Last month, we attended the Customer Service Experience conference in Washington DC. This post is a recap of our key takeaways.
Dennis Snow from Snow & Associates who worked at Walt Disney World for over 20 years gave an example of a typical customer question at a Disney park — “What time is the 3PM parade?” This sounds like a silly question but when you look through the lens of the customer, a parade typically starts at a particular place and then has a path through the park. The customer is really asking, “where is the best place to watch the parade?”
Dennis talked about how a member of the cleaning staff at the Disney hotel came up with an idea to line up the children’s plush toys on the bed. When the children came home, the TV was on and it looked like the toys were watching TV. The family loved it and word got around the staff. It soon became a competition among the cleaning staff to come up with the most creative arrangement of the plush toys.
Dennis also talked about how Disney is meticulous about preserving the cleanliness and presentation of the Disney theme parks. For example, if there is an empty Pepsi can or some other trash in the middle of a garden, that destroys the customer experience. At Disney, trash cans are not more than 26 steps apart in order to combat this type of situation. Another example of “backstage coming on stage” and destroying the customer experience is when you see duct tape on the wing of an airline. Companies put so much effort into creating a nice environment so they shouldn’t let the inner workings of the company be visible to customers.
Ian Jacobs from Forrester talked about how the increase in self service channels such as FAQs on the company website has made agents even more important. This is because customers are able to solve the common issues on their own and customers now go to the agents for more complex issues.
Tobias Goebel from Aspect software talked about the following use cases for messaging in customer service
Erin Robinson and Jordan Golob from AOL shared the following best practices for social media marketing and social care
Jeff Toister from Toister Performance Solutions said that the #1 reason why customers contact you is because they tried getting information through another channel and they were frustrated so they contact you.
Esteban Kolsky from thinkJar said that brands should stop worrying about being omnichannel. Instead, companies should focus on making 1 channel the best.
Nathan Deeds from OpenTable believes that in the future, customers won’t have to ask for help because the system anticipates your need and pushes the answer directly to you. Self-healing will become the norm for products. For example, when a printer runs out of ink, it could re-order more ink automatically.