4 Types of Customer Interactions to Plan For

You’ll never be able to write a process rule or a line of computer code that requires an employee to delight customers; the employee has to want to delight customers.

Sometimes, situations arise that simply weren't planned for in advance. When this happens, your employees must be willing and able to solve the problems you haven't already prepared for. Occasionally it might even require employees to use their common sense to override your otherwise efficient system rules or processes. Having the right corporate culture is critical, and one of the problems with a fuzzy concept like "culture" is that it can't simply be managed from the top down. Culture has to be built from the bottom up, also.

In terms of dealing with customers, one way to visualize the issue is to use a diagram that categorizes customer interactions based on how standardized the business process is, and how important the subject is to the customer. Based on the level of process standardization and customer engagement we can identify four different types of customer interactions to plan for:

The vast majority of customer interactions with any sizable business will be in Quadrant 1 of the diagram, on the lower right. Here you have a lot of repetitiveness and a high potential for standardization, while the customer considers the transaction to be routine. Buying one more items from an online retailer, for instance, or making a call to your credit card company to check your balance, would be routine Quadrant 1 activities. And many of these kinds of interactions can be entirely automated, which gives the company the ability to hard-wire customer-centric processes into its computer system. When iTunes reminds you that you already bought an item you’re about to purchase, it’s because they have hard-wired trustability into their computer decision rules.

In Quadrant 2 the interactions can easily be standardized, but consumers would probably not label them “routine,” and are likely to be highly interested or involved in them. One example might be when a customer receives his very first bill from the mobile carrier he just signed up with. He’s likely to be quite interested in understanding why the bill is higher than he had expected, and in many cases he'll call the carrier to discuss it. But because every new customer receives a first invoice at some point, and it’s not uncommon for them to call in to inquire about it, the mobile company can prepare for the event in advance, and it will likely have a standardized way to deal with these kinds of inquiries.

On the left side of the matrix are the interactions that can’t be highly standardized. Almost by definition, these are the kinds of things that weren’t anticipated and planned for already, including unusual requests or out of the ordinary events. On the lower left in Quadrant 3, a customer isn’t terribly concerned about outcomes, but the company still has to pay attention and manually address these interactions one at a time, which undermines its cost efficiency. An example might be when a hotel company’s web site can’t automatically consolidate a customer’s duplicate frequent guest accounts, requiring a call in to the reservations center to handle the issue, where different agents might handle this same infrequent problem in different ways, probably consulting informally with other agents before tackling it. For the most part these are nuisance problems, and the firm should be logging them as they come up, in order to continually improve its process standardization and automation capabilities.

It’s in Quadrant 4, however, where customer interactions are the most threatening to a firm’s profitability and reputation. These are issues in which the customer is highly engaged personally, but where the company has no standardized process, either because the issue was hard to identify and anticipate in advance, or because the company hasn’t been careful enough in mapping out its interactions. Either way, these “surprises, trials and tribulations” will test a firm’s corporate culture. When a customer is wronged or ill-served in some way, how easily can the situation be remedied by rank-and-file employees who get involved in the customer’s interaction?

Most employees want to work for a company that can be trusted by its customers. But if you want to be able to handle the kinds of problems encountered in Quadrant 4 effectively, then your employees must be (1) actively engaged with your firm and its mission, and (2) enabled to make the right decisions on their own. In short, employees have to be not only willing but able. So consider carefully whether your employees have the ability and authority to deal with Quadrant 4 interactions on their own.

I’ll come back to the issue of engaged and enabled employees in future posts.