Delivering a good customer experience is apparently a rare fine art. The basics include offering goods or services that are good value, effectively communicating about it and delivering on a promise quickly.
The customer should feel validated, seen, even valued. But in this age of automation and artificial intelligence, there are human-mimicking ghosts in the machine and the result is bombardment and annoyance.
My fit and healthy Beloved recently bought a new heartrate monitor online. Electronic comms confirmed the purchase and that set off a stream: the order had been received, it had been packed, it was leaving the warehouse, it had been picked up by Australia Post, it was en route. Email diarrhoea had been unleashed.
This overwhelm happens at times of death as much as in the pursuit of good health. My dear mother died last month. I was charged with organising the funeral director to take care of her earthly remains.
Happily, this is not something most people are practised at, but here is the tip: funeral companies are a bit like tow-truck firms when there is a sniff of a traffic crash – they will swarm and jostle for business.
In the wee hours, when it became evident my mum’s death was imminent, I sent off a couple of online inquiries to seemingly suitable companies that came up on my Google search, asking about the deathly services they offered and cost.
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This clicking of boxes and filling in of drop-down menus set off a tsunami of communications, even before business hours started. Uniformly, there were offers of sympathy, quickly followed by promises of expediency, excellence and well-priced deals.
We selected one vendor and I fended off the rest. A hillock of paperwork was completed. And before my mother’s body had been taken from the morgue for cremation, the emails and texts started: “How did we go?”, “How good were we?”, “Give us five stars on Google if you liked us and call us to discuss if you didn’t”.
The thing is, I didn’t know yet. Our important, personal business was not yet completed. While poor or absent customer service can be infuriating, too much can also result in customers feeling upset.
To most businesses, we are sadly data and dollars – whether dead or very much alive.
Dr Jane Stephens is a UniSC journalism lecturer, media commentator and writer.
