In case you missed part one of the interview, take a moment to read about some of the key challenges related to CX design.
In a conversation with MyCustomer, Professor Mohamed Zaki, the deputy director of Cambridge Service Alliance and course leader of Data-Driven Design for Customer Experience (CX) at the University of Cambridge, delves into CX design.
This interview explores the concepts of personalisation and leveraging digital capabilities, exploring the considerations of maintaining a human touch while incorporating AI technologies into customer interactions.
AI and human connection
Personalisation is an important topic that can be a concern when it comes to AI. For example, missing out on the human connection when interacting with a brand.
"As a human, most of our preferences are human-to-human interactions because we humans understand each other, sometimes, I would say. You need to have some emotional intelligence, you know, when we fail some of our customers. It's emotionally loaded when services fail, and expectations aren't fulfilled.
"In customer service centres, experienced employees know how to call a customer, understand their feeling and emotion, and then respond well to some of these failures."
Over the years, we’ve started to see organisations working in an ecosystem.
"A simple example here is retail, right? So you order from Zara or Next or something. Typically, the one that delivers to you is a separate organisation. That could be, for example, FedEx.
"Now, that delivery service could fail to deliver the product you already ordered through the e-commerce channels or online, making you, sometimes, complain to the brand. You're not complaining to the delivery organisation."
Mohamed explains that when we digitise what we refer to as autonomous services, the interaction of AI with the human customer comes into play. Emotions can be expressed concerning both positive and negative feedback. Despite customers experiencing various emotions, Mohamed explains that there will be little to no reaction when expressing them to an AI-enabled digital service.
"Typically, there are standardised responses that will come from this kind of chatbot. And it doesn't have a personal touch. And we, as humans, more or less pick this up," Mohamed explains.
Empathic chatbots
Empathy between customers and human agents is one thing, but how does that work with a chatbot?
"As a customer, if a chatbot starts to empathise with me, I don't care. It should get into solving the problem. I'm not interested in the, you know, the human side of it," Mohamed says.
"But in general, we found in some of the research we did that to personalise interactions with customers; you need to understand key elements here. One is knowledge about the customer, and the previous experience is really important."
Personality plays an important role in knowing who you are dealing with. As humans, we can quickly gauge if someone is more likely to complain or be more enthusiastic. However, with machines, it's not the same.
"To define that personality quickly, maybe we're not there yet. But to start using this knowledge can enable you to communicate better with the customers in this case and build the right style of conversation.
"So if I'm a customer service agent, I'm coaching a little bit based on the information we collected about the customer, the current engagement, the current emotions, and helping the agent to communicate when they should, if you like, empathise with customers."
It’s also important to know when to apply empathy or have these types of conversations.
"Maybe at the beginning of the conversation, I don't accept it. Leave me to, you know, spit it out first, if you like. Then we can start to talk about it."
In customer service, elements like friendly greetings help build empathy. The question is whether these elements can be automatically integrated into chatbots or text-based interactions to enhance customer experience.
"In the end, we want the customers to feel at these touch points and interactions like they've been heard."