Transactional ease is the new way to delight customersLINKEDIN | 16 FEBRUARY, 2019

My wife has two accounts with the same bank (as advised by the bank). She had to transfer a small amount (all of $1000) from one to the other. As she did not have a cheque facility in the ‘from’ account, she was advised to go the branch to do this. At the branch, she was told this has to be done at the counter and she had 55 people before her. The relationship manager said he could help out with account details but cannot do the transaction. My wife finally drew cash from another ATM in the vicinity and deposited into a cash machine! The bank is one of the top banks in Singapore and this happened in 2018. A friend waited 45 minute on the phone to book a wheelchair for her mother for an upcoming flight (By contrast, it took a mere 3 minutes and a few clicks to book her ticket online). She didn’t even have a good outcome – at one of the two airports, the promised arrangement did not happen! A popular theme park sells advance coupons online. However, it has only one place at the park to exchange the coupons for admission tickets. If you go past the spot, you have to retract a significant distance every time. You can pay cash at the gate to the rides though! Online pre-buying is not a good idea here. These are illustrations of a new paradigm that receives less attention now.

The next wave of delighting customers would clearly be around ‘transactional ease’. Many organizations have assumed that automation (including chatbots) addresses all needs. They couldn’t be farther from the truth. The problem stems from inadequate understanding of customer needs and poor design of services. There are five issues to tackle.

1. An excessive rule culture. In the effort to minimise human interface, banks and other organisations may have over-specified rules for various scenarios, with little scope for adjustment to different realities. Some of the blockchain technologies may suffer from this problem as well. Most current systems follow the one size fits all maxim. There is a need to factor in ‘less-routine’ scenarios and how they have to be dealt with.
2. Lack of empathy – machines can’t be empathetic. As machines take over processes, human resources are now working for them. In fact, there is now a call for people to reorient themselves to be able to work with machines! There is a potential hazard that people working in machine dominated environments may lose the empathy instincts. De-personalisation is an unintended bane of automation of customer facing services.
3. Transactional time vs transactional complexity – in automated environments, the focus is on efficiency. This could potentially lead to not providing for complexity. For example, a blockchain solution may grant a mortgage loan to a borrower with acceptable credit profile (a plain vanilla scenario), but not to a borrower who may have a complex credit profile with many counter parties, multiple assets or liabilities, including cross border portfolios. Lack of ability to capture all relevant data or asymmetry in information or complex algorithms or over-reliant trust in the software may render this difficult. Three copies of a book shipped from Europe arrive in Singapore via snail mail in seven days. 10 copies would arrive in 25 days, as the postal process for ‘parcels’ is different.
4. Poor process design – As companies race to establish digital footprint, they are building incomplete systems and (presumably) fixing the bugs and process corrections on the go or only at long intervals. Otherwise, there should not be 55 customers at the teller counter on a routine Friday morning. Maybe those customers came for 4 or 5 typical transactions and could have been sorted by the nature and managed segmentally. Car companies manage sales and service separately as the two processes have different time duration, skillsets and process maps. Banks, telcos and retailers haven’t quite provided fully for the differences in transactions. You still need to cross several routines before you can pay your monthly phone bill - you would think the telco should be most excited about a customer paying up! Also, software applications tend to take a majority rather than an omnibus character.
5. Poor feedback mechanism – most of the service or product vendors have no effective mechanism to source feedback. Staff is not mandated to seek feedback. If you have a transactional headache, you can go through a grievance redressal mechanism and we all know how more frustrating that is. There is a need to keep the system development as a ‘work-in-progress’ that takes in real-time feedback to make changes. Companies freeze system versions without allowing for this suppleness.

Developing excellence in transactional ease requires a fluid approach to automation, a full research into all ‘use case’ scenarios and the right hybrid between man and machine. Catering for the majority or the common ones is not enough. Outliers do matter. It is the uncommon need that sets off unsatisfied customers to broadcast virally on social media.

Transactional ease is an important feature in new B2B equations as well. Customers now ask vendors to be their ‘transaction managers’. That may include finding sources, evaluating technology and other alternatives, feasibility studies, recommendation with full economic justification, prototyping, establishing proof of principle, pre-sales, during sales and post-sales handholding (or even assumption of full responsibility). The customer is keen to ‘shift’ this role and enjoy free service and peace of mind, both key elements of transactional ease. I have devoted several pages to this in my recent book, “Nuanced Account Management”(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). A vendor is an unpaid consultant until an order is received. All knowledge and execution responsibilities are transferred to him. The vendor is rated on this aspect as vitally as product or service excellence. Companies are now moving towards a stronger pre-sales function than the sales function to cope with this demand. Such pre-sales talents are now in greater demand than even sales people and tend to be rewarded better, as they can potentially swing deals with the right kind of pre-sales work, even before the sales person appears in the frame. Going forward, vendor ratings will skew towards transactional ease and simplicity that they provide throughout the buying and use cycle.