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Some People Hate Self-Checkout

There’s a myth out there that helpdesk companies like to perpetuate about customer service automation — that it will save you time, that all your competitors are doing it, and you need to have it too so you can go work on more important things.

Except this it isn’t true.

As our friends at Buffer like to say about social media automation, “It’s not a rotisserie oven. Please don’t set it and forget it.” The same goes for customer service automation.

All awesome technology requires equally awesome people and processes to build it into a meaningful competitive advantage.

Automation is the technology component of the wonderfully productive golden triangle of people, process and technology. Each requires the other two to make a tangible impact on business.

people process technology

Take people and process out of the equation, and it looks a lot like the modern-day self-checkout.

48% of people don’t love self-checkout

The Mindy Project, a FOX sitcom, captures at least half of humanity’s sentiments about the self-checkout.

Mindy’s childhood love has just come back from a long stint in the army, miles away from any supermarket innovation.

Things have changed. There is now self-checkout.

mindy1

Yea, if the future is a fiery dystopia. She puts it in the bag like the machine says.

mindy

The machine totally melts down.

mindy

It’s like automation gone rogue: the machine is going nuts, there’s no store associate around to help. They don’t even end up getting what they came for – they bail without that shampoo.

mindy6

 

 

 

 

 

 

Useless, right? You might as well bark over the intercom:

“Good afternoon customer, we are replacing the privilege of human contact at the checkout counter with robots. You will now interact with a robot that you’ve never been trained to use. We will task a single associate to supervise the whole self checkout section, so if you run into a problem while checking out during rush hour, you’re on your own. Good luck thumbing through our massive directory of fruit and vegetable codes to find ‘heirloom tomatoes’. You would think it’s under H, but it’s actually under T. Thanks for shopping with us today.”

Some people don’t like self-checkout.

Check out the line at Whole Foods

Only 52% of consumers prefer self checkout. This automation innovation is by no means a runaway success.

Another 48% are opting for the human checkout experience probably for the same reasons as tech writer Farhad Manjoo:

The human doesn’t expect me to remember or look up codes for produce, she bags my groceries, and unlike the machine, she isn’t on hair-trigger alert for any sign that I might be trying to steal toilet paper.

Best of all, the human does all the work while I’m allowed to stand there and stupidly stare at my phone, which is my natural state of being. (WSJ)

Look at how differently Whole Foods manages its checkout lines at some of its busy urban locations.

whole foods self checkout

Customers stand in one long line and walk to their color-coded counters when it’s their turn.

This is a great example of how automation can be used to assist — not replace — human employees. 

The benefits are worth it. Customers enjoy the personal attention of a store associate and more importantly, they don’t have to work the register to be able to walk out with your groceries. Oh, and how about those nice last- minute impulse buys?

whole foods self checkout

Stick to your (automation) principles

There’s a general principle that successful customer-centric businesses tend to follow. We call it The Automation Principle.

kayako automation principle

Here’s where that comes from: some businesses believe that automation exists to free up their time. But better businesses use automation to reinvest their new free time in better human-to-human service.

Automation should support your support. If you’re automating any personal interactions, you’re doing it wrong.

With that in mind, here are little “human hacks” that are total winners:

Automation is your little helper

Follow up on a ticket

The scene: You’ve provided a fix to your customer’s problem. Now it’s up to them to implement the fix.

What to automate: Schedule a follow up date.

The human hack: Write a unique and personal message to ask if they resolved the problem or need extra help.

If several members of the team were involved with solving an issue, the initial point of contact should schedule a follow up to check in: “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Build your knowledge base engine

The scene: You’ve been answering or resolving the same issues over and over again.

What to automate: Run a report linking tags + priority level to see which inquiries are the most frequent and pressing.

The human part: Now that you know what’s tripping up our customers most often, prioritize those help articles first.

Celebrate customer milestones

The scene: Your customer has just been through a milestone with your product: it could be their first 10 followers, completing a level, referring you to a friend, or trying a new feature.

What to automate: Set up an email trigger to notify you of the customer’s milestone.

