Micro-moments that matter | Jeannie Walters | Engati CX

TEDx speaker and Customer Experience genius, Jeannie Walters joins us on the Engati CX show today. She spoke about micro-moments, the power they hold and the way they add up to frame the overall customer experience.

Jeannie Walters is the CEO & Chief Customer Experience Investigator of Experience Investigators by 360Connext a global Customer experience consulting firm. She has 20 years of experience helping companies improve loyalty and retention, employee engagement, and overall customer experience.

Jeannie was named one of the Huffington Post’s “Top 100 Most Social Customer Service Pros on Twitter,” Tenfold’s “Top 40 Customer Success Influencers,” and one of “The Top 5 Women Customer Experience Influencers” by CloudCherry.

Her TEDx talk about micro-moments, is one of Customer Thermometer’s “Best TED Talks on Customer Retention Ideas.”

Micro-moments that matter- A summary

This section will contain a quick summary of our interview with Jeannie on build trust through the moments often neglected. But, if you’d rather listen to our entire interview, our Spotify Podcast is embedded below the summary.

What are micro-moments and how are they transforming the customer experience?

Micro-moments are those tiny moments that are often overlooked in a customer journey. We usually focus on the big, memorable moments, the wow moments, but we ignore the smaller ones.

A single negative micro-moment may not destroy a company’s reputation completely. But, several of these would chip away at the trust that a company holds.

You have an opportunity to either build trust or erode trust through these moments.

Even our error messages are usually dry and disheartening. At least frame the messages in a humorous manner. If you do end up putting them in such a situation, try to amuse them slightly and make them feel good about it.

You talk about ‘Creating Your Customer Experience Mission’- What are the key elements one should involve in creating the CX mission and does technology play a role in it?

Corporate mission statements usually say that they want to be the best in class or they want to provide shareholder value. But, very few actually focus on customer value.

The best companies in the world have their mission statements talk about service and about the experiences they want to deliver.

Jeannie encourages leaders to create a CX mission that helps people grab on to the spirit of the experience. Her company’s mission is to ‘create fewer ruined days for customers’. And this helps them make a lot of decisions on the clients they work with, the people they hire, and how they deliver.

Your mission should be short, precise and grab the essence of the experience you want to deliver.

When it comes to technology, it’s easy to get excited about the shiny new thing. For example, a few years ago, everyone thought they needed an app for their business. But, most business don’t need an application. A lot of them just need to improve their mobile site or get a chatbot to engage with their customers.

Your CX mission can help guide decisions to pick our technologies in order to improve the experience. It protects us from adopting new technology rather than just being excited about a new technology or tool.

How can companies plan and align various touchpoints in a customer’s journey?

Jeannie is a big fan of journey mapping . It helps everybody walk through the experience from the customer’s point of view.

A lot of companies think they’re journey mapping, but they’re actually just process mapping.

Customer Journeys are usually built with an organizational chart and we think they’re going off to Marketing and then to Sales. But customers are looking at the entire process as a whole. So, if one process is bad, it spoils the entire experience.

When you look for micro-moments, you need to have your entire organization out on the watch. You can’t let something pass because you think nobody will notice it. Somebody will always notice it.

If you’re doing something inside an organization that you think your customers won’t see, they’re eventually going to see it. You can’t hide it.

Jeannie tells us a story of her picking up a rental car and they had a number of negative moments. Even though she’s part of their loyalty program, they didn’t have her name on the board, she had to go to the kiosk and then they gave her the keys and made her walk all the way across the garage.

When she got there, she saw a sign on the car saying, ‘low priority’. The card meant that the car was a low priority. It said that they just had to wash it and let it rest, but it made Jeannie feel like she was a low priority to the rental company because of all the other experiences leading up to it.

Someone was supposed to remove that sign before she got to the car, but they didn’t. They didn’t think she’d see it, but she did.

So, we need to look through the journey map and look for micro-moments with a magnifying glass.

How can AI, chatbots and tech, in general, be used to create better customer experiences? And how can they be roped into crafting meaningful micro-engagements?

Jeannie thinks that tech can help us serve people at scale in manners in which we just couldn’t a few years ago.

AI and chatbots are going to help us give customers the right answers in the right way and the right moment.

If we can use AI & bots to answer questions in the right moments and in the right way, that’s actually one of those micro-moments that build trust.

We could use the bots to handle repetitive queries and then have the human agents handle the complicated ones. Now, the humans don’t have to deal with the frustration of monotonously answering the same questions and will be of better service to the customers who actually need their help.

With a lot of chatbots, the journey is not seamless. If the customer goes off to a live agent, the agent should be able to access the entire conversational history between the user and the bot. Without that, the customer would get annoyed because they needed to repeat everything that they already told the bot.

Engati noticed that. So, our bots provide the live agents with the entire conversational history and the user information, so that the customer does not need to repeat anything.

Create powerful micro-moments

AI and chatbots can really powerful at creating micro-moments that build trust. Check out Engati’s offerings and start creating some truly powerful micro-moments.

Micro-Moments that Matter- A Spotify Podcast with Jeannie Walters

Engati CX

We really hope that this interview helped you understand how important each moment in your customer journey is. Engati CX will be back with a new expert in a new episode soon. Stay tuned.

Find Jeannie Walters

Jeannie would be glad to help you understand these moments better and improve your customer experience phenomenally. Reach out to her on LinkedIn or Twitter.

More from Engati CX

You need to be empathic towards your customers in order to craft moments that make them trust your business.

Check out our interview with Annette Franz on Empathizing with Customers.