This is how automation will restore companies’ humanity
It’s all about finding the right balance.
It’s cold in the room, and many students have wrapped themselves tightly in a warm blanket. They are here to stay for the lecture of Ben Cerveny, an experienced design strategist and product designer.
A confronting statement appears on the big screen: “Access to the ability to model complex systems defines ‘wealth’ today.” More and more, Cerveny argues, are we as humans unable to deal with the large amount of data presented to us. We just cannot grasp the complexity anymore, so we turn to machines for help to ‘metabolise’ this complexity. Essentially, the richer and more powerful we are, the more dependent on machines we become.
Now, this could lead one to a seemingly obvious conclusion: in the future, we will need fewer and fewer people to do the work, as machines increasingly become better able than us ‘mere humans’ to make the difficult decisions. The abilities of our human brain, widely regarded as the most sophisticated tool nature ever created, will become obsolete.
Or will they?
Many companies currently struggle with this: as more and more processes become automated, higher management ponders questions such as “What is the consequence of automation for my workforce?” and “What will be the role of our employees in the future?”
My answer to these questions is simple: the distribution of companies’ workforce will shift its balance from ‘process-tilted’ towards ‘service-tilted’, supported by (digital) machines of ever-increasing complexity.
Allow me to explain.
Man-machine collaboration
After his paradigm-crushing defeat at the virtual hands of IBM’s chess machine Deep Blue, Garry Kasparov, reigning chess world champion at that time, foresaw that for chess in ‘single combat’ the machine would always come out on top. Very soon, a single human grandmaster would stand no chance against an ordinary chess computer.
It turned out he was right.
Yet, not all hope is lost. In his TED talk ‘Don’t fear intelligent machines. Work with them’, Kasparov describes the revelation he had during a so-called freestyle chess tournament. The winner of this tournament was neither a human grandmaster, nor a super computer. The winners were a pair of amateur chess players, operating three ‘ordinary PCs’ during the matches. Kasparov became convinced that the future chess champions will neither be a human grandmaster nor a super computer, but a collaboration between them. (This is often referred to as a ‘centaur’, a half-human, half-AI entity.)
Cognizant’s Centre for the Future of Work makes a distinction between red work and blue work, the former referring to the work best performed by machines, the latter referring to the work that best suits human skills. While machines are very good at repetitive tasks, efficiency, prediction, and cracking large numbers, humans are unrivalled in creativity, innovation, social judgment, ethics, leadership, and empathy. This echoes the statements of visionary Kevin Kelly, which I discussed in more detail in an article on how design never changes.
(A colleague of mine at Mirabeau recently pointed out to me that doubt is actually a very useful human trait as well. Can the information be trusted? Is an analysis really true? Does the outcome make sense in this particular context? Google and Uber realised this as well and have recently started to experiment with their artificial intelligence measuring its level of confidence in a prediction or decision. One cannot help but wonder: can a machine truly learn how to doubt? Or does it remain reliant on the information it is provided?)
So even though in the future more and more activities that are currently performed by humans will be taken over by machines, there will always be room for humans to do what they’re good at. We will be freed to do the work that make us truly human, working alongside machines that’ll take care of the rest. This trend is nothing new, but rather an exciting new chapter in the storyline that started when humankind first invented tools to bend nature to its will.
Leveraging companies’ humanity
Expectations of customers will forever continue to rise, and companies will forever continue to try and exceed these expectations. It’s the nature of business. Yet, once all basic services are digitised, all processes automated, and self-service is completely sufficient, convenient and hassle-free, what then will be the differentiator for companies?
The answer (you guessed it right) lies in how personal and effective companies will be able to solve customers’ problems through the ‘human touch’ and care of customer service. This constitutes far more than just call centres or service desk employees; it’s about any kind of front-line employee that has interaction with the customer.
There are those who would argue that this kind of customer service is nothing new. However, as basic services are more and more taken care of by machines (remember: efficiency, repetition), companies are left with the opportunity to provide personalised customer service at an unprecedented scale, currently reserved for ‘premium’ customers only. This marks the birth of the service-tilted company, as less people are needed to steer the automated back-office processes, and more employees are freed to provide leadership and customer care.
Moreover, as of right now, customer service is all-too-often broken up over many different touch points. How many of us haven’t had the frustrating experience explaining the same story to different employees of the same company? Effective digitisation efforts, in which companies’ systems are linked and data is shared freely and effectively across departments, will erase this issue. In these companies, a front-line employee will be responsible for the entire customer journey of a single customer. When given the proper mandate within the organisation, this ‘service agent’ will thus be able to provide the ultimate customer experience across all touch points.
As an example, consider an airline that employs a small army of these service agents, each personally responsible for the wellbeing of a small group of flyers. From the moment of buying a ticket until the moment of arriving at the destination, the customer has access to her very own personal advisor and problem-solver. Whenever a disruption occurs, her service agent, armed with a wealth of knowledge (data), will be available to answer her questions, provide personalised solutions, and cater to her every need.
Two roads to success
Service-tilted companies stand at a crossroads: they will need to choose how to bring about the full potential of their service agents.
The left turn leads to a fully flexible workforce. Service agents are trained for customer service in general, enabled through intuitive user interfaces, and supported by elaborate algorithms for analysis, prediction and optimisation. This allows them to fully focus on providing customer service throughout the entire customer journey, regardless of position or context. The company, meanwhile, benefits from unprecedented flexibility in (ad-hoc) planning and rostering.
The right turn leads to unrivalled service quality, in which each service agent is a service specialist for one particular customer segment. Empowered with rich, simplified information about individual customers, these agents are able to provide customers the feeling of truly being understood by the company. While this approach lowers the company’s flexibility considerably, it has the major benefit of consistently providing very high quality of service. After all, different situations ask for different solutions.
Either way, companies will need to digitise their workforce and leverage the powers of man-machine collaboration. Otherwise, they will invariably lag behind their competition.
Which road will your organisation take to be future-proof?
