We live in a chaotic time when there is a disconnect when it comes to “Customer Service”.
This is true for customer service across the business world, not just your insurance company.
To many companies in today’s world, “Customer Service” does not actually mean “Customer Service”; it seems to mean, “WE WILL TEACH YOU TO….service…. YOUR BOOK OF BUSINESS” because it is too expensive for us to do it any longer.
WE recognize that this reality galvanizes your value in the chain; but perhaps we need to change our language around what it means to “provide service”.
Service formerly meant you would call someone and they would take care of the issue (aka, “providing service”). The new definition appears to be, “download our application; do not call us; use our chat feature, or you will likely have to spend hours on hold, and then we might not be able to provide said solution anyway, because we do not have the technical competency to solve problems; we are trained to push you back to our online tools.”
We know that most of us are frustrated. “Control what you can control” is the constant mantra. It is just that more and more is out of your control, when we formerly had systems that, while much simpler, worked most of the time, and our operational partners were problem solvers, not dismissive ticket creators (e.g. “we are going to escalate this to the next level, here is your ticket number).
But
Here is your opportunity to sell your value to the customer and the company.
We can do things that corporate companies can’t. You can protect the customer from the corporate monsters that want to automate and minimize and compute and artificially intelligence everything.
We are still human, and so are our customers, so be human. Listen, empathize, ask questions and go to work. Perhaps in the future the ones that set themselves apart the most and become the most valuable will be the ones that don’t automate, compute, analyze and remove humanity from the human connection.
Go CARE and watch what happens.
