The Impact of Automation on Customer Satisfaction
Back in the 1960s, a revolution happened in banking: the ATM arrived, making it possible for customers to withdraw money automatically without standing in line at the bank office. This innovation made it much easier and faster for people to get their cash, allowing them to do so outside of office hours without visiting an actual bank. Surprisingly, customer satisfaction eventually went down.
Lack of operational transparency
A study in the Harvard Business Review* examined this peculiar phenomenon. Something gets introduced that makes the service better, and yet we don’t fully appreciate it. The study highlights the reason for this being the lack of operational transparency. So what does that mean?
Perceived effort and Customer Experience
In the case of the bank, though most people probably didn’t enjoy going to the bank office, they could still appreciate the time and effort the cashier put in to ensure they received their money. With an ATM dispensing money within seconds, the process no longer felt like much effort from the bank.
For a good customer experience, it seems it’s not only the end result that matters but also how impressed we are with the perceived effort put into helping us. If I order something in a restaurant and it takes 40 minutes to arrive, I’d probably be annoyed. But if it turns out this is an extremely sophisticated dish and the chef explains all the complicated steps and shows me how it’s being prepared in the kitchen, I might be impressed instead and not mind the long wait.
Automation and customer appreciation
As with the ATM, this can become a problem when we automate services. Even if it’s faster and better, it may not be as appreciated. The above-mentioned study looked at ways to improve this. One example was a solution by the travel agency Kayak. Part of their service is finding the best flights online to a destination. Since this is automated, it can be difficult for customers to grasp if it involved much work. Adding a progress bar while the search is being made is one simple way to illustrate that work is being done. However, Kayak went further by showing how many records it was going through and which airlines it was currently scanning. This made users feel more content with the service and less sensitive to the time it took to load results.
This phenomenon can be considered by mobile operators looking to automate more of their services.
Enhancing transparency in self-care services
If a subscriber, for example, uses self-care for technical troubleshooting, it may be difficult to grasp all the complex things happening in the network and what is now being done to try and find potential problems. However, there are ways to give the customer a better idea of what’s going on behind the curtains. For an initial search, instead of just a progress bar, the service can show how many data transactions it’s going through to find potential issues. Different categories being examined, such as potential coverage, device, or roaming issues, can also be shown to illustrate that the check is thorough.
Avoiding common pitfalls
There are some traps to avoid here. Showing customers things they don’t want to see can have a negative impact. For a mobile operator, even when a customer has given permission for you to troubleshoot their technical history, it can easily get creepy if a self-care app starts displaying past location data and call logs while searching for an issue. If a trouble ticket is escalated and it takes a very long time before anything happens, customers will likely get frustrated, feeling neglected. Another problem is if your self-care shows all the technical checks happening in the network but rarely finds any issues.
Another word of caution is about manipulating what you show as background activity. It’s fine to show, for example, different files flying by the screen to illustrate a search in progress, as people understand this is a graphical representation. However, if the service claims it’s going through millions of records of data when it’s actually doing something else, this can backfire if customers realize the information is not true.
Balancing information and communication
While transparency is important, it’s also crucial not to flood subscribers with information unless they ask for it. The status of an ongoing case should be available when the customer checks actively, but it’s not advisable to send push notifications for every single update. Once the issue is resolved, a push notification is very useful.
Finally, even as things become more automated, it’s still important to maintain the human aspect. Customers should still have the option to speak to a person if they wish. If self-care resolves an issue, an agent can still reach out afterward to verify that everything is okay.
Embracing operational transparency
By giving your automated services more operational transparency, you can avoid ending up in a situation like the one quoted in the old TV show Futurama – “when you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”
External sources: (https://hbr.org/2019/03/operational-transparency)
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