Balancing AI and the Human Touch: The Future of Personalized Customer Engagement

AI and automation have the potential to transform customer interactions by providing more efficient, personalized, and accessible service. But can technology alone provide the human touch that is sometimes needed? And do consumers want this in a machine?

As brands strive for hyper-personalization and automation, they must carefully choose which interactions to personalize and when that personalization is mechanical. And he should be transparent when he does so. Otherwise, they will feel frustrated and disappointed. Or worse, like a Turing test gone wrong, you feel let down, confused, and betrayed.

Let’s take a simple example. How does it feel when you get an automatic birthday message or happy holidays message?

When I think about that question, I myself am not satisfied when I get it. There is nothing personal or personal about the generation or delivery of the message. It simply compares the current month and date with the date of birth, takes the name from the database, and uses a bunch of email templates to generate the message. There is no caring person behind it who decides to take time out of their day to reach out and give good wishes.

Or take this step further. What if this message had been carefully crafted and personalized, so that it seemed like it was coming from a person, would that have been better?

In fact, this is where AI technology is going, and some companies are already taking this too far. Those small steps quickly become big cascades to the world that force customers to interact with machines and AI that don’t always behave well. Take this example scenario where someone in need of mental support interacts with an AI, but the conversation ends abruptly:

(scroll to #7 “Sad” – it’s 1 minute 28 seconds)

Did technology simply fail to come up with a follow-up answer? Is the website or connection down? Is the technology programmed to recover and reach the client, or better yet, relay this to a human? He still desperately needed help.

Reflecting on these questions does not mean that firms should ignore the potential benefits of using AI and automation in the right circumstances. Instead, it points to the importance of understanding the right times and ways to use advanced technology, and knowing when to involve human expertise, and how to ensure a smooth and acceptable transfer and transition.

What consumers want

As businesses shape the revolution and march inexorably towards using technology to increase efficiency and further digital collaboration, the goal should be to provide consumers with what they want – relevant, beneficial, and timely product exchanges. But what level of personalization and personalization should a company strive for in each interaction?

That depends on the situation and the purpose of the customer. For example, AI can be deployed selectively and tastefully. In some cases, it’s best that no one is involved (and it should be obvious that this is the case). In others, humans must be in the loop, where AI is used to augment human capabilities and reduce human limitations.

“Human touch”

Consider these aspects of human touch agents – and think here that the agent can mean a person or a machine:

• It sounds human and conveys unconditional empathy.
• He listens, understands, and suggests appropriate lessons based on understanding the context of the current discussion.
• Demonstrates good judgment, courtesy, tact, and common sense in solving problems in real time, achieving status as a strategic business partner.
• Build a level of trust with the client, achieving status as a trusted advisor.
• Personalize the experience to make the customer feel special.
• Relates to the customer by telling meaningful stories in conversation.
• It remembers important details of previous conversations.

All of this may sound difficult for machines to emulate, however advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are beginning to close even these gaps. When asked, about 40% of consumers believe that AI has the potential to improve customer service (in that same survey of consumers, only 26% did not believe it could), suggesting that once it does, and if it does so in a human-like manner. by the way, they may not care who helps them as long as they get what they want.[i]

So, what do people want?

• Short or no waiting times – Time is precious, and customers appreciate quick responses.
• Accessible service – Availability on all platforms and at any time is important.
• Fast service – Once engaged, customers expect a quick solution.
• Integrated service – A seamless transition between service channels without duplication is essential.
• Accurate and quick responses – Quick and correct answers build trust.
• Relevant and relevant recommendations – Personal and unobtrusive product, service, and reasonable support recommendations are accepted.
• A warm and pleasant experience – Friendly and memorable service inspires loyalty.

