It has been a year filled with advancements in AI technology and a significant surge in the usage of AI in customer-facing roles. Yet, we see over and over again that for many organizations and many industries, their greatest competitive advantage is human interaction with their customers and clients. 

However, human interactions are not a competitive advantage if we as leaders get in the way. This is why employee empowerment is more crucial than ever. 

In my keynote speeches, I like to say that employee empowerment is the win-win-win of customer experience. 

Customers win because their problem is solved in real time. 

Employees win because they’re able to satisfy customers and not have to manage an upset customer whose issue remains unresolved.

The organization and leadership wins because every customer issue that is not solved immediately costs the organization both money and time..

How do we make our human experience just as frustrating as the robot experience? Say things to the customer like, “I’m not authorized to do that,” “I’ll have to check with a manager,” or “you’ll have to call the corporate office.”

If this is the experience we are giving to our customers, then what is the point of having human service? If you’re going to frustrate your customers, at least do it cheaply. 

Of course, I know that’s not your goal, so let’s talk about three ways to evaluate your experience and to determine where you need to better empower your employees to solve customer issues in real time.

Ask Your Team. No one knows better where empowerment is missing than the people who do not have it. Your team knows the situations that arise that could easily be solved if they had the power. Your team knows where they feel frustrated on a regular basis because of the invisible handcuffs they’re wearing at work. There is no source of information better than asking your team. 

Review the Data. For larger organizations particularly, your data can tell you a lot about where to begin investigating a lack of empowerment. Are there certain touch points in the experience that have significantly higher error tickets or complaints? Are cancellations being triggered at a certain point in the experience? Do certain requests trigger immediate transfers either vertically or to other departments? Your data leaves clues about where empowerment might be helpful. 

Review Verbatims at Scale. Search through your customer feedback for certain keywords. Look for the points where they are feeling frustrated repeatedly, where they complain about processes or procedures. Look for patterns that show where a touch point could be easier.

The most important aspect of empowering your team is proactively looking for areas where empowerment can be useful and improve both the employee and customer experience. Depending on the size and scale of your organization, the process can be simple or complicated. Also, if you want to learn more about employee empowerment, make sure to check out our deep resource on the site: The Ultimate Starter Guide to Employee Empowerment.

The post Employee Empowerment: The Ultimate Human Advantage appeared first on Customers That Stick.

Historically in customer experience, the term retail robot has been used to describe frontline employees who just went through their day and more importantly, through customer interactions robotically, reading enthusiastically from a script, interacting the minimum possible to complete the transaction, and never thinking outside the box or looking for creative solutions. 

Retail Robot is a pejorative term that those of us who taught customer experience use to describe the types of employees you did not want on your team and to describe the behaviors you want to eliminate through better hiring, better culture, and better training. 

Now our human robots have been replaced with actual robots, and the result is even more frustrating.

I was actually inspired to write this article. I came up with the idea for this article back in December because my level of frustration with dead-end chatbots and inescapable voice recognition (IVR) systems was already so high. 

Now in September of 2025, it has only gotten worse. Sure, AI technology is better, but the disturbing trend has only continued. Leaders are seeing the dollar signs that AI brings and in many cases are using it too fast, too far, and at the detriment of the customer experience and their long-term relationship with their customers.

This is not a new game. It happened decades ago when companies offshored to the cheapest countries they could find, where often there were not sufficient English language skills or technological infrastructure, and the damage, to customer experience scores and loyalty, was so stark that many companies moved their contact centers (an expensive proposition) either completely back to the United States or to more expensive but “higher-skilled” markets. 

History is repeating itself, but this time, with AI. Leaders are making the same mistake now, sacrificing long-term relationships for short-term profits. 

I can only urge customer experience leaders to think about that pattern and how it cost companies in the past. Sure, artificial intelligence continues to improve and, for that reason, the situation may not be completely analogous. But if you are prioritizing near-term profitability over loyalty and lifetime value, those chickens will eventually come home to roost..

