CX - Make it human

When you ask people what they want from a service experience, the reply is a personal touch, someone who treats me like an individual, someone who listens, understands me, keeps their promises, cares about me, does not process me, makes it easy etc.

All these are traits of a ‘human 2 human’ conversation. 

Customers are not looking for you to be their best mate; what they yearn for is someone to treat them like a human being and not just another number. 

We all appreciate someone taking time to properly listen. 

We all respond to honesty, directness, genuine empathy, kindness, and a sense of energy and confidence. These are the qualities that elevate a service or sales experience into a human conversation, and which turn faceless service staff into individuals who can genuinely make us feel different about our problem, their organisation and even our whole day. It feels more human. 

Customers are people, after all.

Even in situations where we want quick service, we still want that human touch. 

For some reason, in service conversations, the sense that we’re two living, breathing human beings can quickly evaporate. 

Have you experienced a situation where the person serving you treats you like a number and approaches your ‘personal’ situation like just another task? 

I am sure we all have. It does not feel great to be on the receiving end of transactional service: just being processed. 

It is all too easy for service people to slip into habitual patterns where they sleepwalk from one customer conversation to the next.

When you are dealing with your 100th customer of the day and answering the same questions over and over, it is easy to understand why this happens. 

But flip it around: when we are on the other end, as a customer, we hate being processed. We are not a sausage in a sausage factory… we are a human being I hear you cry! 

All the research suggests that it is how you make customers feel that counts. 

‘When 1,620 consumers were tested under laboratory conditions, 63% said they felt their heart rate increase when they thought about receiving great customer service. For 53% of those tested, receiving great service triggered the same cerebral reactions as feeling loved’ 

When it comes to customer service, it’s not about what consumers think. 

Great service is about feelings. 

If it is about feelings, making customer conversations feel more human has to be the way forward.