Pitfalls to avoid when using AI in customer engagement:

In planning for success, it is important to consider what to avoid, to minimize unnecessary mistakes. To improve machine or human performance, learn from the mistakes of others. Here are some risks you can avoid:

• The tendency is to over-automate before you carefully evaluate the full impact automation can have on the customer experience. It may be improving the bottom line (slowly), but does it ultimately improve customer satisfaction, or make it worse?
• Putting a premium on playing tricks with technology or customer experience, while not focusing on whether the outcome is right. Specify the value of the use case. Improper use may result, such as wishing a customer a happy birthday when they have never given you permission to collect and use their birthday.
• Losing sight of the cause and fixing it. Why did the customer ask for support in the first place?
• Designing programs based on the law of averages versus incorporating individual customer preferences and ratings. Remember, some customers may need human interaction, and it may be economically justified to provide just that.
• Being a victim of automatic bias – Being sloppy, careless, insensitive, and angry, because machines do most of the customer service work – and when people are asked to provide service, they can’t – because of rust, incompetence, or it’s given completely incompetently.

5 ways to employ AI in customer engagement:

• Automate the no brainers. For example, use automation & intelligence to look up general customer information, answer frequently asked questions (FAQs), get order status, or even process a payment.
• Use automation & intelligence to differentiate and manage emails, calls, and other requests. They will quickly come to the right people who can finally close the case.
• Develop a creative workforcesuch as using GPT’s knowledge base, with filtering and learning capabilities, to rate potential FAQ answers, and provide those to staff so they can answer questions quickly, while still providing a human touch.
• Be interested in what matters to the customer and knowing things about them that are related to relationships. Use AI to help store and recall important information at the right time, and let people decide how and when to include that in the conversation for a natural flow.
• Make sure the handoffs are warm between self-service technology and the people who may need to complete the service. For example, if a customer engages in self-service, but then grows, it ensures a thorough and seamless transition of the self-service function to human agents.

Advances in AI technology that uses human touch:

• Experiment with chat bots, focusing on which interactions can be fully handled by machines, and which need to be quickly transferred to a human, or escalated to a human when it appears that the chat bot has reached its limits. This goes hand in hand with striving to find the perfect system that is friendly, helpful, and easy to do business with.
• Beware of AI’s dangerous powers, such as deafness and racism.
• Explore using proven intelligence strategies that improve relationships incrementally.
• Use real-time event processing technology, voice AI, and journey analytics to collect content behavior, discover and respond to your customers’ struggles and intent. For example, methods that cause customers to repeatedly abandon or abandon a target, such as failure to complete an application. Or customers raise their voice or click in anger, indicating high levels of frustration.
• Choose one of the best information engines and connect it to all channels. Its role: act as an always-on brain – a 24 x 7 x 365 customer memory bank, insight generator, and engagement hub that knows when to act and when to escalate to people.
• Use usability testing and customer surveys to monitor customer journeys and experiences. Plan the trip to include the right combination of automation, convenience, appropriate recommendations, and the human touch to deliver the best results.

The conclusion

We all form relationships with machines and are already heavily dependent on them. We talk to our machines, use them as assistants and sailors, and laugh at their jokes. Ten years ago, the movie “Her” was seen as science fiction, but today there are applications like Replika where people create emotional relationships with AI.

AI is here to stay. Make no mistake about it – it will take more manual jobs and change the nature of many jobs and our consumer experience, just like the industrial revolution did 100 years ago. An economic outlook published in 2017 by PWC predicted that by 2030 automation will replace up to 40% of current jobs, such as transportation, manufacturing, and commerce. [ii] And that was 5 years before the AI ​​revolution in manufacturing.

However, where social skills are more important, such as in customer service and social work, those same predictions expected the effect to be much smaller. It’s hard to say exactly how this plays out. Undoubtedly, a large part of the operations are at risk of automation, and there will be a completely unmanned customer journey. And while AI will create new jobs, and in some cases better experiences, the change will disrupt many people, who will need to adapt and re-skill.

By avoiding common pitfalls and using AI creatively, businesses can create a more technologically advanced and humane customer engagement model. The goal is not to replace human interaction but to enhance it with AI capabilities, ensuring that the customer journey is as easy as it is enjoyable.

Technology continues to change lives and create business opportunities. Those who learn to use it effectively at scale, with the right balance of automation, AI, and the human touch in customer interactions, will be more valuable to customers, and gain long-term, loyal relationships with them.

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[i] What Consumers Really Think About AI: A Global Study, 2022

[ii] PWC, Economic Outlook, 2017