The human part: Sure, send a personal email, but could you work on something bigger? Invent a way to take the relationship offline.

creativemarket

Creative Market, a marketplace for designers, is seriously raising the bar. Every time a seller makes their first sale, it triggers an email. Then someone on the team sends across handwritten card along with a dollar bill. How’s that for inspiring?

The Takeaway

It takes time to find the right balance between automation and human-to-human engagement.

But you’ll find that if you’re doing it right, your customer service team will be busier than ever: upping their game, building new ways to engage your customers and the new face of your company. Like an unstoppable machine.

When in doubt, be human.

This post was originally published by Kayako at Medium.com

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Leveraging Customer relationships as a Product Manager

There have been epics written on ways businesses should be:

  1. Identifying customers
  2. Acquiring new customers from competition
  3. Retaining customers
  4. Cross selling and up selling into existing customers
  5. Leveraging Customers for expanding business

For a Product Manager, who has to deal with many internal and external entities, Customer is by far one of the most business critical entities that he has to deal with. And rightly so, since it’s the customers who not only pay for your product but help in innovation, evangelizing product and most importantly give you the credibility to make the right product / business decision and the confidence to stand by it.

Every organization has different dynamics around customer management. Hence as a Product Manager, once you get into a new organization you have to feel your way into the customer management dynamics. Let’s focus on some of the common trends and techniques used for successfully getting a handle on building successful Customer relationships.

1. Identifying Customers:

One of the first and the foremost tasks is to identify the customer. There are two types of customer:

  • Internal Customer: These can be folks within in your organization who use your product or service to assist your external customer or use the product / service on behalf of your external customer. As a Product Manager you should give their voice a significant ear, since they can not only share their experience but also be a voice for external customer. Another benefit is that since they are part of your organization you can leverage them for beta testing, brain storming ideas, hand holding external customer and even for evangelizing products
  • External Customer: These are your paying customer. As a company you have made a promise to them for delivering a product / service and that must be kept. You should categorize the customers in terms of their value to the organization:
  • Revenue (current and potential)
  • Brand value
  • New market beach head
  • New geo beach head

 

2. Initial Customer Contact:

Initial customer contact is a crucial point in your relationship with the customer. Hence it is critical that you do all the necessary research on the customer account prior to the meeting whether it’s in person meeting or on the phone. The per-call prep can help you gain insights into customers:

  • Business
  • Current issues
  • Temperament

 

As part of this initial introduction to the Customer, you must establish credibility by highlighting your relevant past experiences and listen intently by being the fly on the wall. One the key things to remember is that as a Product Manager you must align and fit well into the Sales team dynamics, since they are typically the owner of the customer relationships.

3. Basic Ground Rules for Ongoing Customer Engagement:

Once your initial introduction is done, managing the ongoing customer contact is delicate balancing act. A customer managed properly can help take your product to the next level along with its revenue.

  • You must establish basic ground rules:
  • Reviewing meeting agenda with the sales team
  • Sending meeting agenda in advance to the customer
  • Follow through plan after the meeting
  • Set up meeting success criteria
  • You have to be careful not to overwhelm the Customer with long and frequent meetings since it can cause confusion and delay in reaching your goal. This is especially true when you and your Customers are geographically apart. Crisp, succinct and to the point conversation is critical for ongoing communication with any Customer.
  • Remember the Buddha story about teaching Nirvana to a starving disciple? As long as the disciple was starving, there was no way he would have been interested in learning about Nirvana. Similarly, focus on the immediate needs of your Customer before offering him advance solutions. Once you solve Customer’s immediate business problems, he will be interested in working with you since trust in the relationship is built.
  • It’s critical to set expectations when you have conversation with Customers. Typically, if you ask customers to share their pain points, they will open the floodgates and expect those pain points to be fixed immediately. Hence before asking the Customer to open the floodgates, you should make sure that you set the right Customer expectations so that Customer doesn’t loose interest and let down. No one wants to tell the same story again and again, especially if your organization is expected to fix at some point. This same principle goes for sharing product and services roadmap. You should help Customers understand that documents like these are for confidential and for directional purposes only.

