Reduce customer effort and improve customer experience
Last week, we considered the importance of teamwork and co-operation to ensure a customer centric journey. Equally important are customer focused processes to reduce customer effort and ensure a positive customer experience. In addition, staff need to be able to work with the processes to provide excellent service.
Let’s look at what happens when that isn’t the case and processes work against the customer and the company providing the service.
When process is a barrier to customer satisfaction
I just had a very long call with Ticketmaster, having bought tickets as a gift for a family member desperate to see a much loved band who don’t often gig in the UK.
It turns out the person who buys the tickets has to attend the event; presumably an attempt to discourage touts and high priced ticket resales. This all sounds very sensible, but judging from social media, this creates a huge issue when gifting tickets to another family member or friend.
The call was a roller coaster of upset, accusation, threats, and finally a fix. However, the fix was to cancel and re-buy the tickets using the attendee’s card for whom the tickets were a gift. Kinda ruins the surprise, right? And doubles the effort.
I uncovered that the issue was created by the band choosing to stipulate the purchaser must attend. But Ticketmaster are the ones taking the brunt of the backlash. Therefore anyone assessing Ticketmaster would see some pretty poor scores and comments based on the issue. Is that fair and should the call handlers be penalised for a process issue out of their control?
Identifying process issues
It brings to mind that it’s important when designing a VoC or CSaT programme that you need to take account of the outside influences when designing the programme and interpreting the results. We’d recommend a Customer Journey Mapping session to hone the programme and ensure staff aren’t penalised for what they can’t control.
Here at Beehive, our first step in any programme is an immersion session to we get to know the business and understand what is being measured and why. We look at what the kinks in the road might be and what will be done with the results. It’s an important part of the process to ensure a well-considered end programme that staff will respect and will understand is there to help them and the business.
Creating customer focused processes
As for the original issue, a simple fix would be to have asked the ticket purchaser at the point of purchase to tell the seller who will be attending. I’m sure the effort to get that put into the system is more than I imagine, but as more and more bands want to stop touts and overpriced resales, a fix like this needs to be introduced.
Postscript to this: tickets sorted, purchase remade but we were charged twice! Now, that IS on Ticketmaster!