Do Business Well

The human touch is going to come back into fashion. It will (yet again) become the differentiating factor between services. Computers can deliver lousy service pretty much on their own. The very best of humankind needs to be coaxed and coached out into the open. People need to be showcased and supported.

On the way to the virtual world some businesses have a lapse of memory — it’s a kind of ‘Honey, I forgot the people‘ approach. Others adopt an Animal Farm like ‘machine is good, people are bad’ approach. If they adopt the attitude of pigs they should expect to end up as bacon.

Every business should understand that at heart the internet is not a machine, it’s the interaction of millions of people. In the end someone still says ‘I have something for you to buy’ and someone still replies ‘I would like to buy it’. The technology simply represents one set of people trying to sell to another group of people.

There is the person who runs the business — responsible for its culture, objectives and stance on service. Then there are the people who design the processes and the electronic services that the e-customer must use to deal with them. Don’t forget the people who actually make the stuff that the e-customer wants to buy. Or the people that the e-customer meets who actually do stuff for him. They all matter and they are all involved.

Unless business is very careful it will put layers of technology in between buyer and seller in such a way that the connection between them is broken. Ask yourself a few questions: How do you smile at an e-customer over the internet? How do you exchange friendly chat and human warmth through a TV screen? How do you sense that an e-customer is confused, needs help or is unhappy through a WAP phone?

The culture, processes, training and recruitment all need to deliver the appropriate human capacity or characteristic that the e-customer will appreciate. He wants better and better personal service the less human contact he receives.

The advertising has made promise after promise. These people need to deliver their part of the promises that have been made. Sometimes the e-customer deals with flawless e-systems and then ‘Wham!’ He runs into the brick wall of poor human servants.

Play your human card

Often the involvement of real live people is left too late in the e-customer experience because they are seen as a last resort by a business that thinks the best way of making money is to remove the human touch. The best, most human e-customer experiences should use technology to make people even greater servants.

Business must determine where to place people in order to gain the greatest benefit for all involved. Try a new (dangerous) thought, ‘maybe the best time to get people together is whenever they want to talk’.

Throw out that anti-human prejudice! The virtual world is not about removing the people. Build in real relationships, feedback loops and achieve continuous improvements to the proposition and its delivery by really getting people involved.

Make sure that the service is able to move smoothly from human to system to human again If your systems let your people down then your people will be put under pressure. If they do not feel motivated and fulfilled then they will respond to such pressure by siding with the e-customer against the system and, by extension, against the business.

Once you start to rely on the best of human abilities it will be necessary to create incentives, culture, roles and management that gain your people’s goodwill. It will require your people actually to care about the objectives of the company and about the needs of e- customers. People rarely empathize with others if they are worrying about their own lack of fulfilment.

What happens to turn decent people into those that serve me badly? They must start the day as reasonable human beings but something happens as they put on the uniform. Something cultural. Something less than desirable.

Experience has shown that more than half of your e-customer services team are unhappy. It is not a revered profession and its standing is likely to diminish further at just the time when the demands of the job are increasing. Unhappy workers will invariably and eventually lead to unhappy customers. A lesson learned and forgotten a million times first by old economy firms and now by many anti-people, new economy start-ups.

This is why meeting the e-customer’s expectations demands an e-culture. That doesn’t necessarily mean that free, open, democratic and empowered organizations have to deliver via an electronic front. It does mean that if you deal via an electronic front you’re going to need a human at your back who cares what happens. Without them you will not be able to compete.

At what point should the important (and expensive) human card be played? Call centres, live text chat, letters written by people, and even the personal home visit can all play a significant part. Plugging people into the e-customer experience is the vital point at which virtual and real worlds meet.

As technology becomes more and more powerful it may be that people continue to provide its most acceptable face. The e-customer may still not want to deal with all the technology himself. He will desire its benefits but not want to involve himself directly with all of it. Technology can ‘magnify the man’ but the e-customer may prefer to be magnified indirectly via his human agents.

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