The telecommunications space is increasingly crowded. No longer does one provider rule ‘em all like the days of Ma Bell; now, traditional telecommunications providers are also competing with a host of over-the-top (OTT) communication applications and service providers. With all of this competition, telecommunications companies are continually looking for ways to stand out from the crowd. Your customer engagement strategy can be part of this — and core to this is empathy. More than just the current buzzword, empathetic engagement is key to growing stronger, longer-term customer relationships. That means understanding what being more empathetic really means when it comes to your customer engagement strategy — and you can’t afford to get this wrong.
More than a catchphrase
What do we mean when we say empathetic engagement and what does it involve? Offering choices like web chat and text messaging are great ideas; those are trustworthy channels that are more considerate than making clients wait on hold for the next available representative — but is that genuine empathy?
No; genuine empathy means communicating with consumers in a way that considers their feelings regarding a particular event, such as a past-due bill, a policy change or a significant event like a natural disaster or a neighborhood crisis.
Empathy in practice
In order to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and help them feel heard and understood, you need to take a far more individualized — even hyper-personalized — approach based on the reasons why a decision is made. Your interactions will be more empathetic if you can modify them to account for these factors.
Consider this scenario: your customer has just been laid off from their job and now they’re in the difficult situation of having to prioritize which bills to pay and when. They need their phone and their internet service to be able to submit job applications, meet with prospective employers and set up interviews. But their electricity bill is due at the same time, and they can’t leave their family in the dark. What if you, as a telecommunications service provider, not only gave your customer choices for payment plans or different subscriber plans, but also gave them an opportunity to talk about which choice would be best for them? Sending an email to let them know these options might be faster than setting up a phone call to resolve an issue, but it hardly shows empathy. It’s a little more practical and immediate, but not empathetic.
What if you were to promote more dialogue between you and your customers? And what if you could offer more choices in how they’d like to communicate with you? For example, if you gave your customer the option to have a phone call or a live chat online? Meeting your customer where they are helps show that you understand their current situation and that you’re trying to offer solutions that are quick and useful.
Imagine how you would feel if you received that level of personalized service from your carrier; you would tell everyone you know. And there are many smaller ways for telcos to enhance the customer experience.
Architecting empathy
The key to showing this kind of empathy is hyper-personalization based on a greater understanding of who your customers are, what they want, how they prefer to connect with you, and when. Any of these factors could vary day by day or moment by moment. Combining the following techniques will help you develop deeper empathy for your customers:
- Recognize the most efficient behavioral and strategic approaches
- Have interactions with your customers to continually gather insights about their motivations and actions, and adjust as they change
- Skip what works for the majority and learn what works for diverse personas within your own customer base. This is essential if you want to significantly increase the success of your engagement strategy and customer experience.
There are numerous aspects to consider and much analysis to learn from. In fact, there is too much data for one person to gather and analyze alone, but thankfully, it’s not necessary. There are tools and services that perform this analysis, reviewing countless customer interactions and continuously learning from them. You can then apply this analysis to your engagement strategy.
The impact of a negative experience frequently overrides the impact of a good experience. This is a known phenomenon called “negativity dominance.” Even if a customer has engaged with your brand in several positive ways, one unfavorable experience could damage your reputation. Customers who use social media and other platforms as a forum to spread unflattering comments about brands can damage your reputation. That’s why being empathetic is so important.
Thankfully, there are many opportunities to make both routine interactions and challenging conversations positive. For instance, decision-making simplicity has a big impact on satisfaction. If customers need to transition across channels or go through several steps to make a decision, it feels more difficult and may affect customers’ confidence about completing the task.
Customers feel more in control when they perceive the decision-making process to be straightforward and that their choices will produce favorable results.
The heart of customer engagement
When it comes to customer interaction, empathy is the latest catchword, but it takes effort to bring genuine empathy to your engagement. How would you prefer to interact with a provider? What does empathy look like to you? Is that how it looks to your customers? They will notice that you are paying attention to them specifically and that you care about their individual needs if you use hyper-personalized communications. With this strategy, your telco brand will continue to experience favorable interactions that will deepen your bond with customers and increase loyalty. Everybody benefits when empathy is no longer just a buzzword.
