Customer Experience
A customer who complains is giving the organization an opportunity to fix something. A customer who quietly stops buying may never tell us what went wrong. Complaint volumes alone don’ t tell us enough about customer health. Fewer complaints do not necessarily mean happier customers. Sometimes they mean customers have simply stopped believing that complaining will make a difference.
Customer Experience
Your CRM Is Lying To You
Tamara Betty Asonga
The customer said it. We just didn ' t listen.
There is something interesting about the way we manage customers today. We have more information about customers than we have ever had. We have CRM systems, call records, WhatsApp conversations, emails, customer surveys, NPS scores, CSAT scores, sales histories and service records. We can see what customers bought, when they contacted us and, in many cases, what they said.
Yet customers are still regularly asked to explain themselves again. A customer sends a message on WhatsApp and explains a problem. Later, they call the contact center and explain the same problem. They send an email and explain it again. They may then speak to a salesperson or visit a branch and have to start from the beginning once more. The information may be somewhere in the organization, but it does not always follow the customer.
This is something we don ' t talk about enough when we talk about customer experience. We spend a lot of time discussing CRM systems, artificial intelligence, personalization and omnichannel communication. But perhaps we should first ask a much simpler question: does the organization actually remember what the customer has already told it? problem. As businesses move more customer interactions onto WhatsApp, social media, email and websites, customers can move between several channels while dealing with the same issue. But when these channels are not properly connected, the organization can treat them as separate conversations.
Recent reporting on Jasco Communications ' work with Freshworks described exactly this problem: a tweet, an email and a phone call from the same customer can end up looking like three different interactions, leaving employees to piece together the history while the customer repeats the same information.
From the organization’ s point of view, these may be several interactions, but from the customer ' s point of view, it is one conversation. That difference is important.
A customer does not see the sales department, service department, contact center and accounts department as separate organizations. They see one company. They don ' t really care which system each department uses. They expect the company to know what has already happened.
Customers don ' t expect companies to remember everything. They simply don ' t want to keep telling the same story. This becomes even more important when something goes wrong.
Take a customer who reports a problem with a machine. The complaint is recorded. Someone responds. A technician visits. A part is ordered. The customer follows up. Another employee becomes involved. Eventually, the ticket is closed.
On the CRM dashboard, the process may look fine. The complaint was received. Someone responded. The technician attended. The ticket was closed. But what does the customer remember? They may remember waiting for the part, calling twice for an update, explaining the problem to another employee and eventually having to escalate the matter.
The system says the case is closed. The customer says, " I had to chase you." Those are two very different versions of the same experience.
This is why I think we need to be careful with the word " closed " in customer management. A closed ticket does not always mean that the customer ' s problem has been resolved. Sometimes it simply means that the internal process has reached its administrative end. The difference matters because customers experience patterns, while businesses often record individual incidents.
This is the Customer Memory Gap. It is the gap between what the customer has already told the organization and what the organization remembers when that customer contacts it again.
And I think this is one of the biggest weaknesses in customer relationship management today. It is not necessarily that businesses have poor technology. In many cases, the technology is actually very good. The problem is that we have not always turned the information collected by that technology into organizational memory.
A recent example from Kenya illustrates the
A customer who complains is giving the organization an opportunity to fix something. A customer who quietly stops buying may never tell us what went wrong. Complaint volumes alone don’ t tell us enough about customer health. Fewer complaints do not necessarily mean happier customers. Sometimes they mean customers have simply stopped believing that complaining will make a difference.
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