So here are three tips to make sure your organization does not fall into this trap. 

Race to the Top. First of all, don’t engage in a race to the bottom. It is tempting to match your competitors. It is tempting to see them increasing their bottom line and using technology to cut costs, but you can either lead or follow, if you want to be the customer experience leader in your industry or the cost-cutting leader in your industry. 

Start with the Experience. I feel like I’ve been saying this for over a decade now. It doesn’t matter what the technology can do, it matters how the technology can enhance your experience. If you’ve designed a customer experience and a customer journey that you believe is optimal, you should not be asking, how can we save money with X technology. You should be asking how X technology can better execute and enhance our CX strategy. The money saving will come naturally. 

Stay customer centric. The idea of customer centricity is simple. The customer is at the center of what you do. Does it mean you will never make a decision that a customer doesn’t like or that a group of customers doesn’t like? Of course not. But it does mean that you consider the impact on the customer of every decision.

The transition to AI is moving fast, and if you have not had serious discussions about every facet of the technology you’re using and how it’s going to impact the customer as well as your employees, then you’re not leading, you’re following. 

In this age of AI, leaders need a gut check. They need to decide who they are. If you are a short-term leader and your goal is only to maximize quarterly earnings, push up your bonuses and springboard yourself to the next position, then this article is not for you. 

But if you care about your organization and its brand, if you care about the long-term impact of the experiences your customers are having, and if you care, quite frankly, about the human beings who give you their money for your product or service, then be careful about how you add more “retail robots” to your customer experience. Because customers didn’t like them then, and they still don’t like them now.

The post Hassled Customers and the Return of the Retail Robot appeared first on Customers That Stick.

Storytelling is an integral part of human history and a key part of our evolution as a species. Since the earliest days of cave paintings and language, human beings have told stories.

Stories have a special power, a way to make us feel that facts and data do not have. And as such, storytelling can be a powerful part of both the customer and employee experience. 

STORYTELLING WITH CUSTOMERS

One part of organizations that tends to be fairly adept at storytelling is Marketing. Storytelling has been a crucial part of marketing practice for a very long time, but other parts of the organization tend to use stories less often and less effectively. 

So, here are three ways you can enhance your customer experience with storytelling.

Share Successes. Share stories of your success with other customers. This is particularly helpful in a service-based or business-to-business environments. For example, don’t just share that you sold a house in this neighborhood for X price; share what your customers wanted, what their challenges were, and how you solved those to help them get their price. 

Share Projects. Share what your team is working on. For example you might share behind-the-scenes looks at how your team members overcame obstacles to deliver a new product or to improve the customer’s experience. Make sure you keep the benefit to the customer as part of the story, and they can see how hard you’re working hard to make their experiences better. 

Humanize Your Team. As a reader of The Human Experience, you know that humanizing our customer’s experiences makes them richer and more emotionally resonant. Humanizing our team members can be an important aspect of this approach. Share stories about your team. They do not have to be overly personal or about sensitive topics. They can be about Jenny realizing her dream to climb Denali or how Jack was a college football star before becoming your top sales agent.  

As much as I love using storytelling with customers, I think it is an even more powerful tool with employees. With employees, the stories can be even more targeted and relevant. Here are three ways to use storytelling with employees. 

Inspiration. Share the stories of your customer heroes. Talk about what happened, how a team member went the extra mile for a customer. How a team member saved a long term customer from leaving 

Education. Tell similar stories to the above, but break down the lessons from it. Remind teams where they are empowered to act and show them why the choice the team member made was the right choice at the right time. 

Recognition. In this case, you’re telling similar hero stories, but you’re focusing on the person, specifically recognizing them. Customer Hero of the Week maybe? Give them a shout out and encourage the team to do the same, telling them they won a gift card or something else. The stories may be the same types used for inspiration or education, but in this case, we are more focused on the who and a little bit less on the what. 

