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Imagine this, you have a feasible business plan and have successfully set up your company. You spend a week doing up your website, managing your domain and it looks beautiful.
For the next month, you slog your guts out implementing all the latest widgets and plugins to make your website as cool as possible. From the interface to the chatbot, you painstakingly design everything to be fully automated. You're ready!
Your store is now live!
Launch day arrives and you set your website to live, eager to savour the fruits of your labour. The first order comes in and you're ecstatic. All the hard work is paying off, more orders start coming in and you are thrilled. The best of it all? As your website is fully automated, you are getting sales even when you are sleeping. The first thing you do when you wake up each day is to login to your shop and check the new sales figure.
A week later, everything is going absolutely well. This could be the start of something big! You're even thinking about how to expand the business. But one day, all of a sudden, there is a small decline in sales. You do not pay much attention to it.
The drop in sales figure becomes more obvious and by the time you realised something is amissed, that was when it came in - the reviews. All sorts of negative reviews started pouring in.
What happened?
You wonder to yourself, how could this happen? You accounted for everything. You have a proper business plan, a satisfactory product, a website with all the latest technology and ensured everything is up to date. What has gone wrong?
Behind all that shiny new automated widgets you have installed on your website, you missed out on one important human technology - human touch. Customers were unhappy about the customer service your website was providing, writing reviews and impacting your sales.
Think about it, how often did you get frustrated with the automated helpline when you called a bank or a telco company? Or when you are on a vendor’s website looking for help, only to be caught up in an endless loop of automated messages from a chatbot that does not address your concern? In the worst case scenario, there are no other forms of contact points, making you feel helpless and exasperated.
The neglected human technology
In the quest for the latest technology, businesses often forget about the human touch, a human technology relevant for all businesses. They end up serving the latest technology instead of customers. This is very true for businesses in this digital era.
A survey conducted by Price Waterhouse Cooper showed that two thirds of consumers feel that organisations lack human touch when it comes to customer service, and 75% of them want more human interactions. A human technology is what your customers are looking for in your store.
As our world is constantly evolving, technology is essential for businesses to grow. However, it should be used to better serve customers and not make life difficult for them. This is why having the latest technology for your business is not enough. You also need human technology to better serve your customers.
So what do customers want?
Invoking a human touch in your customer’s journey can make their experience more wholesome. Having real humans to cater to your customers at some point in time makes them feel heard and understood. Customers want it and it gives them an assurance that they are in trusted hands.
Based on a 2015 survey conducted by researchers in Boston University, over 90% of respondents said they start their customer service interaction hoping to speak to a real person.
Overall, it is recommended for businesses to implement both the latest and human technology for their stores. The digital age has made everything colder and we need human touch to warm things up. We believe human technology will help entrepreneurs forge strong relationships, build customer loyalty and enable their business to be more sustainable in the long run.