Tuesday, October 10, 2023
I’ve been thinking about customer service and artificial intelligence (AI).
Listen, I get it. AI can do the rote activities of your business: driving out costs, finding new patterns for success, and boosting your efficiency. That is all true. In that sense, as in many others, AI is one of those game changers that comes along only once every decade or so. I embrace any tool that bolsters both sides of the profit equation. Anything that can help raise revenue and decrease expenses deserves serious analysis. The promise of AI to do that is legitimate.
But it is also true (and I’m begging you to hear this) if you get frustrated that “nothing works right anymore,” much of that has to do with good individual tech choices, made over time, that were not harmonized to one another or perhaps just not audited and updated over time. The result can be deep, lonely trenches and tunnels of a customer experience that leaves your customers and prospects in a maze that is frustratingly difficult to navigate.
I first threatened over 20 years ago to write a book titled Begging to Be Your Customer. It was going to feature examples of good ideas, implemented badly, that resulted in an inadvertently negative customer experience. The extent to which the world needed that book 20 years ago is debatable. But it is exponentially more true today that while trying to make it all efficient for ourselves, or to employ the latest tech promise of a utopian experience for our employees and customers, we often unintentionally create the polar opposite. This results in the money spent on customer acquisition costs being wasted and our customers left fending for themselves, finding friction instead of delight, having to swim upstream and work overly hard, trying to become our next revenue source. It’s crazy.
The truth is, AI is fantastic at examining data you have stored and finding the patterns, the hidden knowledge within that data, and putting it to work for you. That is amazing. AI can definitely help spot more revenue opportunities. Which deals make you the most money? Who are your most profitable referral sources? Why do you hit your SLAs with provider A but not with provider B? It’s hard to beat AI for those sets of questions and resulting analysis of their answers.
AI is also superior at handling situations and scenarios that are 100% of the time always true. I’m talking here about the If/Then logic of routing rules and completing tasks. For example, if this type of transaction always needs a certain set of documents, executed in an exact order, with one particular hard-to-remember notation on them, that’s a perfect thing to automate. Watch, as your human errors drop to near zero when their work is bolstered with the assistance of AI. Yes.
And yet, it’s important to remember that when someone calls your office, or when someone emails or engages with your chat support – odds are high that their question or problem is not run of the mill. Typically, if the trains are running smoothly in a transaction, the customer is kept alongside your smoothly functioning process in tandem with you. So, what about the customer who is reaching out to you? Who are they and what do they need? Chances are that customer will be the outlier, the one who needs the human intervention, the one whose transaction is not cookie cutter for any one of a thousand different reasons.
Please, please, please, for the love of your P&L, do not put those customers through some automated experience. What you set up to transport customers down the happy path of common scenario communications quickly turns into a frustrating hellscape for any outlier customer who needs unconventional help. In those circumstances, often your pre-fab imagined scenarios, with which the customer is supposed to correctly identify as option number 7 on your auto-attendant receptionist, for example? It’s just a no.
You know this is bad. You’ve endured it in your life as a consumer. How many times have you appeared to be the imbalanced person yelling “Agent! Agent!! AGENT!!!!” into the self-routing auto-attendant on the other end of your phone?
Yet does your shop have an auto-attendant? If so, what does it say? How many options are given? If I’m calling stressed and anxious about something (like maybe I received wiring instructions from you but I want to make sure it’s you before I send a wire) do I end up in a cul-de-sac of options that don’t apply to me? How many questions do you ask me before I have the option to easily “human out”? Do you make me scream “Agent. Agent. AGENT!!!”? And if so, what’s happened to my blood pressure and tenor by the time I reach that Agent? You know, the employee whose job you tried to make better by employing an auto-attendant? Now that employee is getting screamed at from the moment they say “Hello”.
Don’t over-automate your customer experience. It’s too important. AI is supposed to do the things that don’t need the complexity, the nuance, the EQ of a human brain. That is definitely not your customer experience department, is it?
If you employ automated features through any part of your customer experience program, please audit it for continuity, timeliness and intentionality.
Lastly, assume your customers are intelligent enough to recognize that you’re telling them it’s raining when it is not actually raining. Trust your customers to hear the truth, and be brave enough to offer the truth to them. They might not relish the situation, but usually they will understand it. I received an automated “Welcome!” letter from an HSA account in January of 2023. The body of that letter immediately informed me that debit cards for the HSA account were “temporarily unavailable due to COVID”. You read that right, it was January 2023. And evidently COVID still is causing mass upheaval in the HSA debit card world, because even waiting till August, no card ever arrived. I did not feel Welcomed! – which was the goal of that automated letter. You can’t expect automation to cover up for poor business choices. It will only expose and highlight them, instead.
Don’t let automated AI messages, or pre-planned customer journeys, have the opposite impact of what you intended. Engage and use these tools, yes! By all means. Please also monitor them, test them, update them, ensure they’re benefiting you and your customers. Because it’s too easy for them to devolve down into a broken or frustrating customer experience. And that’s the last thing you can afford.
Until next time,
Mary Schuster
Chief Knowledge Officer
October Research, LLC