 

These basic principles for managing customer interaction will vary based on geography, industry vertical, business model, company size, number of products, product life cycle, etc. But, if followed consistently will take your business to the next level by forging long lasting relationships with your loyal Customers…

 

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“E” is for empathy

The last three business books I read were seemingly all different. “Wired to Care” by Dev Patnaik, “Nanovation” by Kevin and Jackie Freiberg and “Customer Centric Selling” by Michael Bosworth. The first was how humans are genetically designed to care for others, the second was the story behind how the Tata Nano was launched and the third was a book on more effective selling. But there was a common underlying theme to it all.

The theme was empathy. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines empathy as

“the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this”

All the books in various ways said this and I am paraphrasing here – in order to to create a compelling offering you need to understand your customer’s pain and create a solution for it.

This should be self-evident but unfortunately that is not what we find in reality. What we find too often is a situation where a company creates a product without fully understanding how it will solve a customer’s problem. Even if they have a legitimate product solving legitimate problems, they are so caught up in the gee-whizziness of their product that they stop listening to their customers.

This is a big problem. A company that has a valid solution for a defined problem can last for a while. It might even get some early adopters but it will have a hard time sustaining its momentum and will run out of steam unless it starts a dialog with its customers and is empathetic to their needs. This is because your mainstream customers, the ones that will sustain you, are not early adopters and need to develop trust before they do business with you. One of the surest ways of building trust is to make sure the customer feels that you feel their pain and understand their unique situation.

This is not rocket science. It can be easily instituted in an organization. Designing a consultative sales process around understanding a customer’s needs first is a great start. But the culture of making sure that every touch point with the customer listens more than talks starts at the top.

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How Sales and Support can also be ‘Marketed’!

The best marketer of our time was, inarguably, Steve Jobs. And everything Steve Jobs did was aimed at one thing – marketing his products. His presentations were performances, his product demos were carefully directed and choreographed; there was an air of showmanship about everything going on at Apple leading to a launch. Even their support stories became huge news. Walter Isaacson and others dissected this approach later, but at that time, all of us consumers were led to think only one thing – I need that Apple device!

That need wasn’t an accident; that craving was the result of an orchestrated marketing campaign, parts of which would never come under the understood umbrella of ‘marketing’. And that is where they won. 

The lesson in this is very simple – everything is marketing. Every single thing. Even something like customer service. In fact, here’s Forbes terming customer service the new marketing. I couldn’t agree more.

But it’s not just customer service that now falls under marketing’s all encompassing realm. Sales and support can also be ‘marketed’. In fact both sales and support, tied in with customer service, can become integral parts of the marketing machinery, using every customer touchpoint as a marketing channel.

The ‘support is marketing’ line

This is the first point of customer contact and definitely the most important. An indifferent support experience is not going to get a prospective customer to open his wallet. We need to make him pause, make him think, and make him buy. Every support query should be treated as an opportunity to clear roadblocks a customer has in using the product. Anticipating the next question and offering help before the customer even asks is part of this. This is just good support, you might argue, and that is exactly what I’m talking about – great support is great marketing.



The ‘sales as marketing’ story


It was the last week of the month and our sales team was rushing to complete targets. A colleague called up a hot lead and it turned out the lead, the CEO of a small business didn’t know about our occasional agents feature, which would cost him a lot less than actually buying usage for a whole agent. My colleague could have sold the customer the extra agent, but he didn’t. He explained the occasional agent concept, and when the customer purchased our product, he spent less and got more value. 

That customer would now think twice before leaving us, if ever. If that is not spectacular marketing, I don’t know what is.

The Bottom Line
As marketers we are looking for a customer to 1) spend more on our product and/or 2) tell someone else he should be using our product. 

When sales, support and customer service add up to give a customer a smooth and satisfying experience, he’ll have no qualms in spending more on our product or recommending us to others. Our job is done.


And that is why I think we need to take that lesson from Steve Jobs to heart. Everything is, in fact, marketing!