I mandate a 100% human response rate to our customer’s questions and complaints. This is across all digital properties and includes: social, email, blog and review sites.
Maybe it’s my Midwestern upbringing where I learned to write
hand written thank
you cards from the age of five. Or maybe it’s because the power of a human
interaction will win every time.
Think about your most recent purchase – one delightful and
one disgruntled. What separates the delightful from the disgruntled is a human.
A human that chose to connect on a personal level. A human that chose to go off
script. A human that chose to use common sense. A human that chose to admit the
mistake.
Companies that are winning, big or small, empower humans to
interact with their customers. A recent study
found the telephone is the preferred method for 88 percent of people seeking to
resolve customer service issues, suggesting that real-life interactions are
still paramount to customer satisfaction.
We maintain our 100% human
response rate by using a three step triage approach. The medium varies from a digital
post to a phone call to an email to snail mail.
- Our social team handles most of our customer’s questions.
- If a question needs a more technical answer, we pull in and introduce our scientific medical team.
- Any complaint gets a personal touch by our CEO. And as important, advocates get a personal touch by our CEO.
As companies scale, they replace human with automation. The
mistake is not automation. The mistake is not putting a human in charge of
deciding when to automate. There is no human behavior that can be predicted by
an algorithm. Invest in the headcount that will tell the machine what to do.
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