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“For the best kind of customer experience, there must be engagement and human-to-human interaction based on trust. Automation eliminates friction from the customer experience, which is what people are looking for, but as customers are emotional human beings, the experience needs to be “humanised” for them,” says Don Peppers, Customer Experience Expert and Author of The One-to-One Future and Extreme Trust.

Peppers is a speaker at the marcus evans CMO Summit 2017, in the Gold Coast, Australia.

In today’s automated world, how can the customer experience be “humanised”? What experience are customers looking for? 

First, let us be clear: Unless your name is Disney, it is likely your customers are not “looking for” an experience. They simply have a problem to solve or need to be met, and they want you to help them do it. So your primary objective is to make the customer’s problem go away with as little friction as possible. If the customer has to lift a finger to ensure your product works, then forget about relating to them on any higher level.

But customers are people, also, and people are emotional. Humanising the customer experience transcends your product’s features and benefits, by ensuring that customers humanise your brand in their own minds. Do your customers feel they are buying from a “someone” they can relate to, or do they think they are buying from a machine or a faceless bureaucracy? Would they think your brand or service has a “personality,” even if they cannot put it into words? Do they know why your brand is the way it is?  

What do CMOs tend to overlook or underestimate that you consider critical for engaging customers?

What many CMOs overlook is that before they can humanise the customer experience they have to eliminate every last drop of friction from the process of buying, using, and benefiting from whatever product or service they are selling.

What are the qualities of a truly frictionless customer experience?  

As a checklist, the CMO needs to keep in mind the four qualities of a frictionless CX: Reliability, Value, Relevance, and Trustability. Your product must work reliably to meet the customer’s need, your value proposition must be straightforward, all features and services must be relevant to the individual customer, and you must proactively act in the customer’s interest (trustability).

How do proactive honesty and trust turn customers into advocates? What do CMOs need to know to make it a success?

Nothing communicates humanity more directly than trust and empathy. If every time a customer interacts with you, you are watching out for their interests rather than your own, they will want to interact and buy more. And they will recommend you to their friends so their friends can benefit from doing business with you, as well.

What is “self-organisation” and how can CMOs promote it among employees? What value can it add? 

Self-organisation occurs when workers are united by a common sense of purpose, but then left to their own devices to achieve that purpose. For the CMO, this means employees must be truly engaged in their work (they want to pursue the mission), and empowered to act (with the right training, tools, information, and authority). 

Any final words of advice?

Treat the customer the way you would like to be treated if you were the customer.