Why emotion shouldn't be a priority for customer service

Customer emotions have become a big topic of discussion recently. But before thinking in terms of customers’ feelings, organisations should first concentrate on their actual problems.

If you’ve been following the major trends of customer care lately, you’re bound to have noticed a surge in topics linked to feelings.

We are told about the importance of adding a layer of emotion into Customer Care to better understand your customer, reassure and convince them, supported by evidence from studies and neuroscience.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs applied to customer care

While evidently feelings are key in successful customer relations, they are still far up on what I call “the customer relations equivalent of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs”.

With his original theory, Maslow outlined the need to meet individuals’ basic needs before seeking out higher goals. When applied to customer relations, this hierarchy shows that many companies still have more tangible issues to fix before claiming they want to appeal to their customers’ deepest feelings.

When looking at the most essential needs, we realise that huge improvements still need to be made. Answering every message is the most basic criteria: yet, a study shows that 62% of companies ignore customer service emails.

The same applies for quick responses. On social media for example, customers expect an answer within 0 to 4 hours, while the average response time from companies is in fact 10 hours.These statistics show the necessity for many companies to improve the organisation of their customer service departments to meet their customers’ expectations.

The most common customer service frustrations

While a customer wishes for an exchange driven by feelings and empathy, they first of all wish for the problem to be solved.

When investigating the main reasons for a negative experience, customers mostly report bad attitude, slow answers, poor understanding, low availability, well before mentioning impersonal exchanges or lack of emotion.

This study from InMoment also reveals a real disconnect between customer frustration and brand perception. For example, 74% of consumers report that poor staff experience contributed to a negative brand interaction, while only 29% of companies reported the same. To better know which areas to improve, organisations have to leverage customer data and feedback more efficiently.

Companies must solve problems from the lower levels of the hierarchy of needs first in order to focus on more advanced challenges later on.

The need to improve customer care structures in-depth

Some stages, such as improving politeness and clarity, can be achieved by training teams; whereas others, like faster response rates to all messages or efficiently managing channels, will be realised by structural transformation of the customer care department.

This is accomplished by reshaping teams and implementing tools that take these challenges into account.

In the UK alone, 60% of customers typically begin their interaction with customer service using an online channel. This trend is even greater for younger generations who have solely digital habits from an increasingly young age. They are progressively abandoning more traditional channels and turning to messaging apps or social media. These new means of communication show their expectations for off-line interactions, which means they won’t be limited by opening hours, for example.

Another major trend to be taken into account is the use of multiple channels: 66% of customers use more than three different channels to interact with companies and 75% of them expect a consistent experience wherever they engage. The growth of digital interactions and the rollout of new messaging apps for businesses will further increase these expectations.

To counter these evolutions, businesses now need to take an omni-digital approach. This strategy means being available on digital channels expected by customers and offering a consistent experience throughout. By involving a strong aspect of connectivity (between customer care tools such as CRM, customer interactions platforms and chatbots) and data sharing, omni-digital is also a way for companies to deliver a true seamless experience.

Unfortunately, the conventional organisation of customer care departments tends to delay their progression towards focusing on customers’ more subtle needs. When teams are organised in technological silos (an email team, a phone call team, a social media team, etc.), information doesn’t circulate easily and customers will get different experiences depending on the channel. Customers might also get frequently redirected depending on their requests, and will have to re-explain their problems. This issue only reinforces their dissatisfaction, knowing that 89% of customers feel frustrated by having to repeat their issue to multiple agents.

Even worse, this approach doesn’t allow you to even the workload across several teams, which means it can be very difficult to stand by response delays and some messages might even be downright ignored if they expire before agents get to answering them.

To be able to concentrate on subtler customer issues, an in-depth rearrangement of customer care structures seems essential. Before speaking in terms of users’ feelings, let’s first concentrate on their actual problems.