Digital communications to ensure customer success

Leveraging digital tools to emulate the hospitality industry and execute incredible customer service experiences

// By David Nagy, Founder, eCommerce Canada

With complete transparency, I’m no expert in the field of customer experience or hospitality. But, I’m plugged in enough to know there’s no substitute for a high quality, memorable experience.

In retail, how we define quality is invariably a complex combination of price, selection and efficiency - all important elements of the customer journey - because it’s not often readily apparent what an individual “values” the most. This becomes even more complicated when we try to deliver brand experiences with consistency across many selling channels.

Customer experience fundamentals

Consistently exceeding customer expectations when there are so many touchpoints to consider is as much of an art as it is a science. But we’re also at risk of forgetting the fundamentals of customer experience today due to our reliance on digital tools. As a small example, we have the technology to send an email with your first name in the subject line, but we don’t acknowledge that this is the third time you’ve visited the store this week to look at that blouse.

I’m currently going through my own process to design a roadmap for exceptional customer experience with my company and it’s undeniable that digital communications tools will be a huge part of that. But, before any business can get into the tools at their disposal, it’s important to start by building a foundation for customer success.

Hospitality tips

When I’m working on this type of project, I find it helps to be myopic and personify the issue. What would I want my experience to be? On the subject of customer success, I find this so much harder to visualize, so I’m taking cues from the industry where I’ve had many of my best customer experiences - the hospitality industry.

During a recent trip to Chicago, I had several such experiences. Chicago is a real hospitality town - with outstanding dining, hotels and venues to support. Since the topic of customer success has been a focus for me of late, I was very conscious of my own experiences and the subtleties of customer experience that hospitality experts use to thrill their guests.

Acknowledgement

Establishing trust

Digital tools give us the ability to know if someone has visited our website or storefront before. When properly integrated, CRM systems give us immediate access to customer attributes like names, addresses and the products they prefer. The data is at our fingertips, but we’ve become accustomed to dropping pleasantries before trust is established and uniqueness is acknowledged.

Once you’re seated, almost any restaurant will provide you with a server to help you understand the menu and take care of any preferences or allergies you may have. We introduce them by name and, in a few short minutes, establish rapport with someone, reducing friction and decision fatigue. It’s the equivalent of a guide or a concierge and something that a clerk, helpdesk, interactive FAQ or Live Chat agent could be armed and ready to support, backed by all of your history and personal preferences we’ve gathered in our corporate databases.

But alas, customer success agents are quickly becoming Chatbots - the hospitality industry’s equivalent of couch-surfing websites with selfcheck-in. You browse, you research, you read reviews and ultimately, you do your own buying and hope for the best. Heck, you even have to carry your own bags. It can sure save money, but it’s never going to feel like a concierge experience.

What about when it’s time to settle the bill? There are ample digital tools to help us improve customer experience. There are tools to offer us dessert (upsells), tools to help us share our experience (social sharing and email), tools to help us after we leave the restaurant (post purchase email series) and even tools to make sure we come back again (loyalty). There are so many opportunities to use digital tools to maximize the end-to-end customer experience, but so little thoughtfulness is put in to crafting it.

Mindfulness and purpose

Give the hospitality industry some consideration when you think about your customers’ journey and see if it matches your own expectations. I think it may be time to adapt the “slow food movement” to retail and take an approach that involves mindfulness and purpose when we think about customer success. We want the customer to feel welcome and accepted. But we shouldn’t want them to over order. We should hope they spend more time with us, rather than converting in under three minutes and racing out the door. We should use data to understand what makes each of them unique and how their different preferences drive their decisions. All of the tools to do this have been created. Now we just need to start using them.