If customers feel that the companies they are doing business with are not listening to them, they are probably right. New research by Convergys reveals a disconnect between what consumers and the executives of the firm they do business with think is important in customer relationships. And that may be having a negative impact on building and maintaining customer loyalty.

 

Here is a sample of the study results:

 

*    47 percent of consumers say companies do not understand what they experience. Yet 83 percent of executives think they do

 

*     Executives rank personalized service as one of the most important attributes for customers. Yet customers place this at the bottom

 

*     78 percent of consumers believe service trumps personalized features while 86 percent say service defines the brand

 

*      While 93 percent of consumers believe agent knowledge influences satisfaction most, 81 percent say they possess more knowledge than the contact center staff

 

*       41 percent of consumers told Convergys (News - Alert) researchers when they do give responses to issues, companies do nothing. 40 percent simply leave the outfits they do business without any feedback. Nearly all consumers: 87 percent will spread the word of their experiences of firms and their products and services to their family and friends.

 

*       The net result is that consumers are not wowed by the quality of service they receive and may go elsewhere. While 81 percent of customer’s expectations are generally satisfied, only 36 percent of the time overall service is rated exceptional and that the majority would leave for better value

 

“The key drivers to the business are not what are most important to the customer, “explains Ryan Pellet, Vice President, Convergys Global Consulting Services. “Simply delivering the ‘right offer at the right time’ is not what is most important to customers. Consumers defined personalized service as ‘providing unique solutions to my problems and not just quoting standard policies and procedures.’ Companies associate personalized service to selling and not service.”

 

Yet CRM has been built on one-to-one personalized services and offers to attract and retain customers. Convergys' findings seem to render many CRM strategies invalid.

 

Pellet responds: “Convergys sees CRM strategies changing. CRM was designed through an ‘inside out’ approach. Its intent was to capture transactional information to ‘manage the customer’. We are taking the opposite viewpoint and believe that the data collected should be used to ‘manage’ the companies via the lenses of the customers, in essence, looking at the organizations from the “outside in.” The transaction data means very little if the experience associated to the transaction is misunderstood.

 

The Convergys study also showed that more customers are using automated channels, such as IVR/speech recognition voice and web self-service. 32 percent now prefer automated tools in 2008 compared with just 18 percent in 2004. A key reason is queue avoidance; 55 percent of all consumers said automated resolution is better than waiting for live resolution.

 

This shift is most pronounced among younger consumers. The automated preference rises to 43 percent for 'millennials': those who became adults after 2000.

 

The millennials are becoming mainstream consumers and are increasingly channel-agnostic, explains Pellet. They will use the channel most convenient, which delivers the best service and information at any moment in time, explains Pellet. They are more focused on content and results.

 

“The people who know the most about a company are the people calling into the centers- i.e. the customers, “says Pellet. “Contact centers need to get closer to their customers to deliver relevant customer experience strategies and be a strategic asset to the company and not just a cost center.”