Bestselling Author Gives Actionable Advice for Excellent CX

Maintaining a balance between the human element and AI chatbot technology is critical for exceptional customer service.

We’ve all been there… Navigating a company’s phone system or website searching for an answer to an urgent question. When we ask for help, we’re introduced to an AI-based chatbot. It probably has a name. Hi, there, says “Cynthia,” How can I help you? If your question is a relatively simple one, say you want to track an order, Cynthia can pull it up immediately.

But if you have a more complicated question, for instance, whether a certain machine part is compatible with a broken piece of equipment, you run into trouble. Cynthia asks you for your account number, your model number, and the SKU for the part. But because your equipment is no longer being manufactured, Cynthia can’t help you. You end up in an endless loop of re-entering data and being redirected. To add insult to injury, Cynthia decides she has resolved your question, and asks you if your experience has been satisfactory. 

“Many companies deploy these technologies without thinking,” says Adrian Swinscoe, a customer experience consultant, best-selling author, and speaker. 

One of Swinscoe’s favorite topics is the critical balance between digital customer experience (CX) solutions and the human touch. “Many businesses don't have a customer-centered vision of the experience that they want to deliver. Ask them and you get buzzword bingo: seamlessly connected, artificial intelligence enabled, omnichannel, frictionless. I have no idea what they mean," Swinscoe says. 

We had a delightfully human conversation with Swinscoe to discuss CX for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) in the B2B space.

“The problem is not the technology. It’s that businesses aren’t clear on their visions, and how those align with their corporate objectives.” He says they end up plugging in various tools and third-party apps and “expecting magic to happen.”

Unless you understand where you want your business to go, then you're not really properly equipped to understand what tools you actually need.

Adrian Swinscoe

Customer experience consultant

Debunking the "avoidance-of-humans" myth

We asked Swinscoe about the move toward online self-service systems, and how that differs from generation to generation. Swinscoe says his research debunks the myth that younger generations (Gen Z, Millennials) do not like talking to humans, avoiding them in favor of digital-only interactions. 

“Anyone of any age with access to a smartphone or computer will first search the internet. That’s self-service,” says Swinscoe. 

But this doesn’t mean companies—especially B2B companies—can take humans out of the loop, even for younger, so-called digital natives. “Our research shows it’s just not true that Gen Z and Millennials don’t like to talk to people,” he says.

This is also true when a situation is complex, as it can be in B2B. 

The question for businesses is: At what point do their customers want to flip from self-service to humans? “And how can you make it easy and fast for them to flip?” Swinscoe asks.

How to determine your CX balance

Here are two things to keep in mind when deciding when to get humans involved in the customer experience: 

1. Consider the conversation, not the channel

Leading companies understand that these customer interactions are conversations, and the channels are almost incidental. Swinscoe says you should be able to seamlessly go back and forth between channels.

2. Don’t ignore the ultimate computing machines—your humans

Everyone talks about “the data” as if that’s the only truth. Swinscoe doesn’t buy that. Too many businesses are investing in big data, massive computing systems, and fancy analytics, but forget they have access to our own neural network of advanced computers, “and they're called people,” he says. 

You can hire a costly consulting firm to do a study of what’s wrong with your customer service, but ask your own people and they will give you a fix that gets you 80% to the finish line.

“I’m not saying that you shouldn't rely on data,” says Swinscoe. “I’m saying there are different kinds of data.” 

Your key performance indicators (KPIs) from data can tell you how many service calls or emails came in, how long it took to address them, and whether they were successfully resolved. You can even regularly poll your customers to get KPIs on how satisfied they are. 

“Quick access to all that is great,” says Swinscoe. “But it’s not all you need. You’ve got a tremendous amount of data stored in the heads of the people that deal with all the questions that come in. You just need to get people together and aggregate it.” 

Balanced CX is tough going for SMBs

This method of CX puts an undue burden on smaller companies. In the best of all worlds, a business would leverage all its networks and knowledge to minimize the self-service effort, using artificial intelligence (AI) to provide access to that knowledge to customers proactively, preemptively, and even predictively. 

But generating the required content for that—the information pages on the website, the FAQs, and the various knowledge bases that help support workers to help customers—is a huge lift for SMBs. 

The pressure continues when the CX switches from AI to the human element. 

“The challenge is that after a customer has gone through the entire self-serve journey, by the time they get to a live person, expectations have gone way up,” says Swinscoe. “The onus is on that human agent to deliver quick, personable, personalized, empathetic, knowledgeable, expert support. And that's a lot of pressure.”

Ultimately, if SMBs can get the self-service portion in place, then their CX team can handle the more complex, complicated queries where customers can benefit from that inside expertise and the human touch. But, Swinscoe says, businesses need to "leverage networks and information inside a business to try and minimize the effort that is required for that agent or their representative to access that information." 

How to reach CX nirvana

Swinscoe advises companies to look at the current CX situation from a customer’s perspective: What’s the current experience of interacting with their brand? And what would they like it to be in two to three years? 

"If you've got that clear vision and strategy about what you want to do and how you want to do it, it's going to produce the returns that you want. So, I actually don't think the problem is with technology. I think the problem is with how much clarity people have around what it is they want to do and why and how they are going to use experience to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive market," Swinscoe says.