AI and the Human Touch

AI, Humans and great businesses

I had some furniture delivered recently, and the experience got me thinking about the role technology plays in our businesses and, critically, the limitations of that role.

Go to any business conference this year and you’d be forgiven for thinking that AI (whether ‘generative’ or just plain vanilla) is the only topic worth talking about. And there is no question that new technologies have the capacity to change businesses every bit as much as they have already changed our lives as consumers.

It’s strange, in fact, the way that AI seems to have penetrated our home lives so much faster than our work ones. Plenty of people wake up in the morning and ask a voice-activated AI like Alexa or Siri to sort out a drivetime playlist for them whilst they drive to a workplace where they will have to comb through pages of paper records because their invoicing system doesn’t even have basic search capability.

Discussions about AI in business are often dominated by sci-fi inspired guff about augmented reality changing rooms and staff-less stores. The reality is often much duller, but also much more relevant to real businesses. I recall one powerful case-study, for example, of a grocery business deploying a machine learning model to calculate how many rolls and other bread products to bake for their bakery counter each day, and getting a significant payback from doing so.

For a sense of the practical ways in which AI could revolutionise your business, it is worth stepping back to observe practical processes in action and consider how they could be improved.

Take my delivery, for example. AI systems could have helped the warehouse to ensure that the products I ordered were all in the right place at the right time. It could have optimised how they were stored to ensure pick times were as short as possible. It could have optimised the way products were loaded onto the van and probably did generate a route-plan for the drivers.

Communication with me as a customer could have been AI powered too - there is no reason I couldn’t agree a delivery slot with a chatbot, or use it to query details of my order.

And all of that is before you even consider the role that AI-powered mechanical solutions (e.g. robots) could have played in getting all those logistical steps to happen even faster.

But what also struck me when thinking about my delivery was the role that real humans played in making the experience an excellent one. Behind every chatbot needs to sit a real person, for example, who can deal with the unexpected problem or, frankly, just reassure an anxious customer.

Robotic technology has not yet (thank goodness) reached a point where it could replace the drivers who brought the product into my house and carried it upstairs, but even if it could, it would not have replaced the smile, the chat and the little bit of Q&A about how to care for the product which turned an OK customer experience into an excellent one.

And just as much as the human touch makes a difference at the ‘delivery’ end of the experience, so it does at the front end when actually buying something in the first place. In a shop, for example, AI technologies can make a huge difference in making sure that the right products are available, in the right sizes and colours in the right stores when they are needed. It can also revolutionise many back-end processes like reordering, returns handling etc. And of course, armed with a bit of customer data AI systems can do incredible things in profiling and segmenting customers, ensuring that the marketing messages they get and the experiences we deliver to them are optimised.

But read any research of how customers shop and where they prefer to go, and you will see front and centre the role of the real humans who work there. A cheery greeting, an elegantly handled complaint, a well-informed sales discussion or just a warm helpful demeanour can all go a long way to creating the kind of experience that brings customers back again and again.

The conclusion? If you persist in seeing technology investment just as a way of employing fewer and fewer people, you may be missing what makes your brand valuable to your customers.

The great business of the future, then, will be the one that best marries the power of technology with the power of a well-trained, well-motivated workforce doing the right things for their customers.

The thing is, as anyone who has run a business with thousands of colleagues across hundreds of sites will tell you - the latter is at least as difficult to achieve as the former.

So the next time you head to a business conference, try to find one which spends as much time talking about how to deliver a great experience for your customers through the power of your people as it does about the potential benefits of the next generation of technology.

And the next time you are asked to sign off a huge bill to implement one of those cutting edge systems, ask yourself if you’d be as keen to sign off an equivalently sized bill to pay for training, or to provide the kind of benefits and career paths that would make you the employer of choice in your sector.

The technology project, if it is well judged and well implemented, will make you more efficient. But only marrying it with an attractive employee experience that delivers for customers will make you great.

P.S. As regular readers will remember from last week, these posts remain free for subscribers thanks to the generous support and partnership of the team at Barracuda Search. They have plenty of real-life experience of retail teams transforming both technology and customer experience, so do give them a shout if you are curious.