Chapter 3
Reducing the digital divide
From newspapers, magazines and books to CDs and video games, demand for non-digital elements of media and entertainment is contracting year over year.
Clearly, some of this decline is driven by the growing ubiquity and affordability of digital devices and the infrastructure for connecting them, particularly in emerging markets. And likewise, generational maturity is also having an impact as younger cohorts develop greater financial independence.
However, especially when it comes to music streaming or video game subscription services, much of this increasing use is actually due to older generations moving with the times.
Across music streaming services, this changing behavior can be evidenced in the fact that genres such as country have been surging in popularity while rap and hip hop appear to be in relative decline. The reality is that a larger percentage of older consumers with more traditional music tastes and more disposable income have finally adopted music streaming.
When it comes to music streaming or video game subscription services, much of this increasing use is actually due to older generations moving with the times
And this change isn’t exclusive to music streaming services. As such, all media, entertainment and gaming brands may have to reassess current approaches to onboarding and the provision of self-service in order to facilitate and gain maximum benefits from what’s essentially organic growth among older generations.
The need for self-service options remains a constant. Even if the number of potential channels for connecting with an agent is growing all the time, your customers want to be able to solve a simple problem at the moment it arises.
But while the demand for self-service remains undiminished, the methods of delivery and approach to presentation need to evolve.
This evolution needs to mirror that seen in learning and development in recent years. Thanks to growing multimedia capabilities and improvements in pedagogical approach, it’s possible to develop blended means of educating learners based as much on preferences and learning pathways as on closing a skills gap.
Therefore, brands have a huge opportunity to get creative in educating and onboarding older demographics so that they know how to use digital platforms, how to troubleshoot and how to resolve persistent but minor issues and to tailor it in a way that meets the self-service preferences of older as well as younger generations.
Getting it right delivers a twofold benefit — a stronger connection with customers and significantly lower live contact volumes.
Takeaways
Recalibrate customer personas to reflect older demographics’ adoption of new media.
Scrutinize existing customer journeys through a wider range of customer archetypes for potential points of friction.
Rethink self-service and customize its presentation and medium to align with the learning preferences of more generations.
Spotlight
How a Voice of the Customer program minimizes attrition and maximizes retention
Thanks to its blending of qualitative and quantitative data and ability to extract insights at scale from every point along the customer journey (including across the major social networks), the modern Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is instrumental in highlighting why customers are loyal and just as importantly the elements of your existing customer experience that are underperforming and potentially pushing your customers towards the door.
■ Clearer personas
A VoC program allows you to properly segment your customer base and build representative customer personas. This means a greater understanding of needs and expectations and a greater insight as to how relationships evolve over time. This level of granularity should feed into targeted marketing campaigns and approaches toward ongoing customer communication. Something as comparatively simple as knowing how and via which channels your customers prefer for maintaining the relationship will help to strengthen that bond and build loyalty.
■ Less friction
By combining direct customer feedback, accurate customer personas and quantitative data from internal source such as the CRM or within the contact center (such as CSAT and NPS scores), a VOC program can stress test existing customer journeys and highlight any step on the path to purchase or path to resolution that is underperforming and why. Addressing this friction will increase customer satisfaction and increase overall CX delivery performance.
■ Lower cost to serve
As well as highlighting pain points, a VoC program is an effective means of identifying the most common contact drivers. This, in turn, means it’s possible to develop effective forms of contact deflection — such as self-service content — for resolving common issues. When more issues can be resolved without recourse to a live channel, it significantly reduces queues and wait times for customers who have more pressing issues.
■ Behavior prediction
A modern VoC program combines structured and unstructured data. It integrates customer experience analytics, including real-time transcription and analysis of voice and text conversations between contact center agents and customers, with other data sources. This integration enables the development of predictive behavioral analytics. As a result, your organization can recognize the cues that indicate a customer is at risk of cutting ties with your organization. With this insight, you can develop targeted retention strategies to help keep those customers.
■ Product and service improvements
If VOC programs are running frequently, rather than on an ad hoc basis, they can also deliver regular insights directly related to products and services. This information can be fed back into the organization to steer decision making and help guide future development.
Keeping your company’s offering aligned with changing customer needs and expectations will continue to keep the brand relevant and keep consumers from looking elsewhere.