Humanizing Customer Engagement
The troubling trend of dispassionate automation
Historically one of the core marketing strategies in the United States for driving long-term growth has been retaining high-value customers loyal to your brand—in other words ‘hugging your heavies.’ The art and science of engaging brand loyalists to strengthen their bond with the brand have gotten easier as digital technologies have evolved new and unique methods to build contextually relevant experiences.
But, while the automation, behavioral triggers, and prescience of engagement and personalization have increased brands' power to push messaging across all touchpoints, more and more consumers are choosing brands that provide authentic personalized interactions. According to the PwC Experience is Everything report (source), 59% of all consumers feel companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience.
What’s more troubling is that automated engagement has not lived up to consumer expectations leaving 75% of respondents across all regions desiring interaction with a ‘real person.’
While the report shows Japanese consumers are less interested in human interaction, the reasons are twofold—trailing digital transformation and a culture of service.
Nations with advanced digital transformation (US, UK, Germany, etc.) have a higher need for humanized interaction. According to the recent McKinsey report (source) on Using digital transformation to thrive in Japan’s new normal, “Japan has unique disadvantages that put it behind digital leaders such as the US and China”—government controls and regulations are delaying change. The report goes on to confirm that “Japan’s rate of increase in digital was lower than [their peer countries], which indicates that this result was not due to low consumer-side demand. Instead, it highlights the insufficient scaling and development of digital services by most Japanese companies.”
As Japanese organizations begin their digital transformations, they should proactively implement the recommendations within this article—and be true to their service culture—to avoid making the same mistakes of their peer countries.
This engagement gap cuts across all industries with satisfaction with the brand experience trailing the customer’s expectation by nearly 20% in most cases.
And, with only 38% of U.S. consumers saying ‘the employees they interact with understand their needs’ there is a clear mandate that brands humanize their customer engagement or lose their ‘heavies’ to a warm-hearted disruptor.
What’s the answer?
Are today’s brands equipped with the right Martech stack to enable this level of authentic engagement? And, can brands and their marketing staff humanize their approach and continuously provide the added value that customers desire from positive customer experiences?
According to an Econsultancy study (source), missing Martech components is not the top challenge for brands in the U.S. looking to humanize their customer engagement—it’s the lack of culture alignment with customer-centricity and the functional silos created around a product focus.
The McKinsey report warns that Japanese companies and executives are faced with additional challenges: “Insufficient understanding of digital technologies” and the “Lack of talent”. Only 34% of Japanese executives interviewed by McKinsey indicated their company was ready to promote digital. Japanese companies and executives looking to transform digitally must seek experienced partners to guide them through the process.
In addition, it is key for senior marketing managers to embrace their role of customer-centricity and to allow themselves permission to focus on two critical components that will help humanize their customer engagement: 1) The ‘engagement loop’ and starting down the path towards 2) ‘meaningful personalization'.
Remember, the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Find something small to test. Take that first step. Be courageous and start your journey towards creating authentic, impactful relationships with your customers.