Q&A With Forbes Contributor and Customer Service Consultant, Micah Solomon

DrivingSales News caught up with customer service consultant, keynote speaker and author, Micah Solomon, to discuss the current state customer service and customer experience trends in retail. Micah also shares his opinions on the current state of retail automotive customer experience and what dealerships can do to better meet consumer expectations during the questions and answers.

DrivingSales News: What trends have you seen as far as customer experience in the retail industry? What are retail stores doing right and not doing it right when it comes to CX?

Micah Solomon: Retail is in a transitional phase. Now that so much can be done online, retailers are realizing that customers need to enjoy the shopping experience or they simply won’t come. So emphasis on the experience is key, and retailers are starting to realize this. Streamlining the experience for customers is intensely important, and some retailers are realizing this and others aren’t: few customers today will accept an interesting retail experience if it isn’t also efficient, easy to use and respectful of their time. For example, why in the world do many retailers have a cash register – and a place where you line up for the privilege of handing over your money? This is a ridiculously archaic construct; once someone is ready to buy, they should be able to buy. Of course, some retailers get this: Apple and Nordstrom are two.

Certainly omnichannel is very, very important. Customers have always wanted omnichannel; they just have been denied it for so long. But today’s customers realize it is possible for retailers to provide a true omnichannel experience, and they’re starting to demand it.

DrivingSales News: In your opinion, what does the modern consumer want that dealerships are sometimes failing to provide?

Micah Solomon: A great dealer experience includes great human beings – empathetic, knowledgeable, inspired human beings–serving customers and prospective customers one on one, providing assistance, reassurance, troubleshooting, recognition. It also includes a greatly streamlined experience, an experience that achieves what I call “digital parity”– ease of use, ease of search, ease of appointment, ease of paperwork that is equivalent to what customers have learned to expect online. For example, to go back to my cash register example, you don’t have to wait in line online, so why do you have to wait in line in the physical world to pay?

DrivingSales News: What do you think about marketing to millennials? Is it that much different than marketing to other groups? What do millennials want from a CX standpoint?

Micah Solomon: As you know, Forbes just published a book by me on this subject: Your Customer Is The Star: How To Make Millennials, Boomers And Everyone Else Love Your Business so I have a lot to say on this subject.  For background, millennials are the largest generation in U.S. and world history. (They’re by and large the kids of baby boomers, and are even bigger than that enormous generation.) They were born 1980-2000, give or take a few years. They are the first generation in history to have Internet access as an expectation. A “phone” for most of their lives has meant a smartphone. Fast search, GPS, apps … all the stuff that for older consumers has come along incrementally, has always been there for them. There are also social and historical factors that affect their behavior and wishes as customers. If you combine all of these factors, yes it is different to market to and strive to win the loyalty of millennial customers. However, and this is interesting, the rest of the population is also becoming more and more “millennial.” This is because millennials are influential (in part because they influence their parents, with whom they are often closer than was the case in previous “generation gap” times in history) and because technological change is infiltrating most demographics at this point – for example, older customers are often Facebooking and Facetiming just like younger ones do.

DrivingSales News: Tesla Motors sells vehicles using customer experience/service focused reps verses “sales people?” What do you make of this approach?

Micah Solomon: It can either work fabulously or fail spectacularly. Or, more likely hover somewhere in the middle. The success or failure lies in the details: how the reps are hired, trained, and the company culture that supports them.

DrivingSales News: What’s around the corner for customer experience in the next decade? 

Micah Solomon: Omnichannel will become the expectation of customers to an even greater extent than it is now. Expectations for speed will continue to increase. But desire for true service – service from a warm human with a helping hand outstretched – will only grow in importance as our world speeds up and becomes more commodified.

Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant, keynote speaker and author. You can reach him at micah@micahsolomon.com or 484-343-5881