BARE Shares - Customer Experience Index Reveals Brands Lack Human Connection

As bots and AI continue to enhance and become, well, “human”, more and more companies continue to invest in AI rather than people. But at what point does the customer care, or outright prefer, a human connection? Here, BARE International shares an article by Forrester for Forbes on how Customer Experience Index Reveals Brands Lack Human Connection. ‘CX is lagging, creating financial risk. Download Forrester’s complimentary guide to understand why customer loyalty is eroding.

Forrester’s 2018 Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) results continue to show that companies are struggling to create and sustain a human connection with their customers. This is not a question of delighting customers as an endgame or some fluffy sense of emotional attachment; this is a crass and clear story of financial risk.

Taking a step back, it’s proving to be a monumental strategic pivot to reorient operations around the customer. The challenge is daunting: Companies need to reverse deeply rooted operating models that prioritized control and efficiency and overcome product and delivery silos that fracture customer journeys and frustrate customers.

In addition, companies need to take the big leap from viewing customers through a macro lens (an account holder, a subscriber, a segment, or a persona) to viewing a customer as a single sentient human being — and then operationalizing that view.

To dig into this, we looked at different industries — including retail, banking, wealth management, insurance, airlines, and automotive — in our CX Index, specifically comparing how customers perceive the quality of emotional- and human-oriented experiences versus those that speak to the core operational capabilities of the industry. We looked at it in two ways:

How quality scores — effectiveness and ease — compare with emotion.
How core operational measures (e.g., banking services) compare to the customer’s sense of how well their loyalty is rewarded.

The results are at the same time shocking and unsurprising: Companies are struggling to create human connections that matter.

Acknowledging that it is not clear what a rational expectation for human connections should be, there are natural and manmade headwinds that are making what is possible harder to achieve:

Declining trust in institutions
Switch incentives that excite churn
New digitally native, experience-driven companies purposed to the customer
Internal silos that complicate experience design and delivery
Underperforming and mostly supply-side loyalty programs
The “sameness” of digital transformation efforts that erode brand distinction

Today’s good economic conditions are likely masking the real threats to the P&L, but that is a matter of time — time that companies desperately need to tune themselves to an unforgiving market.’

How are you incorporating AI in your business? Do you have a healthy balance between automation and human connection? BARE International’s comprehensive analysis reports provide comprehensive insights geared to give you the industry advantage. Ask us how.

Read the full article at the source here.

Customer Experience Research & Insights by BARE International

Your business challenges are unique. Our proven success across industry categories stems from asking the right questions to help you address the challenges you face everyday. Each solution we offer is customized to meet your needs, providing actionable feedback to help you make critical business decisions. We treat you the way you want to treat your own customers, providing a dedicated project team to give you the attention you deserve and an infrastructure spanning the globe to provide the resources you need to understand your customers’ experiences.