To build customer relationships, businesses must listen and interact with customers in a way that is appealing to them. Connecting with consumers through automation can save a significant amount of time, but businesses often choose to rely on automation, at the expense of empathy.
Finding a balance between automation and human touch in customer experience can pose a challenge, particularly in the current world which is shifting to a digital-first mindset. However, it is possible for businesses to find that fine line between automation and human empathy and achieve desirable results.
In an exclusive interview, CX Today welcomes Andy Bird, VP of Product at Concentrix to discuss the benefits of implementing advanced automation and where empathy should be put first in customer interactions.
Clear Objectives First
Bird begins: “The benefits for advanced automation are closely tied to the types of objectives and outcomes. We always have to ask ourselves: what is it that we're trying to accomplish? What are the problems we’re trying to solve and how do we measure outcomes? In cases where deflection is the outcome, automation can help to a great extent.
It’s no doubt that measuring customer satisfaction using CSAT or NPS requires empathy. Human interaction is necessary for creating surveys and analysing customer satisfaction scores as technology can only do so much to identify pain points and try to understand why they exist.
“There are a lot of companies that can go too far with automation, so far that they never allow for any other type of interaction”, continues Bird. “Companies need to carefully define what they are trying to address, whether it’s building agents, or getting more sentiment. Once their objectives are clear, things will fall into place.”
Listening With Empathy
While data is one of the buzzwords in today’s business world, what is it exactly that we can get from it? When interpreted correctly, customer data can give answers to all sorts of things, from what organisations are doing right to why some customers choose to leave. And when empathy comes into play, the data gains another layer of meaning – raw information becomes actionable insights.
Bird says: “There are a couple of different ways in which we can utilise and leverage the ability to mine unstructured data. We can use it to map the customer journey from A to Z and see the beginning of it all the way to the end. Doing this makes it easy to look for things that are going to be relevant to the customer experience. For example, sentiment analysis on the back end does a great deal. Recording and transcribing a call then performing a sentiment analysis can help us know how to better serve the customer.”
Taking it a step further, we can make that unstructured data actionable and influence the decision making in the contact centre. “
In instances where businesses are short of human staff, balancing the human with technology is essential. Bird says that organisations need to look for repetitive transactions that don't require human interaction.