Would you rather be helped right now or helped tomorrow?
Stupid question, right? Of course, you’d like to be helped now rather than tomorrow.
I was looking for help from X company the other day and was on the phone for 45 minutes before any rep answered the phone. Seriously? Even worse, they had to transfer me to another rep to actually help me.
Okay, this post wasn’t just for me to complain — but I feel that companies that are still operating like this are all a century old or not serious about providing the best user experience.
Here’s what the best companies are doing (especially during the whole COVID internet-only era):
👉 Training and re-training client-facing employees to able to identify problems quickly and resolve them in real-time
👉 Providing the infrastructure that gives these employees every tool they need. For one, whatever infrastructure needs to allow employees to communicate and crowdsource solutions quickly. Another would be an instant messenger that allows Gen Z and Millennials to text rather than talk on the phone.
👉 If asynchronous is the only method, they’re using the extra time as an opportunity to not only solve that issue, but giving out support for issues that the client may experience later
👉 Overcommunicating by providing more information in a clear, concise way (think self-help parts of websites)
👉 Collecting data — What are the pain points? Where are clients getting stuck? — then asking “how do we fix that?”