Personal contact, which is always in the foreground with us in the form of advice, service chats and hotlines, will continue to play this important role.
Customer Journey - Happiness is Measurable
Satisfied customers buy again. And whether they are happy with offer, advice and retailers can be measured with intelligent software. Three questions on customer satisfaction in the digital age to Group Executive Board member Dr Winfried Zimmermann.
1. Big Data is already helping with pricing or personalisation of advertising. To what extent are large amounts of data interesting in the context of customer satisfaction?
Big Data means in this context data points that give us information about our customers’ mood, in other words: customer feedback. We get much more of this now, because social media offer many more channels and possibilities for them to express their opinions. At the same time, customers on the net also actively seek out the opinion of others when making decisions to purchase or use products. There is a huge treasury of data to be opened up.
2. Which analysis tools can you use to measure customer satisfaction?
There is a wide variety of instruments, from web analytics to customer surveys. But the challenge does not lie in the measurement itself. The exciting thing is how are these measuring instruments used to implement measures in respect of customers? Intelligent software helps us here, for example to sift through all the feedback on all channels from service chat to Instagram profile for topics that are relevant from the customer’s perspective. With Crate and Barrel, for instance, it was evident that order updating, exchange and return had to be further optimised. At the same time, such tools have a "social listening" function: they help us understand why customers buy from us - or from our competitors, and then we can act accordingly.
3. Against the background of these new possibilities, how do you assess the role that employees will play in future in the matter of customer satisfaction?
Personal contact, which is always in the foreground with us in the form of advice, service chats and hotlines, will surely continue to play this important role or become even more relevant. What is also exciting, however, is what happens when speech recognition works so well that machines really recognise what customers want, if what are called “text to intent” processes can also read the subtext. This certainly has an impact on what kind of contact will continue to run through people, and what kind will run through machines.