Empathy is the missing code in CX

I visited a bank branch recently. That’s no longer a feature of my life; digital acceleration in banking has been real, and like most people I happily transact online and through mobile apps.

Most of the time. Once in a while the need for an in-person visit to a physical location, after battling traffic and hunting for parking, still becomes necessary.

And so I showed up in front of a young human teller, who had to coach old-timer me in how to write a cheque (I know, I know: that’s a task from my era, not hers. But it’s been a while since I’ve had to open a cheque-book).

I thought I had done all the prep to have this transaction completed smoothly, but frictions arrived. The bank’s systems and protocols stood resolutely in the way, and I found myself thwarted. It’s not really a tap-tap-done world after all. And so I sat, adding nearly an hour to my visit, awaiting the necessary approvals from the system and from higher authorities. Just like in the bad old days.

This could have been highly irritating, but here’s the thing. The young teller was friendly and sympathetic throughout, and kept updating me on the situation. And that’s a big deal, because I sat down to do something else on my device and the time passed without too much agitation. I didn’t curse my bank or threaten to leave it; I was navigated through a temporary impasse. The human rescued the machine.

As the Financial Times noted recently, AI is “patching over a problem technology itself helped create.” We dehumanized service in the name of efficiency; now we look to machines to rehumanize it. The irony is exquisite.

We are not all so bad at customer experience because we lack the tech; but more because we have blindly rushed to use older tech to cut costs and fuel an obsession with efficiency. And now we hope newer tech will solve the problem. But what if the fundamental problem in CX is about the humans in play, not the machines?

Organizations that have been sharp enough to observe this are popping up. One is The Empathy Business in the UK, whose founder Belinda Parmar points out that contact centres were set up to manage processes, not people. They mostly operate in a dehumanized environment where the language—and rewards—are entirely transactional and material. Her company’s research shows that empathetic companies outperform their peers — yet most still train for scripts, not sincerity.

Will AI help us with this? It certainly has the potential to speed up response times, to understand customers individually and personalize interactions with them. But the winning play won’t be smarter bots; it will be smarter humans.

I suspect we are going to miss good ol’ human interaction when we are deprived of it in the everyday business of life. That is why I shout “humanize as you digitize!” everywhere I go. In my book The X in CX I point out that when everyone has automated, the only winning play will be to have humans still present—yes, messy, flawed, less-than-perfect humans—able to pop up when needed, able to smile and commiserate and make intelligent conversation.

We are simply not investing any time or money in the employee experience (EX) that is actually the best driver of customer experience. When was the last time your organization paid attention to empathy (internal and external) as a driver of performance? When was human motivation at work, and consumer behaviour out there, studied and discussed in your board?

Thank me later. Probably after you have automated your processes to hell and back, and still found yourself perplexed by unhappy customers.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE
Empathy isn’t soft; it’s strategic.

 

Like it? Hate it? Engage here