In business today, we stretch to reach our customers in so many ways — via email (automated and not), over the phone, through video, virtual meetings, chatbots, on every social media platform, in-person, and more.
Our logic is that many avenues make things easier, but they don’t.
Customer expectations across the board are changing rapidly and drastically, Yet, have we stopped to ask ourselves why we instead continue to make customer engagement more complex than it needs to be?
Are copy-and-pasted greetings — and this is exactly what’s being used still across email, chatbots and social — actually engaging?
In fact, it all rarely feels easy.
Forging New Connections
The way customers engage with your business should be simple, not complex. But even the biggest corporations still continue to struggle with how to even use social media effectively for customer engagement.
A face and a name attached to a Twitter account or a bot substitutes for a face-to-face experience.
We turn to chatbots and artificial intelligence for the answer, going from 0 to 60 — one extreme to another. As the world around us becomes increasingly complex, we’re craving simplicity more and more, from the way we pay for things to our fashion, our diet and more.
Throughout your customer’s journey, simplicity will ensure their experience inspires loyalty.
The Illusion of Simplicity
Efficiency is the big trend in customer engagement, with the idea of self-service and intelligent knowledge bases saving companies money. Yet, most of the time, non-deterministic queries are escalated to a human when they’re still not resolved.
Chatbots are handling multiple customers at the same time, with slower reaction times.
Businesses are steadily realizing that engagement tools that don’t work 100 percent of the time just leave people feeling frustrated.
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Instead, the next big trend in customer engagement is realism, keeping engagement simple.
Keep It Simple, Engage Customers
Companies that are leading the way in customer engagement understand simplicity is a need-to-have, no longer a nice-to-have, because the world has transformed so much, both economically and socially.
Everything today is much more convenient, and everything is also a lot more complicated.
The majority of us are living and working on mobile devices, dutifully incorporating our work/life balance while on-the-go. We are still taking our time and money far more seriously post-2008.
Making engagement simple for your customers is now giving them this tiny luxury, it’s simplicity as a valuable currency, and your customers will reward your for giving them this brief respite from yet even more complexity with a tasty shot of brand loyalty.
The Human Touch
Blindly extinguishing the human element from customer engagement, just so that we can feel like we’re connecting efficiently to get things done in today’s ultra-competitive world, is bad for business.
Ironically, the more we take humans out of the communications equation, the more complex our daily interactions with businesses seem to become. It shouldn’t be that way.
Simplicity in customer engagement can be achieved in different ways, but realism will be the gamechanger, and realism will become more and more critical for pivotal moments along the journey of high-value customers. How realism will be applied for your customers is up to you.
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