The stereotype has dominated the business landscape for decades: to keep the customer happy, staff smiling broadly and apologising on time is enough. But today the legitimacy and effectiveness of this approach do not look quite relevant. Business in Russia is faced with a new reality, where loyalty is determined not by scripts, but by a high-quality process architecture and competent integration of IT solutions.
Paradigm transformation: from service to partnership
In Russia, the phrase “the client is always right” has been embedded in the consciousness of every manager for decades. We were taught that the perfect service is when an upset customer is presented with a basket of fruit and apologizes for a long time. Today, this approach looks hopelessly naive. We are entering the era of invisible service, where the best customer experience is that the client did not even have time to understand that he had a problem.
Michelle Brigman of Quantum Metric recently formulated a very successful thought:
“If your client is the only source of knowledge that you have something broken, then your AI architecture is not working.”
The architecture of software solutions of advanced companies is now being built in such a way as to anticipate failures, and not just respond to them. Relying on predictive analytics, modern systems can already predict critical errors in advance, allowing processes to be repaired behind the scenes before they hit customer loyalty.
Technologies against the human factor
If the failure could not be prevented and the client nevertheless turned to support with the problem, then the obvious method for assessing the reaction for decades was the survey that followed the completion of the appeal. As the years pass, there is also finally a second global change that we are seeing right now – the end of an era of endless satisfaction surveys.
Everyone is already annoyed by automatic letters, messages in instant messengers or the voice of the robot after the end of the call with a request to evaluate the operator’s work on a five-point scale. Forcing a client to spend his time evaluating after he has already suffered from a company error is the highest form of corporate selfishness.
What is even funnier is that some companies still manage to consider the assessment that the client gives after talking with the operator as an assessment of how easy it was to solve the problem through this particular operator. But according to research by Gartner, conducted 10 years ago, it is precisely the reduction in customer efforts that is more important than any artificial “wow effects.”
That is why professional omnichannel platforms are switching to a passive effort index. They themselves read the stress level from the digital footprint – they analyze micropause, print speed, the number of switches between windows. The system itself determines that it is difficult for a person, and business no longer needs to ask ridiculous questions to see the level of resistance of its own environment.
The economics of impressions
However, simply fixing the level of stress is only half the battle. The main question is who the business will trust to save the situation when the client’s tension peaks. And here the role of AI is changing dramatically.
Remember this horror when you call with an urgent problem, and a stupid robot stubbornly drives you in a circle? And you frantic repeat “Man!,” “Operator!,” trying to find the code by which the bot will let you through to living people, in the hope that they are still there. Attempts to replace living people completely with algorithms for the sake of penny savings on salaries inevitably lead to disaster and an inevitable outflow of the audience.
Russian specifics and future of the market
The ultranew trend of Russian digitalization is dynamic routing by stress level and command augmentation. If the algorithm sees that the client has a vital operation, this request instantly bypasses all chatbots. He flies directly to a live expert who already has the budget and authority to solve the problem right now, without much coordination with his superiors. Here is the first class.
In this scenario, AI acts not as an answering machine, but as a smart navigator for an employee. The machine, analyzing the height of the voice or the choice of words, builds a thermal map of emotions and prompts the operator the correct tone of the conversation, instantly displaying the necessary regulations on the screen. This is the philosophy of Warm Tech in real life.
Algorithms take on the most boring routine – finding the right item in the contract, gluing takes from different messengers, and the team frees up a resource for complex expert support. Technology is simply preparing the ground, but real trust is always sown by a living person.
All these technological and psychological shifts speak of one thing – the Russian market is definitely maturing. Managers begin to understand a simple thing – true loyalty cannot be built on duty smiles, apologies or discounts. It is based on reliable IT solutions, sincere respect for someone else’s time and honest recognition of your mistakes. Those companies that manage to rebuild their processes from the level of disparate instructions to the level of a single technological service code will receive the main competitive advantage – absolute trust, which is directly converted into the lifetime value of the client.
We see that customer experience is finally losing its status as a secondary support function. Today it is the supporting structure on which the entire economy of the company and its ability to generate profits rests. By introducing AI and building omnichannel contours, managers need to keep the main rule in focus – technologies should take on a heavy routine, and not at all build a blank wall between the brand and the person in pursuit of momentary savings.
In the new reality, leadership is already being seized by those who know how to design their own unique service code. This is a business system where algorithms work as a reliable, invisible assistant, and the team gets a resource to show sincere empathy. This prudent, but humane balance turns a random customer into a faithful ambassador of the brand for many years.
By Nina Konyusheva, co-founder of the BayCX CX platform, author of the book “Service code”