Customers emotionally connected with only 19 percent of companies
More than 77 percent of respondents to a market survey conducted by the renowned research company Forrester stated that they would be more likely to work with a company again if they had established a positive emotional connection with customer service or customer care. On average, however, respondents stated that they only felt an emotional connection with 19 percent of companies. According to the Forrester researchers, empathy and emotionality are not only one of the key pillars for generating customer satisfaction and thus achieving greater loyalty and customer relationships, which could ultimately result in customer retention and loyalty.
Quite a few call centers, dialogue marketing and customer management companies in Germany have lost customer proximity, customer understanding and the required emotionality, especially in the hype of rapid technological development. Not least because of the ever-increasing predatory competition across the industry, which call center customers from various sectors of the economy are happy to exploit to set prices, most have turned to digital saviors such as artificial intelligence, bots, etc. and have massively neglected the human component, the emotionality in customer dialogue and the customer experience. Others have repeatedly used call center and service providers from abroad as well as inferior partners with poor data quality and questionable sales and service behavior.
However, it is undisputed that with increasingly standardized and comparable products, services and offers, as can be observed in particular in the telecommunications industry, the energy industry and also in financial services - to name just a few important sectors - the quality of communication is a success factor at the point of sales and at the point of service. Call centers and other customer management service providers that act with passion and enthusiasm for their customers' customers, are able to show empathy in the customer dialogue depending on the situation and responsibly use digital technologies as a supporting tool on the basis of these analogue qualities are far ahead. Of course, legally compliant procurement and the legally compliant handling of customer data in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation are a matter of course.
