Focus on digital and ‘customer experiences’ has weakened customer service: Aarron Spinley
Companies are focusing too much on short-term digital transactions at the expense of strong customer service, according to research from independent analyst Aarron Spinley.
Spinley’s new report, The Customer Engagement Stack, introduces an alternative to the modern “technology paradox” of the digital era, where the everyday customer service imperative has been compromised by digital culture taking over more considered strategy.
Aarron Spinley
“The main misadventure has been a general confusion between marketing and customer service, an obsession with and yet broad incomprehension of the term ‘experience’, a distorted reliance on a data culture, and the over-indexing on customer surveys,” he said.
The report looks to challenge movements around personalisation, ‘experience management’ and short-term digital marketing creeping into customer operations.
Spinley said the low barrier to entry of marketing and customer management means both lack consistent professional discipline and the spread of marketing-based digital tactics has ‘degraded’ customer operations.
Spinley said companies typically adopt “ill-advised” digital practices that annoy customers enough to turn them off from buying their products and services. He added the customer operations vocation is largely “absent a professional infrastructure” and has struggled to respond to changing customer expectations.
“We must balance the absolute need for technology innovation and efficiency gains with ensuring that we adopt valid practices,” Spinley said. “Some vendors provide exactly that, but many are less aligned with critical thought.
He also took aim at executives with titles like customer experience director, CXO or similar, saying they are “almost universally” unable to articulate what an actual human experience is, how it is formed, or what the implications of that detail are for brands and their customer interactions.
“There has been a marked increase in CX investment from major brands all around the world as it relates to the technology, yet net outcomes for customers are worsening,” Spinley said. That should tell us something. Research shows consumers are incredibly annoyed by pushy sales interventions, comically bad chabots, soul destroying call centre wait times, and an inability to get things done quickly and easily.”
Spinley’s proposed Customer Engagement Stack comprises three layers, offer integrity, service and experience, and helps companies recognise that 99% of their customer interactions are the actual product offering itself, and services, not experiences. Whether that would be digital channels, contact centres, and physical channels.
The report also recommends customers should be treated as individuals rather than members of a segment, and that the experience layer only takes up a small portion of the mix when engaging with customers.
“It’s vital to execute the services layer brilliantly in order to earn the right to provide great experiences,” Spinley said. “The services layer has the most impact in the creation and sustenance of customer trust.”
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