Intelligent conversation
With almost three decades’ experience at BT (British Telecommunications) Global Services, Millard’s roles have included stints as a human factors researcher, a customer contact strategy consultant and a customer contact futures project manager.
During a recent Melbourne visit, she spoke with Marketing about the insights found in BT’s ‘Digital Customer 2017’ research. The global study conducted over 10 countries sought to find trends in consumer preferences, expectations and fears, and looked at their satisfaction – or lack thereof – levels over a number of platforms including telephone, online chat and smart capabilities, including bots.
The conversation surrounded the use of personal data in customer experience and business strategy, and touched on why AI isn’t that intelligent, and the importance of building context into what it says.
Marketing: What were some of the main trends and preferences that emerged from your study?
Dr Nicola Millard: There are a few things that have improved, but there are also things that are tangibly not improving. Customers saying they’re exhausted from dealing with customer service issues, that’s going up. There’s more exhaustion going on. We’ve been looking at easy journeys and frictionless journeys for a while, so you’d think that should be changing, but it isn’t. One of the big issues, I suspect, is that digital customers – when they go into digital – expect it to be easy, and therein lies the problem.
Customers like self-service because it puts them in control. If it isn’t easy and they can’t find what they need
