Gaining Customer Trust – Part IV: The Connection to Customer Experience

As we continue this blog series on gaining customer trust, let’s talk about one of the pillars of customer trust we have, so far, not touched on with a specific post – being personal, transparent & honest. In today’s hyper-competitive and complex economy, I believe the true source of competitive advantage is the one that can survive any disruption: an obsession with customer experience. Good experiences grab customers and bad ones push them away.

A few years ago, I surveyed customers who purchased digital goods using a particular eCommerce platform. The results there, I think, tie very well with what I’ve observed in the prepaid market. Interaction with a rude employee, unexpected fees or charges, and poor quality products or services come together to create bad experiences. And we all know how that ends: churn.

You don’t have to take my word for this. Do some research on Google and you will see a multitude of very credible and scientific studies in which consumers are asked to rate the experience at companies they do business with. In a survey I did a number of years ago for a mobile service provider, some of their consumers equated the experience of contacting them for service issues to going to the dentist!! Ouch!

What is clear is that customer experience correlates to loyalty. Specifically, it correlates to the willingness to consider your prepaid program for another load or top-up; willingness to recommend your card to their friends; and the reluctance to switch to a different prepaid provider. In other words, if you want that next load onto your card, if you want to make money from interchange fees and not just use fees if you want good word of mouth, and if you want to keep your customers, it’s unlikely that anything else you do matters more than delivering a superior experience. Much of the experience relies on the security, availability, and flexibility of the processing platform you’re using. These things have always been a focus of ours for this very reason.

But, no matter the platform, there are basic business and marketing philosophies that you as a program manager, financial institution or issuer should consider. The neglect of these is often at the root of the customer retention and endless customer churn challenges so prevalently in the prepaid and emerging payments market. Here are four simple things I’ve found work wonders to improve customer experience:

1. Understand your customers and personalize their experience.

As a business, you need to be in touch and knowledgeable of the customer’s expectations of your financial products and services. Do you know who your customers are? How they are using the card or service? What they are purchasing and when? It’s so easy to use analytics to mine the vast amounts of data stored on your processing platform – so use it. That’s why i2c provides the tools for this type of data mining.

Leverage it to your advantage. In addition, use personalization features whenever possible to address customers by their name or incorporate unique/dynamic information into their experience so it is more relevant and personal to them. Do you want to offer coupons and loyalty promotions to cement the relationship and drive use of the card? Then you better understand what their spending habits are and what they are likely to buy.

Again, this is easy to do with analytics. Also, look at the specific services or features the customer uses and then adjust their views and treatment accordingly. For example, if they haven’t downloaded the mobile app yet but they use text alerts frequently, then messaging and/or offers to download the mobile app might make sense. Customers will see these messages as relevant. Just remember: you want relevance, not spam.

2. Gather feedback from your customers.

Every interaction with your customer is an opportunity to gather feedback. If you’re not understanding the customer’s expectations – then I can almost guarantee you’re probably not gathering feedback from them either. Your customer website is a good place to interject surveys or solicit input. For phone-based customer support, use every interaction with your customers as a source of input on your customer experience.

Post-call surveys are the standard method, but I recommend that you consider adding other methods for collecting feedback over the phone because these traditional surveys have very low response rates. Earlier this year, we began offering our clients a service whereby customers could leave a voice message regarding a service experience. The messages are automatically queued for immediate, personal follow-up by a live customer service agent.

This method not only lets customers state freely their feelings (sometimes you just have to let them speak, not just grade you!) but it also guarantees that they will be dignified with a response from a real, live person. And let’s not forget the mobile channel. Sending simple text-based surveys following a service interaction is a great way to reach the many customers that prefer the speed and convenience of giving feedback on their mobile phones.

3. Analyze customer feedback & usage patterns regularly and establish an action plan.

Figuring out how to improve the customer experience, especially to your most loyal customers, has to be a primary focus. How does one do this, exactly? Conduct regular reviews of customer usage habits and create action plans on how you’re going to resolve the issues that surface. And, obviously, part of this process involves summarizing and analyzing the feedback you collected from the various methods we discussed in #2 above.

4. Develop an on-going dialogue with your customer.

Yes, the fourth step builds on the other three because if you understand your client, you gather feedback from them and you analyze the data, then you’re most assuredly on your way to having an ongoing and fruitful dialogue with your customer. And it is ultimately this dialog that will help you build trust and keep your brand top of mind, leading to an expansion of your business. Why? Share of mind leads to card usage and continued loads and purchases.

To connect with your customers in a way that makes sense for them – perhaps via a monthly/quarterly e-newsletter as well as social media (i.e., Facebook, Twitter) or use text messages and opt-in emails to engage.

In summary, superior customer experience comes from knowing your customer, gathering feedback from them, analyzing it, and keeping the dialog going. Four simple ideas, yet doing them well is not so simple. But, successful brands practice all four, all the time.

Next week’s topic will explore how customer service plays a role in building (or damaging) customer trust. Customer service plays a big role in the customer experience, and there are tactics and approaches to customer service that should be explored when talking about customer trust. Customer service is everything and anything that touches a customer – directly or indirectly, it’s so much more than just solving problems or addressing complaints.

Customer service is really part of a holistic customer experience that provides a critical competitive advantage in today’s increasingly cluttered and commoditized financial products and prepaid marketplace. Until next week, think about how these ideas can be incorporated into your customer experience strategy.