com and scroll down to the bottom and see what our current CSAT score is, and we have goals around that. And that also nicely integrates with Google reviews and you know, other responses to increase your public visibility about your happy customers. The other one that's, you know, probably a big one that's been around for about 15 years now is your net promoter score. If you've ever received one of those surveys that says, how likely are you to refer XYZ company to a friend or colleague from a one to 10, that is a net promoter score. KPI, and what the company is looking for is, you know, who are your promoters, those that are rating a nine or a 10, or your promoters, and then your seven and eight are your kind of middle of the road, those are the ones that could leave at any time, if you do something wrong, and then you have your detractors that are rating your company, six or last, human nature, you know, we only, we were not very honest, in our scoring, we tend to score high in this, we're really upset. So NPS is a is a big as a KPI that you should be measuring from a customer service standpoint, other KPIs, I think, is like average response time to customers, you know, maybe wait times on your phone call, you know, response on quoting, conversion rates, things like that. So, you know, there's, you can collect as much data as you want. But I think those two top ones from a customer service standpoint, can be collected automatically, and should be collected often. So that you're getting a gauge on how well you're doing as a company.
Sherry Lipp 21:40
And one final thought to wrap this up, do you think the future of automation is going to make can do you think it can make the customer experience better, you know, if the effort is put in, or do you think we're just gonna move to pushing buttons and, and getting what we want?
Nathan Whittacre 21:59
I think there's got to be a balance, right? Because sometimes the customer experience is better if you can push a button. You know, anybody that's been to a fast food chain, recently, you walk in and you have a kiosk, or you can order from an app before you walk in, you know, and that's an option for some people like they'd rather, you know, from a personally personality standpoint, some people would prefer just to interact with the, with the device, and then some people don't. So I think what you have to do as a company is to give people options, to choose their own adventure, in your interactions. You know, if you remember those books from the 80s, I loved him as a kid, you know, you flip to the different page, and you pick how you want the story to go. And I think that's the way that companies can be and provide better customer service through automation, it's just give the customer the experience that they're asking for, and allow them to switch if they're dissatisfied with those automated systems. So you know, whether it's a great experience to have a quick automated process. Or you need a more personalized service and interacting with, you know, customer service representatives, or technicians or, you know, the professionals inside the company. So it's definitely going to be a balance. And I think companies that give options, if they're going to be the more successful ones, especially with AI moving forward, you can tell when AI is involved, I think, somewhat for the most part today.
Sherry Lipp 23:37
And you know, there's going to just be a certain percentage of the population that don't want that they want to talk to a person, so gotta give people options, and that that will improve the overall satisfaction. All right, well, thank you for your insights on this. It's a it's a fun topic to kind of speculate about what's to come and what's going on right now.
Nathan Whittacre 23:58
And I can assure you all that this was not generated by AI. Both Sheree and I are live people. Yes. We real at least for this week. I mean, next week might be a different
Sherry Lipp 24:11
another episode or like, How far has the I got? Thanks, everybody. Thanks for listening. Thanks, everybody for joining us.
