One of the latest concepts which isn’t yet well known, but definitely has a big future and great practical implications, is called the customer interaction cube. What is it? This is the question that we are going to answer in this article, as well as we are going to explain why using a customer interaction cube may be beneficial for your business.
What is a customer interaction cube?
This is a geometrical projection that helps to classify different types of customer interactions by three different criteria: emotional input, urgency, and difficulty of handling. Basically, this form is a cube with a 2 x 2 x 2 structure, where two horizontal lines of the cube are used for classifying urgency and emotional status, and a vertical line is used for urgency. Thus, the customer interaction cube covers eight types of customer interactions.
Based on that, you can analyze what types of customer requests you receive and how can you handle them to both save operational costs and improve customer satisfaction and overall customer experience.
For instance, ContactBabel in its research provides examples of different types of customer interactions, with differences in the importance of customer interaction. We`ll try to provide our own examples, for each characteristic of the three provided by the customer interaction cube.
Emotional importance for customer
Request for available subscription plans - low emotional input
Request to get an account on the knowledge base platform - low emotional input
Request to get current discounts - low emotional input
Request for emergency support (lost account access, etc.) - high emotional input
Request to find tickets for the current day - high emotional input
Urgency
Request for being approved for customer loyalty program - low urgency
Request for changing the WiFi router - low urgency
Request for a critical issue with the SaaS product - high urgency
Request for help after cracking the personal account - high urgency
Complexity
Request for refund - low complexity
Request for changing delivery point or just a query about product delivery - low complexity
Request for personalized configuration of the application - high complexity
Request for audit of the working process - high complexity
As you could guess, there are eight possible combinations of these characteristics:
- High emotional importance, low urgency, high complexity
- High emotional importance, high urgency, high complexity
- High emotional importance, low urgency, low complexity
- High emotional importance, high urgency, low complexity
- Low emotional importance, low urgency, high complexity
- Low emotional importance, high urgency, high complexity
- Low emotional importance, low urgency, low complexity
- Low emotional importance, high urgency, low complexity
Let’s look at the examples of each of the combinations:
High emotional importance, low urgency, high complexity - for instance, a customer has paid the order, but because of the system’s lag, a customer paid more than had to pay. For a customer, paying more - no matter the reason - can cause a feeling of being fooled. Also, this process is complicated to resolve because you have to return the money and process the order once more if regulations in your country don’t allow you to just refund the difference in price. Nonetheless, there is no urgency if the extra cost customer paid isn’t too high to make this a real trouble for the customer and your company. Even though such issues aren’t really urgent to be solved, do your best to reduce the potential resolution time to as short as possible. Such issues are better to be handled via phone call as their high difficulty for resolution requires you to notice all details concerning the issue.
High emotional importance, high urgency, high complexity - the worst situation. Imagine that you are selling software as a service tool (SaaS), and the customer paid for it, set it up, and created an account, but after importing all important data the software crashed. So, you are in a situation where a customer paid for a tool that is vital for his or her business, but it doesn’t work, so the customer loses money and time. Moreover, you also don’t know why the tool crashed. Such customer support requests should be processed first of others. Such issues have to be processed via phone calls only.
High emotional importance, high urgency, low complexity - customer ordered a product, but it has been delivered to the wrong address. So, for you it isn’t very difficult to resolve the issue - you have to just contact the delivery service, change the address and ask for free delivery (that is 99% likely to be approved). Nonetheless, such issues have to be resolved as soon as possible, and also you have to delight the customer with a little gift to restore relationships and trust - a free delivery is a good example of such a “gift”. For such issues, you can use either web chat or phone calls, depending on the preferred channel for a customer.
High emotional importance, low urgency, low complexity - a great example would be a car dealership case: a customer has severally contacted you to find out if there is any available exclusive car on sale (some sports cars or special trim levels are rarely available at the dealership of as there are too few men to buy them). You know that the customer is looking for this car only, but it can only be available for a test drive after ordering it from the manufacturer. Thus, the best way to process such an issue is to contact the customer via email when the car will be available, or even better solution - reach out to the customer via messengers or email and promise that you have already talked to the manufacturer and the car is en route with the estimated time of arrival of X days or weeks. So, when it will come to the dealership, you will contact the client. Also, you can use emails to follow up with the customer and offer additional equipment - custom brakes, advanced guarantee, and so on.
Low emotional importance, low urgency, high complexity - a good sample of such an issue would be a house interior design request. Imagine that a customer is now building a house and it will be ready in half a year, but the client wants also to have a prepared design for the interior. This request is not in a hurry as the house isn’t still ready, and the customer also has many more things to deal with besides the interior design. Nonetheless, any interior design is a difficult project to complete and it requires you to involve different professionals to get it ready. For such issues, email or messenger is the best option to communicate with customers, with phone calls for agreeing on details and discussing further steps regarding the project.
