Customers’ emotions drive their decisions
According to McKinsey surveys, 87 percent of customers increased their value by purchasing more products or investing more of their assets after a positive customer service experience.
Just as tellingly, more than 70 percent reduced their commitment when things went sour…
How can Dassault Systèmes – EXALEAD “ii for Frontlines”, help deliver the skills and information frontline employees need in order to handle interactions that are important to customers?
How can Frontlines software help employees use their emotional intelligence and develop “an instinctive frontline response?”
Everybody knows that the cost of keeping customers is much lower than that of acquiring new ones.
Although companies are investing record amounts of money in customer-relationship-management (CRM) technology, most of these initiatives end in disappointment.
According to Forrester research, only 10 percent of business and IT executives surveyed strongly agreed that business results anticipated from implementing CRM were met or exceeded…
What’s often missing is the spark between the customer and frontline employees that helps transform wary or skeptical people into loyal fans of the brand and engaged customers.
An emotionally driven behavior between customer service employees and customers during “moments of truth” creates “a meaningful ongoing dialog characterized by trust and loyalty.” Critical opportunities to engage in this dialog arise, for example, during interactions in the aftermath of a car accident, a lost mobile device or a damaged suitcase. At times like these, customers require the full attention and emotional commitment of the customer service employee to overcome the issue and reach a solution.
To handle these situations, frontliners must be able to respond instinctively, putting the customer’s emotional needs and personal agendas first.
However, executives typically struggle to transform the way a company responds to its customers.
We would like to suggest a couple of practical tips for overcoming these challenges:
• Ensure that frontliners have clarity of purpose and provide them with all the tools they need to address the customers’ questions, feelings, values, beliefs and emotional needs.
• Improve frontliners’ capabilities—and shape their thinking—so that they develop the right emotional skills. By supporting and fostering the emotional intelligence of its frontline employees, companies can ensure that more of those critical moments have positive outcomes.
Dassault Systèmes – EXALEAD “ii for Frontlines” application can help dramatically:
1. Ensure clarity of purpose for people in frontline work
Employees deliver exceptional customer service—and perform well at critical moments—only if they have a clear understanding of what they are supposed to do and why.
Helping employees understand their response options can be complex, but it is much more effective when the information they need is presented as simply as possible.
Dassault Sytèmes – EXALEAD “ii for Frontlines” delivers a selection of relevant answers by providing a “360° view” of customer issues, drawn from the existing knowledge assets of all of a company’s departments and services. Its advanced semantic search capability analyzes the issue and pushes only pertinent, useful content, with a sub-second response time.
Because they don’t have to follow a strict process funnel, employees are likely to react spontaneously—or in an emotionally intelligent way. They are not burdened by a lengthy and detailed rule book, but rather are given the supporting information needed to engage in an emotional story with the customer.
2. Use all company-wide knowledge assets to help frontliners have a meaningful exchange with the customer, thus increasing customer loyalty.
Standardized responses to eliminate human error (mechanistic CRM approaches with cumbersome scripts, and complex protocols), may make for smoother customer interactions in simple situations (such as remote-banking transactions), but these technological approaches will never enable an emotional connection between employee and customer—the kind of connection that characterizes positive experiences in complex frontline situations.
We believe that scripted responses eliminate authenticity and empathy from the customer experience and prevent spontaneous emotional connections and creative problem solving.
Dassault Sytèmes – EXALEAD “ii for Frontlines” application crawls and indexes data from throughout the company to provide information, alerts and events with clear and simple timelines, in much the same way the control panel of a cockpit provides a pilot with the critical information needed to fly a plane.
In conclusion, emotional intelligence is largely innate and hiring and managing emotionally intelligent frontline workers is a first step. But a solution like the ii for Frontlines application from EXALEAD can make it easy for companies to take the next steps toward improving the Emotional Quotient of their frontline workers.
Adopting such a solution can pay off rapidly in deeper interactions—and more profitable relationships—with customers.
Want to know more about ii for Frontlines? Please share your questions or comments here.
