Listen to any company in almost every industry, and you’ll undoubtedly hear phrases like customer-centric and customer-focused touted as top priorities. But what does that exactly mean? When leaders of a company fail to explain or provide specific examples of what it really means to be customer-centric, employees often see these words as little more than corporate platitudes.

Companies feel obligated to go on record as being customer-centric. It makes sense. Which company is going to publicly announce that they do not care about customers and what they have to say? But the reality is that becoming truly customer-centric is about more than developing vague marketing statements. The more important question is this:

“As an organization, what can we do today to put the customer first?”

And to really make this really real, each employee at a customer-centric organization should ask themselves this question:

“What can I do today to create a better customer experience for our customer?”

The reality is that becoming truly customer-centric is more than developing marketing statements—it is a fundamental shift in a company’s mindset to focus on the customer.

The best way we know for companies to actually become more customer-centric is to consistently listen to the customer. It starts and ends there. We believe that the choice is simple—either listen to your customers or die. It sounds a bit dramatic, but it is true. Ask RadioShack, Blockbuster, BlackBerry, Kodak, and any other companies that were once on top and then stopped listening to their customers.

Becoming Customer-Centric

We recommend accomplishing customer centricity by using an organization-wide, customer listening program called Voice of the Customer (VoC).

Customer service (CS) is critical for delivering a great customer experience (CX). All too often, these terms are used interchangeably, but they are not synonymous—CS is not the same as CX.

Customer service is part of the overall customer experience, not the entire customer experience. It is vital to understand the difference between CX and CS as you implement Voice of the Customer (VoC).

What is Customer Service?

Customer service is probably a more familiar term — it’s also the more narrowly scoped of the two.

Customer service is the assistance and advice provided to a customer for your product or service as needed.

Customer service requires your customer-facing team to possess a particular set of skills, including patience, product knowledge, and tenacity, so they can provide the answers and assistance a customer needs. It’s the human element in the customer journey and the voice your customer will recognize as representative of your organization.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience, or CX, refers to the broader customer journey across the organization and includes every interaction between the customer and the business.

CX involves all the ways your business interacts with a customer, including and outside of traditional direct, customer-facing service. CX captures how the customer uses your product or service, their interactions with self-service support options, the feeling of walking into your retail store, customer service interactions with the team, and more.

Customer experience includes three main components:

1. Customer Service: This includes Customer Support, Customer Success, and self-service support — the points at which your customer interacts with your team.
2. Technology: This is the product itself — how it works and the interactivity points.
3. Design: This is the brand touchpoint — the marketing, the design, and the feelings your brand creates for your customer.

While those three areas are quite distinct, there are no hard lines between them. All of the pieces combine and work together to make up the customer experience.

Customer Service[CS] Vs. Customer Experience[CX]

The key difference between customer service and customer experience is that customer experience involves the whole customer journey, including customer service.

Customer service is limited to the interactions a customer has when seeking advice or assistance on a product or service. Understanding the customer experience, on the other hand, can involve analyzing data from non-customer-facing teams who contribute to a customer’s overall experience with a product or service.

Customer service and customer experience are both important pieces to an organization’s success, yet it’s not possible (or necessary) to draw hard lines between them. The line between how customers use a product and how they interact with the people supporting it are more blurred than ever. Customers consider the whole picture when thinking about your offerings, and you should, too.

CX is holistic and covers a wide number of touchpoints. Some of them are CS oriented, some are not. A complete VoC program includes all touchpoints, including those that are product or digitally oriented.

Zomato has been at the helm of things in the past few days and by far became the most talked about Food app in India because of few interesting and thought provoking ads and incidents. CX was the central point in both the incidents. Just to refresh memories, Few months back a video went viral where  a delivery guy from Zomato eating food meant for delivery went viral which prompted a strong thought among the customers whether to trust and order food from such companies.

The customer experience was in question where this incident was considered as a breach in the company’s delivery strategies.

The company off course took massive corrective actions and went on a fierce damage control campaign to ensure that the customer trust was regained and Customer experience was perfectly delivered.

Moving on with the incidents, the latest incident where a customer refused to take the delivery of the food from a delivery boy owing to his religion. Considering the customer experience focused of the organization, the company including the CEO immediately swung into action by tweeting promptly that “Food doesn’t have a religion. It is a religion”. A statement which found them in the middle of a lot of positive and negative reviews .  Infact the company refused for the refund.