We humans are wired for story, and they can motivate us to think differently, to feel differently, and to learn differently. The more you can utilize stories in both your customer and employee experience, the better both experiences will be.

The post The Incredible Power of Storytelling with Customers and Employees appeared first on Customers That Stick.

If you could guess what customers want most from AI, what would you say?

If you answered “for it to be more human,” then you win the prize. (I mean, I basically gave it away in the title.)

It is a bit ironic when Computer Weekly promotes the humanization of AI, but that is exactly the message of this article: Human-centric AI drives customer experience loyalty.

The research study cited by the article “uncovered five critical trends that will shape the future of customer service.”

• Autonomous service accelerates with AI copilots
• Consumer confidence rises with human-like AI agents
• Personal AI assistants will shape the future of customer interactions
• Voice AI gains ground as the preferred channel for complex issues
• Personalisation will redefine customer loyalty.

So, what can we, readers of The Human Experience, take away from thIs?

It’s simple: Being more human, providing more human experiences, is always a competitive advantage.

For companies, using AI to serve customers, your blueprint is clear, though the execution may be less so. Start with the optimal end experience. How can you use personalization to wow a customer? How can you create an emotionally resonant experience? How can you create connections with your customers?

AI (currently) does not excel at any of those objectives, creating an opportunity for us to create better human connections. 

What our goal should be (whether we use AI to facilitate it or not) is creating experiences that are so good that AI can’t even begin to compete.

So, here are two quick tips for how to make your experiences more human than AI ever could.

Maximize In-Person Interactions. If your business model allows for it, in-person interactions is an area where AI really has no way to compete. In-person, human interactions are still the great differentiator. 

Use Video and Phone. While AI voices are incredible and avatars are on the way there, they still can’t have human conversations. Most people can tell they are talking with a robot after a few exchanges. How long will this continue? It’s hard to say, but it’s that way now. Use it to your advantage. Use phone and, even better, video chats with customers when the situation allows for or necessitates deeper communication.

Want to ramp it up a notch? Use familiar people or multiple people from your team on occasion. It shows extra attention and is virtually impossible for AI to mimic at this point in time.

Want to ramp it up two notches? Use multiple people. For video and audio, using multiple team members is inherently more human. Why? Because while AI can execute multi-person conversations, in corporate and customer service settings it isn’t even close to replacing flesh-and-bone humans yet. 

The pace of AI improvement is incredible, and I wonder if I’ll be able to write this same email in a year’s time. 

Yet, regardless of how much AI advances in the next year, being more human isn’t just about the experience, it’s about the relationships created by all of your more human experiences.

And solid relationships are not something that AI can easily replace, so take advantage of building them while the opportunities are there.

The post Customers Want Human AI appeared first on Customers That Stick.

In many organizations, employee onboarding is no longer just a how-to-open-the-register process. Modern companies with people-centric cultures have learned the importance of employee onboarding, of starting new employees off on the right foot and making sure that culture and experiential values are instilled from the start.

One of the most powerful cultural creation and reinforcement strategies organizations can implement is a fun, educational, and memorable onboarding process.

Let’s look at the employee onboarding process throughout the four key phases: applying/interviewing, pre-onboarding, day one, and the first weeks. 

THE APPLICATION/INTERVIEW PROCESS

Cultural expectations, particularly for brands that are not household names, begin with the application and interview process. How your ad is written, what is said and done during the interview(s), and the communication throughout the process will say more to a potential new employee about who you are than anything you say about your culture.

How is your employment ad constructed? Is it a laundry list of duties that looks like it was created by a lawyer or does it have personality and give potential employees a sense of who you are and what a day on the job looks like? 

Is the application process easy and clear?

What is the interview like? Full of personality and interesting questions or the same-old, same-old? Your interview is a chance to differentiate your brand or department and to make sure that the people you want to attract are attracted to you, and this is even more important in a tight labor market.

