Have you ever been swimming in clear blue waters on a bright sunny day, the warmth making you just a little bit heady? Then suddenly, with one misplaced gust of wind, the clouds come over with no warning, and the water starts very quickly turning gray and chilly. You leave the beach - drenched, slightly annoyed, and probably quite cold.
That sums up how most users are feeling when one misplaced, accidental click triggers a follow up high urgency phone call to Global Support. For most of our clients, Global Support is a consultation room, and for some users, it’s often the emergency room. Our analysts have the tough job of dissecting complex product problems with very vague symptoms and very tight timelines. They must not only identify the root cause but also fix it. Most of the times, they can. Sometimes, though, the damage is already done, it’s too late, and they are the ones who have to break the news to the user on the other end.
Not a great starting point for customer satisfaction, is it? Yet ExactTarget Global Support gets perfect surveys, day after day - even for the emergencies where there is no recourse. So, what can a marketer learn from this story? If how to engage a subscriber with your product is marketing, then how to keep them engaged despite a bad product experience is super-marketing.
The dream: A marketer’s aim is to engage the subscriber and lead them to a perfect product or service experience. You spend hours, nay, days, in meeting rooms, strategizing, then spend more resources executing the strategy - designing, segmenting, proofreading - all for that one perfect “wow” moment.
The reality: In a world of insatiable digital consumption and complexity, your subscriber may discover a perceived or real imperfection in that experience. And how your user's perception of that imperfection is handled will decide whether they will have the confidence to go back to that application, that product, that website, that company, and often whether they will recommend your brand.
The key takeaway: Support forms a vital extension of your product or service experience. It allows you to humanize your interaction with a cluster of screens and pixels and complete the circle of human-computer interaction.
So how do you make sure the support desk re-converts that imperfect situation into a perfect experience, a que sera sera into a hakuna matata?
The answer is elementary to most marketers: personalize the experience to make it positive. Follow @ExactTargetHelp as we celebrate #customerserviceweek all week!
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