Digital Transformation and the Human Touch
Book Review: Steven van Belleghem’s ‘When Digital Becomes Human’
In today’s time of digital transformation, companies and businesses turn to new technologies to achieve efficiency, streamlined processes, and lowered costs. For many companies, the digital wave has allowed them to explore different avenues to be able to improve overall company performance through innovations in Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence. In Kenya, workforce automation is expected to double in the next three years. The reasons are clear: if mundane and repetitive back-office tasks can be automated, it allows a team to handle more complicated tasks that require a specific skill set, leading to increased efficiency and a streamlined process.
The shift in the industry landscape has led to technology innovations that have significant implications for people — both end customers, as well as customer service agents. As customer service plays a huge role in overall business growth, it is important for companies to ensure customers are kept happy. It should come as no surprise that if customers are not satisfied with the service provided, they will not continue to interact with the brand or organization
Businesses while welcoming the digital revolution, which now offers them previously unimaginable connection with customers, need then to be wary. Digital connectivity puts brands directly in front of their customers in an unprecedented way, but digital is by definition remote and inhuman, and as any traditional business knows successful contact with customers requires the human touch.
Today we review the book “ When Digital Becomes Human”by Steven Van who according to him digital transformation is never enough, there also needs to be a human transformation in customer relations — one that is digital but emphasizes the human interface.
The Importance of the Human Touch in a Digital World
A recent study conducted by Harvard Business Review showed that 17% of customers would stop interacting with a brand they love after one negative experience, while 59% would stop interacting after several bad experiences. While digitalization has created ease in communications between brands and customers through different digital platforms, this perk can also create a challenge for businesses and brands: it is now too easy for consumers to voice their unsatisfactory experiences with a brand or product. “It is crucial for businesses to ensure they are consistently delivering a stellar digital customer service,” noted Steven. “Automation technology cannot work solely by itself — it also requires the human touch. Combining both humans and technology together allows businesses to provide enhanced customer experience.”
Recent insights from neuroscience tell us how human decision making is driven by the emotional as much as, if not more than, the rational. Computers and e-commerce websites are not good at the emotional. Whereas it is the creative and empathetic human touch that we know makes people click with people. In this book Van Belleghem offers a vision of future marketing that combines savvy use of big data and all that digital can provide with a reinvigorated human approach to customer relations.
Using examples from newcomers like Uber and AirBnb and established brands such as Amazon, Apple, Toyota, ING, and Starbucks, Van Belleghem explains why introducing the human personal touch can be the difference between keeping and losing a customer. First, however, the digital has to be right. He is in no doubt that companies without a credible digital offering supported by a sound digital ecosystem will not survive, and so part of the book lays out a very useful template for digital transformation, covering digital marketing, big data and predictive analytics, privacy concerns, crowdsourcing, etc.
The second half of the book, which is confidently titled ‘Human Transformation’, looks at how technology is getting smarter in connecting with people, at the role of corporate leadership in setting the scene, and how organizations through what he calls ‘heartketing’ can build cultures that promote positive human connection with customers, and finally at how customers need to have a person to talk to not a robot or a screen and what a digitally transformed company needs to do to integrate this.
Here he addresses the central role people should be allowed to play in the customer relationship — moving them away from purely technical support roles, to ones where the emotional component comes to the fore and the customer is met with creativity, emotion and passion.
Van Belleghem’s acknowledges the value of human empathy in today’s digital landscape, and the role human interactions play in customer service: “Customers want to feel as though their query is highly important to the organization,” he observed. “Through automation and artificial intelligence, businesses are able to deal with a large number of customer queries, and be more efficient — however, all of this isn’t necessary if the end customer feels more like a commodity rather than a valued customer. This is where the human touch is needed to provide the emotional connection customers need when interacting with a product or service.”
Van Belleghem’s argument that the human touch will become more, not less important, in the future, is a convincing one, and this book is a useful manual for any business that wants to know how to go about incorporating the human touch in their digital transformation process.