Low emotional importance, high urgency, high complexity - insurance for an expensive car can be a great example: it isn’t highly important emotionally as all customer’s emotions are focused on the car itself. Anyhow, insurance is needed and you have to provide it as fast as possible. The difficulty here stems precisely from the urgency because it is definitely not your only customer who is looking for an insurance contract. The ideal communication channel for this issue would be a chatbot or IVR system, where the customer explains all vital details about the car and awaited insurance service, and you just call a customer back and confirm the details of the agreement. You can also reach our customer via SMS with a link to the contract to sign online or via email with the contract itself.
Low emotional importance, low urgency, low complexity - a simple customer’s request for product details or available payment methods can be considered the most “low-important” customer request type. Such issues also include elementary customer queries, such as your business hours, main office location, delivery options, refund policy, demo version orders, and so on. Perfect communication channels for such issues include self-service channels like IVR software, chatbots, knowledge bases, and FAQ sections on your website. When the issue is transforming into a potential deal, the ideal option is to switch to a web chat or follow up with an email.
Low emotional importance, high urgency, low complexity - the best example for such issues is a customer request concerning the payment status or delivery status. Such issues aren’t emotionally important at all - you will anyway deliver the product, and there is no difficulty in checking such data, but there is an urgency in such issues - customers understand that it requires a few clicks made by the agent to get the answer for the question, so coming back with an answer after a few hours may be considered a sign of poor customer service. Such issues are better to be processed via self-service channels, so work on automating them to save operational costs and decrease cost per interaction and free your contact center agents from unnecessary manual work.
What are the benefits of using a customer interaction cube?
A customer interaction cube can be considered a customer strategy cube. Why? First of all, it allows you to understand what contact channels are perfect for servicing different types of customer inquiries. As it follows from this statement, you can save much more on operational and labor costs using this strategy. Secondly, you can greatly improve the customer experience you provide by managing different types of customer interactions and customer queries. In other words, the customer interaction cube is a static customer interaction centre that defines where you need to involve customer service representatives, and where self-service options or non-immediate communication like email can be more suitable. Finally, it can help you review your customer service strategies and classify main customer issues to improve your IVR design, knowledge base content, and other aspects of customer service.
So, let’s discuss the benefits in detail.
Operational costs optimization
When you implement a customer interaction cube call center strategy for getting a higher impact on customer satisfaction, it is also a moment of truth for optimizing your cost of service and increasing the use of lower cost channels. When you research your customer base, the types of interactions your customers prefer, customer demographic preferences, and emotional stake of different types of interaction, you can understand where you can give all the responsibility to self-service channels. No matter what is the type of interaction - you use the customer service cube to understand whether it can be processed via self-service options or do you need a customer service agent to be involved. And the consequences are clear - with wider use of self-service channels, you not only decrease customer service effort for both customers and agents but build customer loyalty and customer advocacy. How? Well, studies show that people adore self-service channels and the customer service cube is just another step for sharing self-service opportunities with your clients.
Better customer service
Bad customer service is customer service provided without understanding what and why you are doing it. Customer service cube is the best solution for a more comprehensive view of your customer service channel with interaction type that differs by customer preferences, demographics, social statuses, personalized needs, and so on. Customer service cube gives an answer to a few very vital questions - what types of interactions should be handled first? What are customer emotions concerning different types of issues? How to process queries from prospective customers? Where to focus more while solving customer problems? Customer service cube gives you the best advantage you truly need: an opportunity for using a wide range of classification options for customer issues and processing them without losing important problems and focusing too much on elementary issues.
A way to enhance your self-service
Customer service cube has its goal to deliver more customer service capabilities to self-service channels. Let’s remember what are the main self-service channels: IVR system, chatbots, knowledge base, online community, and FAQs. Also here is a complete guide to customer self-service channels. With the help of a customer service cube, you can understand whether there are imperfections with your self-service strategy or not - that’s why it is sometimes called a customer strategy cube. Customer service cube will help you understand what types of problems customers can resolve via self-service opportunities, and this will be the answer to how you have to design and configure your self-service capabilities. It works simply: you have to gather data about the most common custom problems, classify them using customer interaction cube criteria, and use the received data for developing your self-service channels. Believe it or not, it will be the best investment you can make: lower labor costs, higher customer service agent satisfaction and productivity, as well as higher customer satisfaction will be your rewards.
Conclusion
Customer interaction cube call center customer experience measurement technique is one of the newest tactics you can use to improve customer experience and measure all types of interaction your customers are involved in with your company. This technique can enhance your customer service capabilities thanks to its positive influence on optimizing customer service costs, self-service optimization, and better customer experience provided after researching the types of interactions you handle with your clients. Based on that, we can say that if you begin to use this tactic for your customer service strategy now when it isn’t yet well-known, it can be a truly beneficial decision for your business as well as your competitive advantage over your competitors.
But what you really need to enhance your call center customer service capabilities is an all-in-one call center software that also provides you with tools to measure customer interactions effectively, with a much deeper view of customer interactions than even customer interaction cube provides.
Contact us to discuss your needs and see Voiptime Contact Center in action!
