I was asked a few days ago whether I had any insights into how customer behaviours are changing in the world of CX, and after a bit of reflection I answered that I think the industry is changing much faster than our customers are.
Having spent some time in Amsterdam at Customer Contact Week earlier this month, I got the opportunity to observe first-hand the absolute saturation of the CX market with AI. There was literally not one stall, nor one talk I attended that wasn’t almost entirely AI-centric. I came away with a distinct feeling of what a colleague named for me as AI fatigue, and the experience helped me to crystallise the messages I have been preparing for my keynote speech at next week’s CX Conference in Manchester.
Customers aren’t changing nearly as much as they are adapting to the changes our industry is exposing them to.
Humans tend not to enjoy change; from a psychological point of view, what is known is what is “safe” - even when that is demonstrably not the case. Often we will cling to the familiar over the functional, simply because that’s what we’re used to. This is the mindset we need to have in mind when we are designing our all-singing, all-dancing customer experience robots.
Customers, being human, are feeling beings who think, not thinking beings who feel, and unless we understand the ways in which human emotions are in the driving seat of behaviours and choices, we are always going to be designing customer experience with at least a partial blindfold on.
We know we need to understand our customers, and we know we need to give them experiences that make them feel good enough to come back; but how many of us have done the work on developing and fine-tuning the empathy in our organisations that’s necessary to make that possible?
People who are out of touch with their own feelings and needs are unlikely to be able to meaningfully connect with somebody else’s - making those needs and feelings extremely difficult to understand. Without fluency in the language of emotion, there’s always a risk that something crucial gets lost in translation.
Consider the smiling dog image that I’ve used as a visual for this post.
How confident are we that we understand why they seem so happy?
The better we know the dog, the better we can guess. If my dog Evie was smiling like that, I’d assume she was either having her ears scratched for as long as she wanted, or had found a nice big pile of something unspeakable to eat, undisturbed in a field. These are educated guesses based on how well I understand doggy behaviour when it comes to Evie. Also, very important to be able to accurately discern which is which when deciding on next steps…
The more in touch with our feelings we are in customer service, the more educated our guesses will be when it comes to intuiting how any individual experience might be received.
That’s where we are getting ready to trip ourselves up with AI, in my observation.
Outsourcing tasks and activities makes total sense right up to the point where we start asking robots to take on tasks that it simply cannot exist in their configuration. I’ve heard an AI agent offering verbal “empathy” to a disgruntled customer as part of a demo, and heard a ripple of uncomfortable laughter fill the room, because at their most human level everybody could feel the lack of connection - and it grated on them.
Empathy is not a behaviour that can be programmed into a machine. It’s an organic experience of connection between beings who feel. They don’t even have to be human beings - animals are experts in empathy and show visibly that they understand when we are hurt, sad or afraid.
The more human we try to make our robots, the more we expose that as exactly what they’re not. Our job is not to programme robots with empathy - such a being simply cannot exist. We can, however, invest in our own capacity to create authentic, human connection, and programme robots [insert crucial comma], with empathy.
Humans feel. Customers feel. That hasn’t changed since the first day I engaged with customer service as a rookie, 14 year-old waitress on the cusp of the digital age. I knew perfectly well then that it made my customer feel deeply uncomfortable to have a teaspoon accidentally dropped into their shirt down the back of their collar (yes, this is a real thing that I actually did). I know perfectly well now that a furious customer being told on the telephone by a machine “your frustration is very reasonable, and I understand why you feel like that” will also feel deeply uncomfortable.
The difference between these two scenarios is that a panicking 14 year-old waitress showing genuine human empathy and horror at what has just occurred will defuse a tense errant teaspoon situation much faster than the machine that moves smoothly on to its next programmed behaviour.
Which brings us back to the beginning of this article and asking ourselves the question again - are customers really changing that much?
Or are they simply continuing to have human feelings that drive them towards or away from experiences depending on whether or not they felt good?
I’d love to have your thoughts - please comment below with All The Opinions.