Bots or No Bots About it, Human Empathy Primed for Customer Experience Comeback

As customer service continues its evolution as an integral part of the broader customer experience (CX), companies have some things to learn, unlearn and relearn to bring it up to snuff.

As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce blogged, “One way customer service has notably changed during the pandemic is that brands embrace empathy and human connections. This can be as simple as asking how customers are doing or as complex as slowing down complicated interactions to walk customers through step-by-step instructions.”

Customer experience expert by day and playwright by night, Freshworks CX advisor Colin Crowley is well-versed in such dramas. They’re playing out in call centers and in customer support teams two years into the pandemic as notions around CX change in curious ways. Discussing the new paradigm with PYMNTS, Crowley said companies need to be more thoughtful about how they invest in and prioritize processes for customer interaction.

“Looking internally at CX organizations, the first thing I would say is [there is a] lack of investment in agents,” he said. “Some companies still look at front-line agents as being very reactive, lower-level jobs, when in reality — with the technology revolution and the fact that now more the easy issues are being resolved through chatbots — you need more people capable of problem solving and specializing in different areas of concern to deliver more tailored service.”

Noting the volume of artificial intelligence (AI) pouring into customer service during the past 24 months alone, Crowley believes it must be part of a flow that puts customers at ease and prevents the frustrating phone holds and chatbot exchanges that can seem endless.

That’s where the flow of customer service inquiries becomes good (or bad) CX.

“Technologies like chatbots and the rise of messaging channels like social messaging — SMS, WhatsApp and live chat, etc. — can really help,” Crowley said. “If you’re taking conversations and moving them off to those channels in a natural way that makes sense to customers, then you’re relieving the backlog in traditional channels like email and phone.”

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Empathy and Automation

No matter how cute we make them, chatbots are never a crowd favorite, but when deployed well, they can add value to any customer journey — it just depends on the context. Chatbots, Crowley said, can allow companies to deploy workers on the front lines more efficiently and effectively.

Instead of answering mundane or routine questions or queries, he said, “Human beings [are using] their powers of empathy and problem solving in a more effective way to deal with more complex issues.”

What a company can’t do is wall itself off with bots and become an unresponsive entity that doesn’t seem to care. This is where blending self-service bots and human agents is paying off for all stakeholders.

He pointed to “high-powered technologies that, for instance, in a live chat situation in real time, look at historical conversations with customers previously that went well based on high CSAT [customer satisfaction] scores, and surface recommendations to agents as to how they should respond to customers. It helps with consistency of information and consistency of tone, and helps agents focus on resolving issues rather than typing out responses.”

Crowley said, “I’ve seen that reduce response times for agents by upwards of 25% and again, not in any way leading to a diminishment of quality.”

If and when a customer does want an agent, they’re generally seeking empathy — not a bot.

“You often have to be very careful about how you engage with customers, and this is where quality assurance comes into play. A big focus on that is empathy and tone,” Crowley said.

Companies like Freshworks develop standards for the use of humor, seriousness and keeping a professional yet conversational tone throughout. He said “even standards in terms of when you may use emojis in an email interaction or a chat interaction” can positively impact CX.

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The Tiptoe Approach to CX

While training human agents and designing an omnichannel customer service flow that works for all stakeholders — customer first, of course — quality assurance must be maintained. Noting that growing companies sometimes delay attention to it, Crowley said QA has to be built into the process at every step to ensure experiential outcomes are satisfying.

“Smaller companies scaling their CX organization, oftentimes, they’re mainly trying to keep their head above water,” he said. “They’re not necessarily focused so much on building up a quality assurance program. They do that more as an afterthought later in their experience when they already have 50-, 60-, 70-plus agents, when it’s harder to go back to that group of people and impose quality standards at that point.”

He said, “It’s better to get a run on that very early and develop the quality assurance program early that, in turn, informs your training program, so you’re getting people in and you’re socializing them in a very specific way as to how you want your customers to be treated that will enable you to scale and maintain quality at the same.”

With expectations of service increasing due to smartphone conveniences that have now become second nature to millions, companies should take a judicious approach to adoption. The best way, Crowley said, is to “tiptoe into the process.”

With a robust set of technologies, ideally from the same vendor, they can give themselves room to experiment with artificial intelligence and automation then scale out with the same vendor.

Better to have a bot to answer basic FAQs and leave problem-solving to trained agents.

“See what you get for early level deflection with the basic answer bot that scours through FAQ questions, and then build some conversational flows into that to make it a better experience, and you see how deflection changes,” Crowley said.

“It’s much easier to prove the case for what you’re getting every step of the way, and to monetize that by looking at the number of contacts you’re ultimately deflecting. Then you have some qualitative information as well to make sure that you’re not giving short shrift to the customer experience.”

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