Is your communication throughout the application process clear and respectful? Do you try to communicate in a way that makes applicants feel at ease during a process that is full of stress and fear?

PRE-ONBOARDING

The pre-onboarding phase is crucial. What tone are you setting before they even “walk in the door” for their first day? 

Are you communicating excitement and instilling values, using tactics like welcome videos and personalized emails?

Are you making the required administrative, legalistic parts of the process as fun as possible or, at least, sandwiching them between more energetic and positive touch points?

DAY ONE

Many organizations have put careful thought into designing a powerful first day, with a particular focus on setting the tone for their brand and culture. If you must do an information dump, such as the history of the company, make it entertaining and interesting.

The most important target for Day One is making sure that new employees feel special and like they’re part of the team. 

Starbucks does a great job in this respect by giving new hires a green apron and a personalized name tag. 

Make it personal. Have a welcome sign, a personalized welcome gift, or both. Have people applaud when you bring a new hire into the break room. 

In sum, look for ways to send a signal to your employee that this job will not be like their last jobs. Your organization is different.

THE FIRST WEEKS

A lot will depend on your industry, company, and resources, but here are some key aspects of successful onboarding during the early weeks. 

Most companies focus on operational training; your goal is to make sure this training is holistically connected to your culture, your brand, and the customer experience. 

For any customer-facing roles, soft skills training is crucial. While effective training needs to continue over time, starting this training immediately after hire is essential to developing a customer-centric mindset, much less the skills needed to succeed with customers. 

(Of course, we do have virtual courses that can help you with this. Please check out our Rapid Hero training series, Employee Onboarding I, II, and III.)

Shadowing, having your new team member spend time with a more experienced team member, is an invaluable tactic. However, it is often done poorly. 

You must, must, must make sure that new team members are shadowing your star players. Shadowing should not be determined by who happens to be on shift at the same time. Shadowing must be arranged so that your team members are learning the right things from the right people. 

Finally, make it fun. Don’t just have a great first day and then a 180 degree shift in tone for the weeks that follow. Make sure to include fun and lots of positive reinforcement–all the time, preferably–but particularly in the first weeks.

This post only scratches the surface of creating a powerful onboarding process that is aligned with your culture and your customer experience objectives. Just remember, habits are formed fast, and a well-designed, strategically focused onboarding process is the key to instilling work and service habits that will make each new employee a valued and essential team member and a customer hero.

The post The Power of Employee Onboarding appeared first on Customers That Stick.

A few years ago, I was asked to give a quote for an article to answer this question: What is your favorite customer service metric and why? When the article came out, the great majority of answers were what you would expect NPS, C-SAT, CES, but my answer was different. 

I responded with one word: profit.

Let me explain.

I started the Customers That Stick blog in 2011. The blogosphere was a lot like social media is now. There were trends, and people tended to talk about the same things. 

A few years into blogging about customer service and experience, Tony Hsieh (may he rest in peace) and Zappos were all the rage for customer service experts and bloggers. 

But aside from one article about the User Interface of the Zappos home page, I never wrote about Zappos. Why? Because I was running a small business, and at the time, it was obvious that Zappos was delivering their legendary service without profitability. I was trying to talk about customer service in the real world and delivering service that depended on burning through an immense amount of venture capital money was not instructional.

Customer service must be delivered profitably.

Now, two big clarifications. 

First, I was and am a big fan of Tony Hsieh. I think he was a true innovator in customer experience, and I think Zappos is an incredible company with an amazing customer experience culture. I know people who have gone out to Las Vegas to do the Zappos Insights tours, and all have spoken highly of it. 

Second, believing that companies must be profitable does not mean believing in extreme versions such as profit-at-all-cost and maximizing shareholder value. Profitability equals survival, but after that, other things are important too.

So, let’s take a look at the three types of profitability you need to focus on as a customer experience leader.

