To deal with the demand for tailored one-to-one customer/company conversations, businesses are using AI. By 2020, Gartner predicts that 85% of customer interactions will be handled this way.* Increasingly, companies are experimenting new ways to engage their customers. The crux lies in understanding the demands of the more empowered and knowledgeable customer.
There is a popular quote—about the nature of how central a customer is to any business— making the rounds in the customer service world for years. It reads, “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider of our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do so.”
This has been commonly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Growing up in the years before ecommerce was even dreamt of as a phenomenon, I remember seeing the quote along with a picture of Gandhiji adorning the walls of innumerable local stores. Indeed ‘the customer is always right’, or ‘customer is king!’ was usually the ace up the customer’s sleeve that stopped any debate dead in its tracks. With both parties laying down their cudgels, the argument was usually settled amicably in the customer’s favor.
Not a whole lot has changed since then, and yet, everything has. What used to be acceptable and satisfactory in customer service until a few years ago does not make the cut today. It is a fast-paced digital world with the rules of customer engagement rapidly changing and customer expectations vaulting ever higher.
Enter the mobile phone and its world of instant gratification. In hectic lifestyles punctuated by texting, tweeting, posting live updates, and high-speed internet connectivity, there is no place for sluggish or subpar service. If a customer’s expectations are not met somewhere, there is no dearth of other places they can take their business to.
This story is from the March - April 2108 edition of The Smart Manager.
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This story is from the March - April 2108 edition of The Smart Manager.
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