Guru Speak - Steven Van Belleghem - Human Touch
Smart companies automate the operational part of the business
-to create time for their people to connect with customers
“Everything is becoming digital and because of that the value of
the human touch is increasing every day,“ says Steven Van Belleghem, a
professor at Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School, Ghent, Belgium and an
expert on the future of customer focused marketing and author of When Digital
Becomes Human: The transformation of customer relationships. “This statement is
based on the law of scarcity -when something becomes scarce, it increases in
value. The one thing that will become scarce in the customer relationship of
tomorrow is the pure human touch and because of that its value increases,“ he
says. As a result, companies are dealing with a double transformation digital
and human.
He explains: on one hand, every company has to speed up their
investments in digital, but because of this, the role of humans in a company
will change as well. So the consequence of the digital transformation is the
human transformation of customer relations. For instance people might be
happier carrying out their bank transactions remotely, whether on a computer or
mobile, but when it comes to dealing with customer service, almost everyone
would rather talk to an actual person over an automated voice response system.
By being smart about how they manage their digital and human capital, companies
can manage to cater to both these customer needs. At an Apple store, for
instance, the role of the operatives is very clearly to show customers how the
device works and not actively push a product. However, the whole store is
geared in such a way that the human element ultimately ends up being the
deciding factor that often leads to the purchase.
Van Belleghem has spent the last several years researching how
customer relationships are evolving and how they can be transformed. In 2013,
he coined the term, Heartketing, or achieving a positive impact on customers,
employees and society as a whole. Heartketing is a philosophy for ambitious
companies, says Van Belleghem, as it's about having a major impact on society.
The core idea being that a personal emotional attachment to the company is
valued much more highly by customers than loyalty programmes. It involves
adding a human touch to the relationship by appealing to the consumer's heart
rather than his wallet. One way of doing this and bringing in the human touch
is by having an emotional layer built into your digital strategy.“There are
three elements of this human touch that cannot be created through digital
interactions: empathy, passion and creativity.Companies that are good in those
three will be tomorrow's winners,“ he says. With everything moving towards
automation, as humans, it will be crucial to find ways to differentiate
ourselves from technology, and it is these three elements that are the key to
this differentiation.
He uses Disneyworld as an example of a company that has completely
automated the customer interaction process but at the same time, continues to
invest in keeping the human element strong. Every customer gets a `magic band'
when they visit Disneyworld which basically does everything for them --it opens
the hotel room, gives you access to the park, allows you to make ride
reservations through the connected app and so on. “Because of the automation,
their staff has to spend less time on the pure operational part of the customer
relation.This creates additional time and this time can then be invested in the
more human part of the relationship. Smart companies automate the operational
part of the business to create time amongst their teams to really connect with
their customers,“ says Van Belleghem. Other companies who have done a good job
of straddling both sides are Apple, Starbucks and newer companies like Uber and
Airbnb.
Admittedly, doing this requires a shift in how leaders approach
digital. “We sometimes take the human part for granted. Some companies think:
okay, we already have the humans, so we only need to focus on the digital
part,“ he says. The focus shifts completely to the digital and the human
element isn't used to its maximum potential. To get this right, positive
leadership is crucial. He sees three major chal lenges for leaders today:
ensuring their companies are ambitious enough, keeping the focus on the
customer and ensuring that people in the organisation get the support and trust
to outperform on the pure human strengths, namely empathy, passion and
creativity.
“Companies like SpaceX want to colonize Mars. Google wants to
extend people's life and tackle the problem of aging. New style companies have
more ambitious goals. These goals are not just financial goals, they are
ambitions to change the world. As a leader, ask yourself: is your company still
ambitious enough or do you just want to make some more money?“ he says. He
clarifies that contrary to popular belief, this is the age of the customer -not
technology. As the customer becomes more and more demanding, the only way
companies can deal with this is extreme customer centricity. While some, like
those in the travel and music business have already undergone this transition,
others like finance, retail and healthcare are in the eye of the storm, while
still others can see it coming, “At the end of the day, 90% of the companies
will go through these changes,“ he says. How they manage balance the human and
digital side will dictate who will be successful in the long run.
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By Priyanka Sangani
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CDET11SEP15
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