Transactional Profitability

The fundamental measure. Is the individual transaction profitable? . The more complicated the industry and the larger the business, the harder this can be to calculate, particularly if you are trying to distribute pro rata non-variable costs like overhead. However, we generally have a fairly good grasp on this number. 

We sell the widget or a service for X dollars; it costs Y amount of raw materials and labor, and the transaction is profitable. But in customer service, individual transactions can quickly become unprofitable when there is a service issue. One refund or a service issue that is not resolved quickly can easily make a transaction unprofitable.

But of course, we are modern customer experience leaders. We know that sometimes you have to have an unprofitable transaction because what really matters is a profitable relationship.

Relational Profitability

Is the relationship profitable over the long term? As noted, we may sacrifice short-term transactional profitability to achieve relational profitability, to have a happy customer who continues to buy from us and whose lifetime value increases because they were happy across many transactions. 

Relational profitability is also why we have to sometimes say goodbye to problem customers. Apart from their impacts on team morale, habitually difficult customers are often unprofitable over their lifetime and are more trouble than they are worth.

Experiential Profitability

Obviously, organizational profitability is essential to the firm’s continued survival; however, it is also a broad, sprawling theme that involves things such as rent, debt, service, human resources, and so on. We want to know if the customer experience, including the sale of products and services, is not only profitable but sufficiently profitable to contribute what is needed to achieve organizational profitability. 

Obviously, this is a wide-reaching and nuanced evaluation with many dynamics at play, but customer experience leaders should have an idea of the profitability of the hard and soft costs of delivering and executing the customer experience across the organization. 

Now, if the organization is not profitable or profitable enough, that does beg a further question about customer experience profitability, which is it profitable enough to contribute what it needs to the bottom line?

In conclusion, while profitability at each level can be challenging to ascertain with precision, we can often get a reasonable estimate of how we are doing. Just remember the following:

Every transaction does not need to be profitable, but most do. 

Every relationship doesn’t need to be profitable, but almost all do.

And unless you’re swimming in venture capital money and can lose money for years on end, your customer experience needs to be profitable. Full stop. 

Use NPS, use C-SAT, use CES. Use whatever you like. But just remember that at the end of the day the metric that matters most is profit, because without it, you won’t have a business to measure anymore.

The post Customer Service Must Be Profitable appeared first on Customers That Stick.

If you read customer experience news or trade websites, the percentage of articles that are in some way related to artificial intelligence is remarkable. While I haven’t counted them–obviously–it must be over 50 percent and could be as high as 60 to 70 percent. 

It’s not that AI is a new topic; it’s not. And it’s not that AI is not improving; it is, at a dizzying pace. It’s that AI can still only do certain things. 

And one perspective I’d like to share with you actually comes from our shared experience with COVID. 

I’m sure you remember the bold predictions that were flying around during the height of the lockdowns. We were told that people would not go back to stores, that people would become accustomed to shopping digitally, that people would not want to return to the office, and that we were transitioning to a new normal. Digital, supposedly, had finally killed retail and in-person business models.

Yet, these predictions turned out to be only partially true.

Yes, consumer shopping habits were forever altered. People who were not comfortable doing so before learned to use digital service channels. Business models that were already being pressed by a digitally-transformed landscape found their challenges multiplied and not all survived.

On the labor front, the prognostications were at least halfway accurate. Despite the cost savings, many companies found disadvantages in remote work forces, but their employees enjoyed the freedom and flexibility of working from home and did not want to go back. The heated discourse around forced RTO (return to office) in the last year is only proof of that.

However, despite the COVID-inspired push into more digital experiences, we also saw something on the consumer side that defied the predictions–something crucial to bear in mind as predictions about AI swirl around us. 

People could not wait to get back to being with other people. People could not wait to start having in-person shared communal experiences, whether it was bowling, going to concerts, going to parks, or going to cafes and restaurants.

I won’t drop 20 links here, but there is a mountain of evidence that we are social creatures and do not do well in isolation. In ten years. Who knows? AI may be so good that our brains receive what they need from interacting with robots. (Our brains aren’t really great at distinguishing reality, so this is absolutely possible.) 

