Customer Service = Reactive
Customer Experience = Proactive
Your primary job is to anticipate customer needs and address them before they come to you with a problem.
If you are always thinking in terms of downstream instead of upstream, you will end up spending far too much time and money in your business.
Instead of asking, “How do we create a system and process to solve this issue?” we should ask, “How can we prevent this problem from happening in the first place?” That’s the right way to solve.
Example:
Back in 2012, Expedia was spending more than $100 million per year because they logged 20 million customer calls annually.
Ryan O’Neill, the head of customer experience, observed that the company kept asking, “How do we reduce the 10-minute calls to 2 minutes?” — a downstream way of thinking.
But O’Neill began asking a different question: “Why spend time on a call when we could let customers solve the issue themselves through an online service?” — this was upstream thinking.
Digging deeper, O’Neill and Mooney (VP, Global Operations) discovered the issue stemmed from:
Customers entering the wrong return email address
Confirmation emails landing in junk folders
Customers accidentally deleting the email, mistaking it for spam
O’Neill and Mooney brought their findings to Expedia’s CEO at the time, Dara Khosrowshahi. Together, they formed a “War Room,” bringing in people from different operating groups for daily meetings. The mission was simple: “Save our customers from having to call us.”
The War Room rolled out a series of solutions to cut down on customer calls, including:
Adding an automated option to the voice-response system (“Press 2 to resend your itinerary”)
Adjusting how Expedia sent emails to avoid spam filters
Creating an online portal that allowed customers to handle the task themselves
The result? Calls dropped from 58 out of every 100 bookings to just 15.
The root cause was that no team — from product development to marketing to operations — was focused on preventing calls. Their systems were designed to keep customers happy after a problem occurred, instead of asking, “Why do they need to call us at all if they can solve this issue on their own?”
Upstream thinking goes deeper to find the root cause and create a robust system to prevent the problem from happening in the first place.
You won’t be able to foresee every issue, but your effort and curiosity in making customers’ jobs easier will go a long way.