Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

You’ve got to always remember that the big challenge is going to be how do you differentiate from competitors, and how do you deliver the kind of customer experience that’s going to make people want to come back. Because why do they come back? They got value. Maybe they got great product value. It works just the way you want. It was a good price and you know, boom. Or maybe they got that fast delivery and that easy to order. Again, value. Maybe it was just the way your people are, that mindset category, you know, super important. Or they feel that increasing loyalty that comes along with continued being taken care of by an organization.

So the problem comes is when people are, if you will, upstream from the customer experience, which is happening downstream, and they’re building tech, for example, without really having the customer experience in mind and certainly not in heart. So they’re looking to do things, let’s say, more quickly, or they’re looking to do something in a way that they think is going to be more efficient or more productive or more profitable without actually having the downstream customer experience in mind. And I’ll give you an example. I call this lesson number one in the solution, which is- build it for real humans because your customer is not another technology, your customer is human beings that are buying from you or registering with you or voting for you.

Rule number two is that as you bring more technology in and in and in, the way you need to absolutely care for, the customer experience will show up, especially at points of what I call migration and education. And you know, one industry that’s been a huge violator of this is banks. So remember the time when there were branches and you’d walk up and you wait your turn and you smile and you hand over whatever you had and you got what you needed, and then ATM machines came in. And for many younger people, they’ll never remember a time when there weren’t ATM machines. But you may remember when all of that banking went into the app. And then there was the thing like, you can do it all right here. How convenient for you. You know, it’s just right there. Swipe left, right. Do what you need to do. You can do all your banking on your phone. How convenient for the bank. I mean, just think about the reduction in labor costs. Just think about the ease of getting all the data and pushing out new data and handling things and transactions on the phone.

But what are you going to do about the older customer base? And older doesn’t have to be 60-70, and it can be anybody who’s at a point where they didn’t grow up with that phone in their hand. For the young customer base? Certainly. Give them the app. In fact, they can’t quite understand. Why would you need to go into a building to do your banking? But what are you going to do with all of those middle age and older people who, by the way, have a lot of assets and by the way, need a lot of service because they’re either completing a mortgage or they’re taking out a second mortgage, or they’re financing college education, or they’re planning for legacy and philanthropy and intergenerational wealth transfer. And, you know, I don’t really want to do that stuff on a phone, but if you want to get me to the phone, and you want to show me what I can do, put a human there to help educate me, to help encourage me so that at least in my early experiences, I’ve got somebody saying, come on, let me show you how to do that. Right. You go there, you put… That’s right. Yep! You can do this. You know, I knew you’d get the hang of this so quickly. And then the next time they’ll use that, rather than just taking it away and putting some new tech in place. So rule number two is when you’re going to do a tech change preserving your customers, it’s a migration for some people. Provide humans right there to support the education and the migration.

And the third and this one’s obvious, is when something goes wrong. When something goes wrong, I really don’t want to chat with your chat bot. I really don’t want to search all over the website to try to find the phone number. And you know what? If something’s gone wrong, I don’t want to fill in your form and send it and get an email back that says, we’ve received your you know, we’ll get back to you. No. I want a human to show up right then and there. And so we’ve got to help leaders decide, you know, where do you put the human talent and how do you use tech to support those moments when it’s really important to provide the human touch?