But not yet.

Currently, we’re surrounded on all sides by the media telling us how important AI is and how it’s going to disrupt everything. And it is.* However, similar to the COVID-era predictions about future consumer behavior, I think that the predictions are over-hyped from the perspective of delivering the customer experiences we want to deliver. 

Today, right now, humans can connect and generate an emotional response that AI tools simply cannot. 

For the foreseeable future, a human experience is still the ultimate competitive advantage, and the more you can lean into human connection, relationships, and/or shared experiences, the more you can provide the rich emotional experiences that make customers stick and that permeate our human essence, making us want to come back for more.

* To keep this post manageable, I have kept it narrowly focused on AI and the human aspects of customer experience, avoiding AI’s impact on jobs, economies, and other areas of society. These impacts will be swift, sometimes miraculous, frequently devastating, and will affect us all.

The post Lessons from COVID for the Age of AI appeared first on Customers That Stick.

Note: This blog post contains information related to and provide by a client of CTS Service Solutions.

With our webinar upcoming this week, Hassle-Free CX: Define, Design, and Deliver, I enjoyed getting to talk to Dawn Varghese of Agara Labs about the role conversational AI is playing in today’s customer support environment and what the near-term future looks like.

First, Sign Up for the Webinar: November 19, 2020

This event has now passed. Sign up is no longer available.

An Interview with Dawn Varghese

Please tell us a little about the mission of Agara.

Agara is an autonomous voice engine powered by Real-time Voice AI designed to handle customer support calls without any human intervention.

Focused on improving customer experience in the banking and financial services sectors, among others, Agara conducts phone calls in a natural, conversational manner while providing instant responses 24×7.

Agara’s mission is to drive better customer experiences, and act as a platform that offers credible and robust self-service over voice, power natural human-like conversations, and in the process, drive significantly better operational efficiency.

With the current state of the technology, where does Conversational AI add the most value both to the customer and the company?

Currently, there has been a growing awareness about what conversational AI is, and what it brings to the table. While chatbots have got more acceptance and have played a major role in this, given the rise of advanced speech recognition technologies, voice bots are fast gaining traction to become the most chosen customer self-service tool.

However, the state of affairs with voice support till recently was not great. Users had to go through a fixed tree of options, press preassigned buttons, and speak very scripted flows.

The users were led by the bot or led by the IVR, rather than leading the conversation. The technology was not meant to drive autonomous human-like conversation but was just to have the first level of interaction before it was actually passed on to an agent.

Today, the technology has completely shifted, where the first layer of conversation has itself become intelligent in recognizing the need of the customer, irrespective of the situation they are in.

The conversations no longer need to be linear and can be completely accomplished with no human intervention whatsoever. In contrast to what it was, today autonomous voice bots are capable of delivering highly personal, contextual, and frictionless self-service in a natural human-like, intelligent way.

What are the typical concerns you’ve received from C-Suite decision makers about integrating AI into their customer support journey? How do you answer them?

This is where our data comes in, where we have a promise of actually not leaving the customer high and dry in any situation. It could be the fact that the customer doesn’t prefer to talk or engage with the bot. Or it could be the fact that we were not able to recognize what exactly the customer wants, or there may be an error on the customer part.

Sometimes these things are possible, in say one out 20 calls, because of the variables involved in voice; it could be the accent, it could be intonation, it could be the speed, volume, or a noisy environment.

And in those situations, we will transfer the call to an agent if the agent is available or capture certain critical information so that we make the information available to the agent when the agent is back to do a call-back.

The other common question that we often hear is how Agara as a voice AI solution can exist in conjunction with their critical IT and telephony systems. Customers also ask how long it takes for such integration. API availability is something that fast tracks our implementation because we don’t have to build it from scratch; typically, there are also concerns and questions around training because the understanding of customers, with what they have seen till now is the fact that they have to train the system for a long duration for the system to get intelligent.

