Hark the customer's digital voice

by Elison Lim

Every day, gazillions of interactions take place between customers and front line staff. How many times have you said, "The service is so bad I will not bank with them or eat there again"? Or when delighted, spread great word-of-mouth compliments such as "service was stupendous."

For most customers, the receptionist, the salesgirl or the waiter is the first – and often only – face of the organisation they see. Their impact on how your customers evaluate the service experience or perhaps more importantly, your company's image, is immense. Your frontline employees may actually be the linchpin that determines whether your customer will return.

While service-based operations can set up standard operating protocols, for example, having frontline staff adhere strictly to a script to standardise service delivery, there is another aspect of the service delivery that is more difficult to teach or control. This is the nonverbal behaviour of employees, via their tone of voice, level of enthusiasm, body language or appropriate dressing. Yet, the nonverbal cues that the employee exudes can potentially play an important role in how customers evaluate the service experience, and subsequently, your company.

In our research on the role of nonverbal cues in service interactions, we noticed a curious phenomenon. All is good when the service delivery is going smoothly. The strong rapport built between frontline staff and customer improves customers' impressions about the service experience, resulting in better word of mouth about the company; but where there is a service failure, the initial rapport between employee and customer actually backfires, making a negative customer experience seem worse. This is because the initial rapport has raised customer expectations for a satisfying outcome, and when that is not met, customers will be more dissatisfied. However, such customers are more reluctant to lodge a complaint against the employee - their rapport has created a bond, evoking concern for employee's welfare and possible penalties against him or her. Instead, these unhappy customers are more likely to vent their displeasure to family and friends and may even take to public spheres such as Facebook and Twitter to express their dissatisfaction.

In today's digital landscape, where potential customers are likely to look for user reviews of a product or service before they commit, or where netizens are so interconnected and quick to post, this finding has important implications. The feedback survey forms that come with the bill at the end of a meal are probably useless at tracking dissatisfaction if customers already have some level of initial dislike for the employee who served them. Perhaps of greater concern is the question of how and where such dissatisfied customers are letting off steam. Companies can no longer regard customers as mere passive entities at the receiving end of a service experience, but as a potent force who can use their digital voice to bring forth favourable or unfavourable PR.

Case in point of how powerful the digital voice can be - last year, local eatery The Western Co. engaged in a he-said she-said ugly and defensive confrontation with a customer, which played out blow by blow online, receiving overwhelming backlash by outraged netizens. In another case, the video of the lady who assaulted staff in an optical shop in Tiong Bahru quickly garnered 40,000 shares and 8000 comments.

Service failure being inevitable, companies must have in place recovery programmes that are able to resolve and contain customer backlash before they go viral. Such recovery mechanisms must go beyond the inert suggestion box or feedback form – which may be deemed insincere, remote and lagging. Millennials demand quick and sincere responses, so the feedback channels need to allow for direct, immediate and meaningful engagement.

Companies may send out random and anonymous post-service checks via mobile apps to capture feedback immediately. More importantly, what is needed is for companies to appear more open to receiving comments, especially negative ones. They may also want to demonstrate sincerity and ability to respond to customers' concerns quickly, thereby containing the negativity before it is poured out onto social media.

In such interactions, customers do not want to feel they are dealing merely with a cold corporate entity. Companies should develop an appropriate online persona with a personality that depicts the brand. Simple things like the use of first-person pronouns or the use of mascots go a long way towards humanising such interactions and encouraging a more open channel of communication.

Online channels need not only contain negative feedback. They can also be used by companies to receive favourable feedback, which can be similarly channelled to create positive PR. Consider the outpouring of support for the golden staircase, a flight of steps covered in gold foil, at Jalan Rajah. The artist was asked by authorities to remove the installation but it was widely lauded by the arts and online community. In another demonstration of its reach, it was a crowdsource effort that led to the identification of the considerate cyclist who stopped in the middle of a heavy downpour to straighten out a road barricade to prevent a traffic jam.

Today, given the power of the average Joe to influence opinions and set off a digital tsunami with one click, companies need to develop the capability to manage online customer feedback – whether positive or negative.

Perhaps more fundamentally, what companies need is a corporate culture that embraces authenticity and growth – such that both employees and customers will feel assured that they will not be unduly punished or ignored when they flag genuine concerns. Just relying on frontline service staff to please customers is woefully inadequate.

About the author

Elison Lim is an assistant professor of marketing and international business at the Nanyang Business School, NTU and a Fellow with the Institute on Asian Consumer Research Insight (ACI). The research project mentioned in this article is co-authored with Yih Hwai Lee and Foo Maw-Der, both from National University of Singapore. This research will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

This commentary was published in The Business Times on 12 July 2017.