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You need more than an great product and a decent price to win over the public. Without good customer service that's quick and has streamlined processes and technology to optimize deliveries, your service might not get chosen when it's time to pick. And Zendesk is a customer service trailblazer when it comes to establishing stronger relationships with customers in Brazil and around the world.
That’s why the company was recognized as Featured Partner at Aivo Awards, and we invited Francisco Chang, Senior Director, Partner Sales for Latin America, to share trends and changes in consumer profiles in Brazil, along with the growing appreciation of a good experience at all stages of the relationship. Here are some of the key points from the conversation.
The experience is the winner
What's the best lesson from your Customer Experience career?
There were a lot of accomplishments and lessons, but the greatest was realizing customer feedback wins the day. I’m an engineer by training, so I always had the idea that “the best product with the best functionality is enough, it’s the one that will conquer the market, and the one that'll be preferred by consumers.” Well, later I realized it’s not exactly like that. Nowadays, consumers don’t want just the best product at the best price, with the best functionality or design. Today, they value the experience as a whole: the requirements I mentioned earlier, the quality of service when they have questions or need to interact with companies, brands or people, and the speed and accuracy of the experience that the interaction has in resolving problems or questions. So today that’s my greatest lesson: the best product isn’t always the winner.
How did consumers change in the last few years? Are companies just changing and giving more value to the experience and the service because that also became a demand from consumers?
Consumers saw how important their feedback and preferences were. Today, they want to be served when, where and how they want. Plus, along with the digital transformation process, consumers are more and more digitalized and demanding about the experience they get. Zendesk carried out a study called CX Trends, where we gathered customer feedback and noticed that with Brazilian consumers, the experience was even more important than product price and quality.
And now with the pandemic, this trend was significantly accelerated.
The situation changed so much that it’s not the biggest against the smallest anymore, but the most agile, flexible and closest to the customer against the slowest, most complicated and the reactive. And the pandemic just accelerated what we were already experiencing. Suffice to say that during 2020, the experience of visiting customers and physical stores ceased to exist. Instead, e-commerce and social media skyrocketed. That impact was huge.
Which technologies and channels would you say are important for that service based on the customers you have at Zendesk?
It’s hard for me to pick one channel, there are a few. And all those media and technologies really made access more available. Today we can receive a request without knowing if it's from São Paulo or within the State of Ceará. And we’re going to handle it the same way, regardless of where it came from or even the time it came in. The solutions are providing several channels for the service; the way companies serve customers is unified. That is, the service isn't just multichannel, it's omnichannel, which is what’s having the biggest impact. And within that omnichannel solution, we can offer support through chat, WhatsApp, social media, etc.
Do consumers want to talk to a human agent? No, they want their problems resolved.
So if the company has a AI chatbot tool integrated to the system, the customer says: “Well, if I can have my problem fixed by a chatbot, great. I don’t care if I talk to Matthew, John, Mary, or a robot.” Really what’s most important is the problem has to receive support.
We saw in CX Trends that 9 out of 10 Brazilian consumers are willing to switch brands and companies in order to get better service. So it’s not about better price but about better service. Look at this other detail from the survey: 80% of consumers say they still haven’t gotten the service level they’d like. In other words, 90% are willing to change and 80% say they're still not 100% satisfied with the service they get. So there’s huge room for improvement.
What would you bet on as a CX trend for 2021?
I’d say there are four areas for the upcoming year. The first is improving omnichannel consolidation. Without a doubt, WhatsApp is the channel companies can’t ignore today. And voice is still one of the main channels, chat is becoming extremely important, chabots, social media, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. So the omnichannel process has already started and will continue into 2021. Artificial intelligence is another trend. We still have a ways to go, but artificial intelligence is definitely here to stay, especially in customer service.
The third area is empowering consumers and agents. We can’t forget there's a person on the other side supporting customers. If that agent doesn’t have the tools that are really going to help them at work, how are they going to be motivated? How will they stay interested in serving their customers? And the last area is the collaboration among consumers, agents, the company and customers.
For the award, just like Zendesk, Aivo is also seeking innovation, looking to understand and anticipate customer needs. So that match was pretty natural since we're offering the same things, delivering the same objectives to our customers. Our customers who adopted Zendesk and Aivo solutions are the best references.
And that partnership between Aivo and Zendesk is really valuable, not just in Brazil but around the world - in Argentina, Mexico, the US... In customer service, it’s always nice to find partners who share the same vision, objectives and beliefs. And it’s a real pleasure for Zendesk to have Aivo on board!
Want to know more about Aivo Awards?
Check the complete list of Aivo Awards and learn the story behind their conversational bots. If you want to implement our technology into your customer service strategy, schedule a call with one of our representatives.
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