Their CEO Deepinder Goyal even went further to quote that “We are proud of the idea of India – and the diversity of our esteemed customers and partners. We aren’t sorry to lose any business that comes in the way of our values.”

A bold statement issued by a leading foodtech unicorn whose roots are firmly entrenched in India catering to  the people of all diversities and religions. Such was the impact of this that even Uber Eats a rival of this unicorn supported them.

While soon after its tweet, there was a positive response on Twitter, with users supporting the “secularist” stand, the negative comments took over soon. Since then over 100K tweets have tweeted against Zomato through the #BoycottZomato and #ZomatoUninstalled.

In a world where brands are specifically told to avoid intentionally hurting religious sentiments or even commenting on such matters, Zomato’ s stance is definitely uncommon, but even though its heart may be in the right place, the ensuing backlash on Twitter might just come back to bite it at a later stage.

A heart winning advertisement was placed which was very cute but a very thought provoking one.  The caption read : “A well settled smart and loving brand looking for those who can’t cook. The statement straight away stuck the right chord with the customers as there a millions who cannot cook.  It explains the superb level of customer focused of the organization immensely”.

What is important to note here is the fact that the customer experience cannot be compromised and by far the most powerful tool for any organization to flourish and stand out from the competition.

The ethics, the values and mode of operations can always differ. The most critical element is placing the customer at the center while building your product or product strategies and ensuring the deliverance of a perfect CX.

We strongly believe that Zomato has undoubtedly come out as a perfect winner in terms of offering unique values to the customers and so has been it’s superlative CX quotient.

It’s no secret that emotions drive behavior. Happy people whistle. Angry drivers crash cars. And now, with the help of emotion detection and analytics, more companies are tuning into their customers’ feelings in an attempt to learn what makes them tick.

This customer’s emotions will eventually determine their brand loyalty and likelihood of churning. That’s why monitoring customer sentiment through emotion recognition is becoming an increasingly important way to improve customer experience. As you’d expect, it’s all about the data.

What is emotion detection?

Emotion detection measures an individual’s verbal and non-verbal communication in order to understand their mood or attitude. The idea is to evaluate a customer’s experience with a product or their interaction with a representative of the company and to uncover any weak links that cause negative reactions. Also known as emotion analytics, the ramifications of implementing this technology into customer support systems are endless.

Limitations of current feedback systems

Many popular KPIs – such as NPS and CES – are single questions, with or without a free text option. At best, they provide a narrow snapshot of likelihood to recommend or level of effort. Such feedback is collected at the end of a customer interaction and is biased by the outcome – it doesn’t tell the story of the ‘ups and downs’ of the episode.

Emotional language is limited – is there a material difference between being happy and elated, frustrated and dissatisfied, or surprised and confused? Then there’s Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – the idea that the evaluation itself will impede upon the system being evaluated in unpredictable ways. In other words, it’s essentially unscientific to ask a customer to evaluate their own emotional reactions.

That’s why emotion recognition represents a ‘secret weapon’ for any business looking to get ahead by getting inside the heads of their customers.

How Does Human Emotion Detection Work?

Emotion detection is an effective and objective measure of consumer feedback, which uses artificial intelligence to detect and analyze data, without requiring customers to take any additional action. In other words, you can’t fake your feelings. Examples of technological methods for analyzing emotional data include:

Text (Sentiment) analysis:- uses algorithms to analyze text and determine whether the writer’s perception of a specific topic is positive, negative or neutral. Sentiment analysis has become a key tool for making sense of the multitudes of opinions expressed every day on review sites, forums, blogs, and social media.

Speech analysis:- refers to the process of analyzing voice recordings or live customer calls using voice emotion recognition software to find useful data, such as stress in a customer’s voice. For example, smart speakers can measure your mood and select music to match it. The technology can also be used in fraud prevention, analyzing the unique vocal characteristics that may indicate dishonesty or concealment of information.

Facial Analysis:- uses facial emotion recognition technology to analyze a person’s expressions within a photo or video, such as raised eyebrows, smirks or wide smiles. By setting specific parameters around different facial reactions, educators can spot struggling students in a classroom environment, while security forces can detect individuals with malicious intent at public events.
While these are exciting uses of algorithm-based technology, the goal for enterprises is to apply the lessons learned from recognising and analyzing emotions to improve their relationship with customers.

Business Applications of Emotion Detection

Leading B2C providers are now taking these lessons “to heart,” holistically combining the various technologies to optimize customer assistance at every stage of the journey.

