Organisations are missing the human ingredient when planning their customer experience strategies. Too many CX plans are based on flawed customer personas, which are detached from ‘human’ reality.
Current CX strategies are being built “on poor foundations”, David Wales, CX consultant and founding member with Purposefully Human, told Customer Experience Magazine. “Personas are not sophisticated enough for what we are trying to do with them,” he added.
According to Wales, corporate CX thinking needs to take into account human emotions that can impact decisions at any one time. Incorporating a greater degree of human understanding within customer experience is a great opportunity to build trust with customers.
However, the rapid push to rollout big IT systems to automate the CX function, threatens to obscure the human element. “Big consultancies and big tech companies are dominating the space,” said Wales.
“We don’t understand that the foundations are poor. It is going to get worse because we’re going to start using more AI and other technologies. We don’t necessarily understand where it will go, and we’ll build in inequalities and irrational behaviour,” he predicted.
Purposefully Human’s approach shares similarities with Bruce Temkin’s Humanity At Scale initiative, launched at the start of the year.Temkin’s leadership programme aims to encourage decision making that takes into account not just customers and employees but anybody that comes into contact with the organisation.
For Wales there is a growing sense of urgency around the need to create more human organisations. “There needs to be a lot more boldness and urgency about getting the ‘people piece’ done right,” said Wales.
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