Let’s not forget how close we are to the people we serve…
...or how far away we may be.
Early in my career I had the good fortune of working with Fred Leichter, the head of experience design for Fidelity. He would include a closeup of eyes in his presentations to hit the point home that people are that close to the screens we design and that their interactions with us impact their lives in ways large and small.
Embedded in the message was the truth that if customers are that close to us, we need to get that close to them through including them in the design process and understanding what we can do to weave experiences for them that help them to achieve their goals. He worked with Tom Tullis, who led user experience research and testing for Fidelity to put that principle into practice. Tom was a cornerstone of the Boston UX community and we were devastated to lose him in 2020.
They created one of the most talented teams in the industry and it continues today.
I was reminded of them recently as I did research for a project I’m working on that involves showing up for people during a digital experience in a very human way. I searched for woman crying while using phone and was bowled over by the quantity of images.
We know that people reach for their phones in moments of celebration and in moments of suffering, in fact we have more than likely done it ourselves. But how close do those contexts feel to us as we are designing to improve their experiences? This is why I have focused my career on Human-centered design with the belief that the people we serve can create with us as partners as experts in their own lives. Business is the medium, and the experiences that result from decisions made play out across many channels and affect both personal and social outcomes and business results.
When designing digital experiences, we are one degree removed from people. We may read NPS verbatims, but that isn’t the same as seeing someone’s face, hearing the inflection in their voice, and relating to them and their situation to build empathy and understanding. We advocate for this kind of face time and research to not be neglected but there is not always the time, budget, or understanding of the importance of it in terms of helping us hit the mark and de-risk the initiative.
Meanwhile, call center representatives who are on the phone every day with customers will hear the full spectrum of emotion and the real stories of people’s lives. They also have the ability in the best cases to directly and immediately engage with people to bring humanity to the situation and adjust standard workflows to match the reality of what is needed. For this reason, conducting research in the call center and including call center associates in the design process is also essential.
Full-service experiences involve human support over the phone, in a physical environment or through live or asynchronous chat with a specialist. Digital experiences involve apps, websites, texts, emails and chatbots. There is a drive within organizations to push toward self-service but when self-service fails, inevitably folks will seek out support via chat or calling in. The problem that occurs is that people receiving the inbound chats and calls do not always have the context of seeing what the customer is seeing or being able to show them around. Also, those experience are voice only interactions and very rarely involve video.
I recently became aware of the technology company, Glance, that connects specialists in a call center or physical environment with customers engaged in a digital experience. These connections happen real time via video during the moments that matter most. This bridging of human support and digital experience creates a new channel of “guided experience". US Bank did a great job with this, connecting local tellers with customers who knew them by name from visits to the bank, but this time meeting in the digital channel. During the pandemic shut down, this enabled customers to see a friendly face and get some support with things that were new to them like doing a mobile check deposit, for example. Intuit has used this technology to connect people with tax specialists to support them in completing their taxes from within the TurboTax application and one of the largest consumer brands in the world has used it to connect people with experts as they shop for the perfect new product.
We want to deliver on modern consumer expectation for convenience, but we don't want the customers we value and have decided to put at the center of our business strategy to feel like just a number pushed through a system. In the push to leverage AI/ML and chatbots to improve self-service experiences we also want to ensure that we leverage them to identify the situations that truly need human support.
The latest technology can help us to intelligently determine what tasks or jobs to be done are purely transactional and possible in a digital channel and which are not. We want to be able to sense when someone is doing something routine and when someone is trying to interact with us on the worst day of their lives, so that we can choose to show up differently. We also want to reach out proactively to people who have been struggling, to let them know we care and to hopefully affect positive change in their lives.
We can use the latest tech to signal us when people are experiencing a life, health or financial crisis or frustration in the digital channel and through sensing their presence in the digital environment we can connect them with the most relevant specialist to help. This transforms a company's app into a location for incoming calls, screen sharing and collaboration.
The screen can be a veil that conceals our humanity or one that effectively draws us into it, providing us with opportunities to engage with empathy and create experiences that build trust and improve relationships. My hope for the community is that we explore how to leverage digital as a bridge and foundations that enable and empower the best, and most human experience possible.