1. Emotion-based call routing

Emotion analytics can be used to pick up on a customer’s tone of voice and mood, and to classify the call with the right priority to the right agent. For example, an angry customer might be routed to the customer retention team, while a happy, satisfied customer might be routed to the sales team to be pitched a new product or service.

2. Powering customer personalization

When an agent is in tune with a customer’s feelings, the conversation can be tailored to ensure empathy, thereby enhancing CX. For example, emotion recognition software can ensure that a frustrated customer might be greeted differently than a happy customer, and a sad customer who might appreciate a few warm words at the start of the conversation will be greeted appropriately.

3. Tracking emotional reactions over time

Data provided by emotion analytics is multifaceted and can provide information on every aspect of the interaction at each moment of the episode. For example, contact centers might tweak their processes when emotion analytics indicates that while a friendly introduction is effective, the follow-up identification process is seen as intrusive and annoying.

4. Delivering corporate-level analytics

Decision-makers benefit from a goldmine of data that helps them understand at the macro level which of their products or services elicit specific emotions. For example, a perfume manufacturer might rely heavily on emotion analytics to finetune its formulas based on customer reactions to specific notes of fragrances, or an ad campaign may be pulled when analytics detect that a specific percentage of people grimace when they see a particular image.

The ability to read a customer’s emotions is clearly a game-changer when it comes to improving CX. And the introduction of computer vision has upped the ante, as new advanced technologies enable computers to both see and interpret the customer’s facial emotions simultaneously, creating unprecedented possibilities for intuitive service.

Visual Assistance is the Key to Holistic Emotion Analytics

Visual Assistance is an emerging technology that enables agents and product experts to visually guide customers using augmented reality during live video sessions. With the introduction of dual camera recording, companies can leverage split-screen snapshots taken simultaneously with both front and rear smartphone cameras, providing a glimpse of both a customer’s facial expressions and their environment.

The Potential Role of Emotion Detection in the Call Center

Real-time insights into customers’ emotions can help agents engage with them in a highly personalized manner and deliver empathetic service, a vital quality in today’s customer-centric business environment. For example, agents providing instructions for setting up a smart TV can see confusion registering on a customer’s face, enabling them to repeat or simplify the steps.

Voice analytics may help an agent detect high levels of frustration and provide personalized service that addresses the customer’s specific issue. When there’s a language barrier or a noisy environment, a voice-to-text app will enable agents to benefit from sentiment analysis, providing insights into a customer’s mood when speech or facial analysis is not possible.

Emotion Detection    Brand Loyalty    Customer’s Emotions    Customer Experience    Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle    Consumer Feedback  Artificial Intelligence  Customer Retention  Computer Vision

Real-time customer experience is a vital driver of growth. Acting in real-time, armed with the most up-to-date information about your customer, can hugely improve customer experience.

To truly “do” real-time properly, you need to be able to listen to real-time signals from your customers, understand what these signals mean in the larger context of their relationship with you, and then identify and execute the right action to meet these needs.

It’s time for marketers to adapt. Whether adapting externally to customers’ unpredictable behavior or internally within a brand’s organization, the time has come for traditional marketers to become Adaptive Marketers—agile customer experience enthusiasts who take a customer centric approach to marketing instead of a channel-centric approach.

Adaptive Marketers focus on optimizing the context, speed and state of each customer relationship instead of each channel. They can simultaneously achieve a business objective while creating the best brand experience possible, regardless of the channel. And they are making it happen now.

Understanding the customer’s needs is a common challenge for many businesses and studies show that this will become a make-or-break benchmark for most companies. Salesforce conducted a survey of over 6,000 consumers and found that 76% of them expected companies to understand their needs and expectations. This doesn’t leave very much wiggle room for your marketing and customer service strategy to fail. If you want to deliver a sound customer experience, then it’s imperative that you create a customer-centric company that is focused on fulfilling customer needs.

When customers discover a delightful customer experience, it’s likely that they’ll want to return to it again. Dimension Data even found that 84% of companies who focus on improving customer experience are reporting an increase in annual revenue. This is because these companies are gaining more customer loyalty which is highly valuable to the brand. Loyal customers make repeat purchases and offer recommendations to other potential leads who then become ambassadors as well. If you’re looking for new ways to increase your company’s profit margins, invest in bettering your customer experience.

Customer Experience    Customer Centric Approach    customer relationship   customer’s needs    customer service strategy    customer loyalty    Loyal customers