A few months ago, I was on a panel at the Customer Experience Online event in London, where there were a number of delegates in the audience from country divisions of multi-national organisations, such as banks, mobile (cellular) telecoms operators and courier companies, all of these delegates wanted to improve the support for cross border customers.
Having worked for many years in delivering multi-lingual customer services, I was able to understand the comments I was hearing from these delegates.
Some of the topics discussed included
- What do we do if a customer from another market contacts us?
- How do we respond to the customer if we do not have the language skills?
- How do we support another markets customer from our P&L?
- What happens if a customer wants to return some goods they bought in another country?
Why is it happening?
People are increasingly seeing the world without borders (people who are commonly called global citizens), customers are also becoming more aware of purchasing products cross boarder to save money through the use of the Internet. As an example, some customers realise they can book the same hotel room at a lower price then in their own country but when it comes to support they will often go to the the local website for the online travel agent.
How can cross border customer experience be improved?
Simple: Talk to your colleagues in other markets. I often find the markets work in silos and do not share best practice to enable a better (and more profitable) customer experience. We should be working to a global profit target within our organisations, not just the profit target for our own market. The latter is detrimental to the customer experience.
How can we support across borders?
Empower your teams to take ownership of issues and allow them to ensure that the customer issue gets resolved, whichever country they may be in. In the eyes of the customer it is one name above the door and it is irrelevant to them who they deal with. Yes, there may be language issues but there are ways of getting around this problem.
It is essential that processes are in place to enable cross border customers to receive good customer service. To enable a great experience, front line teams should be able to transfer callers to other contact centres within the organisation, transfer support tickets and even accept goods bought in another country; including being able to process refunds.
Unify CRM / contact management platforms
This may be a huge change for most organisations but highly customer focused organisations generally use the same CRM platform. This allows support tickets to be transferred to another markets’ queue without leaving the contact management solution. Organisations who use the same contact management platform across markets include easyJet, Expedia, Electronic Arts, TomTom & Nikon.
Arranging cross border best practice events
It is an excellent idea to arrange a best practice event for contact centre management teams from around the world within your organisation. You can discuss systems, processes and best practice. These events will allow for a more fluid customer experience across borders and will also drive improvements within the local organisation.
What are your experiences of assisting cross border customers?
Have you had experience of dealing with cross border customers within your organisation? How have you improved the service to those customers?
Related posts:
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Paul,
Finally, a post about the customer experience across borders. I’ve been looking for some thoughts and ideas about the role of customer experience and contact centers to deal global customers.
I studied at Thunderbird School of Global Management and one of the key pillars to the curriculum is a general understanding of the cultural impact on nearly every facet of business (marketing, negotiation, leadership, communications, etc). Knowing the language is only one part to the story, understanding your customers’ cultures will allow customer-facing employees to be more engaging and understanding of the customer’s situation, ultimately leading to better customer experiences.
Great post!
Brian
Brian
Thanks for the great feedback.
As you mentioned, language is only one of the issues of managing the customer experience across borders, there are many cultural duifferneces that need to be taken into account. For instance, customers in Germany would not want the call centre agent to intriduce themselves to the customer with just their first name and there are many more of these type of colloquialisms around the world.
Paul