Personal vs. Impersonal Customer Experience

Thomas Lah

An attendee asked the following question:

Digital customer experience is inherently impersonal. How do we balance that with the goal to achieve trusted advisor status, to know our customer better than they know themselves?

My take: The digital experience should be enhancing and augmenting the personal interactions your employees are having with customers. And the digital experience should be replacing lower value add tasks to unlock cycles to maintain a strategic, personal relationship with more customers.

What do others think?

Doug Caviness

@ThomasLah, I agree with your comments above. I would just add that once a customer relationship is digitalized and there is a robust set of analytic-driven insights associated with each account and persona using the vendor's solution, digital can actually provide an insights-driven and personalized, albeit digital, experience for human users within the customer account and the vendor's organization that can enrich the value of human to human communication. This could be realized in a variety of ways, such as a customer dashboard, just-in-time customer notifications, customer journey mapping, and prescriptive analytics.