Human-Centric Service: Only Connect

Dreamforce 2019 Reflections

Dreamforce 2019 is wrapping up and I’m in a coffee shop taking a moment to collect my breathe, thoughts, and feelz. It’s been an awesome week of challenging ideas and inspirational vision. These are the things I’ll be keeping close to heart as I finish out the year and look toward 2020.

Voice is the New Must Have

“It’s time to do more with voice,” Is the rallying cry of this idea. It’s convenient to think that customers exclusively want to communicate with us through our lowest cost channels. In reality, our customers want to connect with us all the time, across multiple channels. Email, Chat, WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… and yes, they would like to pick up the phone and talk us.

Is it surprising? When you asks someone what they love about a conference, how often do they share how much they love being able to talk to people. Our customers want to talk to us. It’s time we stop deflecting them and engage. Do more with voice.

Augmented Intelligence will Beat AI

That said, no one wants to talk about resetting a password. If your voice channels only activates when something has gone wrong and you need to mitigate an issue, you miss the value add of human connection. While AI is getting better all the time, AI has inherent weaknesses that are showing. Better than either AI or personnel solving a problem alone is the two working together. Using Cloud Telephony, real-time transcription, and Einstein, Salesforce demonstrated the power of AI / Phone Consultant collaboration. Einstein listens and serves up the relevant information based on the context of the conversation, leaving consultants free to listen, empathize, and connect with customers. The approach lets computers do what computers do well, and people do what people do well.

Invest in Developing your People

This elevates our Consultants roles and value in our organization. We don’t need to staff bays of people to translate human speech to text and conduct searches. Tech got there. Now, our Consultants can focus on the more rewarding and value add work of connecting with customers. But the agent that you recruited, trained, and rewarded for being fast at translating voice to text isn’t skilled for their new world. The need the training in emotional intelligence. They need support in trusting AI to do its job without feeling threatened. They need recognized for connecting with customers. If we don’t guide this transformation, we will drag them kicking and screaming to the hurt of everyone. Their new role: “Only Connect”.

All this falls under the umbrella of Human-Centric service. It gets to ideas I’ve not been able to encapsulate in a single term before. As a customer, I’m not an account number, and I’m not a persona. I am an individual at a unique time and place. The customer who calls you will never call you again. The next time you talk with them they’ll be a different version of themselves with a different context. Whomever they are when they reach out to you and whatever their context, they need to be at the center of their conversation with you. They need you to connect.

Human-Centric Service: Only Connect.