The future looks bright
Rise of the autonomous customer

Business as unusual is becoming the norm thanks to smartphones, social media and other customer superchargers, says Dr Nicola J Millard, Customer Experience Futurologist at BT.

Have you got a smartphone? Do you find that your behaviour has completely changed because of it? I’m not just talking about the fact that you habitually walk into walls now, but that it is becoming increasingly more central to the way that you live your life. It’s becoming your wallet, your sat nav, your personal organiser and it might even take phone calls as well!

If you are in a queue in a bank branch, chances are you are checking out your facts before you get to the front. At that point you start asking the poor front-line person some quite difficult questions and you are very likely to wave your phone at them and declare: “That’s not what it says on your website!”

You have suddenly become a monster customer to deal with because your smartphone is supercharging you. Research done by BT and Avaya called “The Autonomous Customer” also found that smartphone users are statistically more likely to call a contact centre than any other customer. Smartphone customers seem to use all channels more and, because they do that, they tend to spot discrepancies between channels very easily. That means that banks need to make sure that their customer experience strategy is consistent across branch, contact centre and website.

However, it’s not just smart-phone users starting to behave strangely. In the face of a tsunami of financial choices and the economy and stock market doing the hokey cokey, we don’t make financial decisions lightly. Customers are turning into “shopper swots” – 76 per cent of us are doing our homework to make sure that the purchasing decisions that we make are the right ones for us. Our bank may well be the last port of call in the advice seeking pecking order as the majority of us start online, often on a search engine, rather than any official financial website.

Autonomous customers tend to gravitate towards online self-service because they say it puts them in control (according to 58 per cent of them) and no one tries to sell them anything (according to 59 per cent). We are quite happy to do many things ourselves as long as it is easy to do so – 83 per cent of customers say that ease of use is the primary reason they stick with a brand in an era of declining loyalty (46 per cent say they are no loyal no longer). Customer loyalty is emerging as a factor driven more highly by customer effort than by customer satisfaction. So making it easy for customers is starting to become a key strategic driver.

Where are your experts ?

Self-service as a strategy was supposed to remove lots of contacts from the contact centre and branch – and this has largely happened for simple transactions. However, 56 per cent of autonomous customers say that they are now only getting in contact when they have complex and emotive issues. They get frustrated when they ring or go into a branch and are faced by “lovely people who can’t do anything for me”.

This means that the branch and contact centre need to be able to cope with this hike in complexity. In the past, organisations protected their valuable expertise, frequently hiding experts in back rooms, only to be dusted off and taken out when all other strategies failed. Now, getting that expertise to autonomous customers is becoming very important. Your back end is now your front end in this model.

The problem is finding out who and where your experts are – because they may well be lurking in branch, in contact centre, in head office or maybe even beyond the boundaries of the bank. Once you’ve found them, you need to figure out whether they are around (presence information is desirable in this model), and then speed-date the customer with the expert using the best medium available. This may mean that expertise is delivered via video in the branch or via branch-based people over the phone as part of the contact centre.

Things are getting a bit cloudy in terms of organisational boundaries and also in terms of the technology that can deliver all this. In a cloud-based environment all you potentially need is a browser to become a “networked expert”. Contact centre advisors no longer need to be tethered to a warehouse-like building; they can work from home or from branch or anywhere in between as long as they have access to a secure network connection and the Internet.

However, if potentially anyone is talking to customers, chaos may ensue and that tends to act against things like control, regulation and measurement, so tying this in to CRM systems and workflow management is vital.

Customers may also be bypassing financial institutions entirely when taking advice; 83 per cent of autonomous customers are using reviews online to confirm the quality of products and services. Of course, banks cannot control this information. If social media is a dance floor, you can’t control it but you can go and dance. There isn’t an obvious killer dance track for banks, though.

How far can social media be trusted?

According to research by Forrester on social media and finance, 45 per cent of online consumers want to engage with banks on social media but only 17 per cent wanted access to bank accounts and 14 per cent wanted to access customer services. For advice, 16 per cent wanted to use Twitter. Trust is a mitigating factor in this, with 52 per cent saying that they would only engage if they trusted their bank. There is also the fact that social media is a less trusted (and very public) channel than traditional ones such as the phone and the branch.

However, people very often vent their frustrations over social media – and it is good to go and linger at the side of the dance floor and figure out who is there and what kind of dancing they are doing before deciding to pluck up enough courage to go and dance. Advances in intelligent systems technology are helping organisations to make sense of random DJ mixes being shot at them.

Having that information and then doing something about it are two different things – you need to get that information to networked experts who can do something with it. Being able to route social content to the people who can either learn from it or deal with issues on a business-as-usual basis is much more effective than creating a “social media department” separate from the rest of the business.

So the future is one where customers are autonomous and informed, where organisational silos are blurring and expertise lies in the cloud. Business as unusual is becoming the norm, driven by new technologies, and it is redefining the traditional relationship between bank and customer.

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