However, with us, because we are purpose-built for high-velocity use cases, we either come with ready-to-use cases or with use cases that we identify with customers. But in either situation, we believe that our architecture is structured to drive the reusability of our conversation blocks or component-based architecture 60-70% of the time.

So, a date is a date, a mobile number is a mobile number, a credit card number is a credit card number for a retailer, or for an insurance company, or for a bank. We are able to reuse a lot of things that we’ve already developed, we already take care of what we call normally a conversational explosion, which is about the 16 different ways in which you can say a particular date. 

This patented technology actually reduces the amount of training to actually meet customer expectations. This is a significant differentiator for us in terms of go-to-market. These are some of the specific questions that we get from customers, which we think are very strong differentiators for Agara.

Will AI become a source of competitive advantage for larger enterprises or will we see robust third-party solutions geared towards SMB’s (as exists in the SAAS sector)? With so much of the power of AI coming from specific learning, will these solutions truly be able to compete with the big players?

I believe that voice AI technology and companies like Agara are democratizing the acceptance of voice AI into the customer experience.

Fundamentally, from a technology perspective, Agara is suitable for both enterprises and SMBs. The way we have charted out our product strategy is the fact that for small and medium enterprises who don’t have a lot of dedicated teams internally, they will be able to reuse a lot of self-service features that we are building, which will enable them to get on board on the platform with very minimal effort from their side, of course, they will have the teams from Agara supporting them.

Whereas for enterprises, it may be a little bit more involved process, given their infrastructure, their processes, and systems, with which we have to coexist. 

So it may require two different approaches. But Agara is built to be suited for both enterprises, and SMBs, largely being driven through minimal amounts of data that we need for training, the ready-built modules that from a conversation block perspective, workflow perspective, the self-service tools, API integration, etc. The approaches could be slightly different, but our product strategy is geared to do that.

Where do you think the AI will be in five years, both capability-wise and adoption-wise?

I think nobody knows the clear answer to this, but you know, if you ask RPA companies, automation has become very much commonplace today and there is a full suite of providers who have evolved quite fast in the last five years or so; they are still targeting the processes to automate that were typically run by ERP companies.

But with AI, we will see more and more processes coming into the automatable bucket, hyper-automation, or autonomous AI. The technology is set to evolve, with more robust and complex language models becoming commonplace.

As we move forward, we will definitely see improvement in the kind of sophistication and the depth of use cases. Largely, IVR based one-level interaction will be completely taken over by speech-based technologies, and evolve into delivering seamless customer experience over voice.

The post Conversational AI in Customer Service: An Interview with Dawn Varghese of Agara appeared first on Customers That Stick.

Chip Bell innovates the world of customer service with the best practices of customer-centric organizations and provides powerful cutting-edge ideas and unique strategies that business leaders can immediately act on.

Getting Inside Your Customer’s Imagination

Did you know that some of your favorite products today were ideas from customers?

Customer co-creation has been around since the 20th century — minus the fancy name. Brands have been observing customers, listening to what customers want and creating new products and services based on their ideas.

Vans, Starbucks, McDonalds — these are just a few of the companies that have successfully co-created with customers. Take inspiration from these stories and start engaging your customers in conversations that let their ideas flow.

In this fun interview, Chip talks about his new book Inside your Customer’s Imagination and how to utilize one of your business’ greatest innovation asset — your customers’ ideas.

Some of the highlights from my conversation with Chip are…

• What it means to co-create with your customers,
• Customers’ involvement in the designs of Vans shoes and
• The results of these customers’ ideas in business and our lifestyles

Make sure to learn more about these topics and get other great insights from Chip in the video below.

To learn more about Chip, check out his bio beneath the video.

ABOUT DR. CHIP R. BELL

Chip R. Bell is a renowned keynote speaker and author of several award-winning, best-selling books including Take Their Breath Away, Service Magic, Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service, Magnetic Service and Kaleidoscope:  Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles. His newest book is Inside Your Customer’s Imagination. Dr. Bell has appeared live on CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg TV, CNN and his work has been featured in Fortune, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Businessweek, Entrepreneur magazine and Inc. magazine. Global Gurus in 2020 ranked him for the sixth year in a row in the top three keynote speakers in the world on customer service.  

CONNECT WITH CHIP

Web: https://chipbell.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/chiprbell

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiprbell

The post Popular Products Co-Created with Customers appeared first on Customers That Stick.

Empathy requires more than a shift in mindset; it requires a specific set of skills

As a customer experience strategist and customer service trainer, empathy has always been a cornerstone of our approach to customer experience and service.

Customer experience is difficult and is defined more than anything by human emotion. Having teams that understand how to both have and demonstrate empathy is essential to delivering Hero-Class® service.

Listening to much of the talk about empathy in recent weeks, I’ve noticed that a key piece of the empathy puzzle is often missing, a crucial aspect of helping others become more empathetic.

Most of the discussions I have heard lately have focused on shifting mindset, simply trying to have more empathy by attempting to understand the other person’s perspective, their journey, and most importantly, their feelings. 

This openness and willingness to understand others is a crucial first step to empathy.

However, once a person commits to this mindset, they are confronted with the very real challenge of how to approach this change.

For, empathy requires not only a shift in mindset but a specific set of skills that help facilitate the changes in perspective and understanding that lead to empathy.

Empathy requires not only a shift in mindset but a specific set of skills.

Let’s look at three crucial skills for facilitating empathy:

• Countering Instinctual Reactions. Part of the ways both implicit bias and confirmation bias distort thinking and impede empathy is through their automaticity. They are ingrained reactions based on beliefs, both conscious and not. Someone observes the action of another, then automatically creates an answer for what it means without trying to really understand where the other person is coming from. Counteracting both implicit biases and cognitive biases is not easy. Getting people to interrupt their automatic reactions and to open themselves to an alternative explanation is not something that the average person will be automatically good at just because they are told to “have empathy.”
• Practicing Self Awareness. Understanding not only one’s biases but how their experience might be drastically different than someone else’s requires self-awareness. One needs to understand how to approach self evaluation. What are the questions one needs to ask to better understand what their beliefs are, where they come from, and how those beliefs might be completely changed if they used a different lens to try to understand the person in front of them?
• Asking Effective (and Nonjudgmental) Questions. One thing I’ve seen in the training room is that many people find asking questions difficult, at least when the subject is delicate or emotionally charged. What do I ask? How do I ask it so it doesn’t seem judgmental? How do I ask it so they know I really care? Questions are crucial to empathy, because you can’t properly give or demonstrate empathy if you don’t know what it is you need to be empathetic about. 

Of course, the above ideas do not encapsulate everything that is needed to be better at empathy; but they are three big rocks that, if not innate in a person, must be learned for someone to practice empathy well.

At the heart of the above three ideas is an old principle from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. In fact, I often use Covey’s famous story of the screaming kids on the subway in our trainings. 

A group of kids were screaming and acting rambunctious one morning on a subway car, and the father didn’t seem to care. Covey got in a huff, assuming the worst, and said something to the distracted father. When Covey learned that the kids’ mother had just died, he had an immediate change of perspective and heart. 

This story perfectly captures the links among automatic preconception, listening and understanding, and empathy.

The openness and skills to have and demonstrate empathy are distributed much like any other characteristic in a population. Some live their everyday lives as open-hearted empaths, some lack the capacity to feel it at all, and the great majority are in the continuum between. 

For most, empathy is not a switch you can flip. True, it requires an opening of the mind and of the heart, but it also requires a set of, sometimes, unfamiliar skills.

If we want to increase empathy in this world, we have to help people acquire the skills to both hear the stories of others and to understand how to quiet their own stories long enough to do so.

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