The Dystopian Future of Customer Service Ratings

The ride sharing company Uber has just announced it will start allowing customers to rate their driver mid-trip.

This could be a very positive development. It's often during the ride where passengers have a convenient moment to give a rating, share a comment, or even tip the driver. 

Passengers are typically on the go when they arrive at their destination, so stopping to give any sort of feedback via the app could be seen as an inconvenience.

There's another side to this story.

The never-ending quest for ratings feels like a slippery slope that leads us to a dystopian future imagined in this episode of Black Mirror, where we rate every interaction with every other person.

It feels a bit dehumanizing. Is this a glimpse at our future? 

Socially Awkward Rating Systems

I must admit, this bell gave me pause.

My service was satisfactory.

There's nothing wrong with that, especially when you are buying a few items in a grocery store. We don't need a life-changing experience with every interaction.

So ringing the bell would feel like a lie. It would also feel incredibly awkward since ringing the bell would inevitably draw attention to me and the cashier.

On the other hand, I couldn't help but wonder if I was subtly insulting the cashier by not ringing the bell. She probably works hard every single day and I can't literally lift a finger to *ding* her some low-level praise?

Rating an Uber driver mid-ride comes with a similar level of social awkwardness.

• Should you rate your driver while in their presence?

• What if your feedback is less than stellar?

• Should you share feedback with your driver or just rate them?

The Impact of Personal Ratings

The rating you give your Uber driver is personal since it's tied directly to them. A form of personal ratings are already underway in China.

Called a "citizen score," this system is currently in a pilot phase before it's rolled out to the entire country in 2020. A person's score could impact their ability to get a loan, rent a car, or even entitle someone to faster check-in at a hotel. 

Two elements of the citizen score are the person's behavior, including their personal spending habits, and the person's social connections. That means a friend using social media to rant about extreme political views could impact your own credit rating.

(If this happened in the US, we'd all have at least one friend we'd "unfriend" as a result.)

Back to Uber, there's an awkward social contract knowing that your rating directly impacts your driver's job. This BuzzFeed article has several excellent examples from Uber, Lyft, and other services.

Many drivers are outright coaching their customers on what rating to give, which is a form of survey begging.

Uber and Lyft drivers also get to rate passengers. A passenger's rating can impact how likely they are to have a ride request accepted. This can be especially important during busy times.

There are two interesting caveats:

• Both Uber and Lyft request 5 out of 5 stars as the default rating for okay service.

• Studies show overall ratings are higher when customers are rated, too.

What Future Will We See?

The change to Uber's rating system is relatively small and could be positive.

My worry is how this change will gently nudge customers away from the human-to-human interactions that are the core of great customer service. 

Customer-centric companies should prioritize humanity over data.

Humanity encourages interactions between people. This includes the positive stuff, such as "you did a great job, thank you!" It also includes letting someone know when things aren't going so well. 

The Customer Service Bot That Can Save Humanity

Robots can be scary.

They sometimes feels like a barrier to real customer service. Such as when you find yourself yelling "Human! Human! Human!" into the phone, only to hear an annoyingly pleasant robotic voice respond, "I'm sorry, I don't understand."

Other times, automation can create service failures. A bot once tried to send me to the wrong airport when it re-routed me after a weather delay. Another bot hilariously joined a Tweet chat and quickly became confused.

Of course, some automation is inevitable. We use the Starbucks app to skip the ordering line. A self-service portal allows us to troubleshoot our devices without calling support. Automation even sent this blog post to you if you subscribe via email.

Will automation eliminate people? 

I recently attended Zendesk's user conference, Relate Live, where I learned about one bot that's actually helping people be more human.

The Zendesk Answer Bot

Customers often prefer self-service.

This is especially true for easier issues, such as resetting a password. A challenge occurs when customers can't get the answer they want via self-service so they grudgingly contact the company for live support.

Zendesk's Answer Bot tries to save customers from that extra step. We can see how it works with this example from MailChimp, a marketing automation service that uses Zendesk to power its customer support.

Let's say I want to use MailChimp to automatically send new Inside Customer Service blog posts to email subscribers. I search the MailChimp support site but can't figure out how to do it, so I decide to send an email.

Once I hit send, Answer Bot jumps in and scans my email. It helpfully suggests a couple of articles based on what I wrote:

Ah ha! The second article is exactly what I'm looking for.

Now I can cancel that support ticket. No need to wait for a live person since Answer Bot already solved my problem. I can just click on the article and walk through the how-to steps. 

So how does Answer Bot help humans be more human?

Restoring Humanity

It was a presentation by Brian Crumpley from Dollar Shave Club at Relate Live that helped me see Answer Bot's true potential. 

Crumpley shared an analysis of Dollar Shave Club email interactions. His data revealed that 40 percent could have been handled via self-service. Even worse, these interactions cost a little more and satisfied customers a little less than transactions that truly needed the human touch.

The company wants its agents to have great, personalized interactions with members. It's tough to do that with more transactional issues. The customer generally wants a quick answer and to be on their way. 

High volumes also make personalization difficult. If there's no budget to add extra staff, agents find themselves racing through contacts just to keep up.

Enter Answer Bot.

Dollar Shave Club implemented Answer Bot to help deflect some of those self-serviceable contacts. After six months, Answer Bot was handling nearly 5,000 contacts per month that would otherwise have gone to an agent.

Those contact deflections gave Dollar Shave Club some extra capacity without adding staff. Here's how Crumpley was able to use it:

• Expanded live chat availability

• Created a knowledge base task force to further improve self-service

• Debuted a Customer Insights magazine

Best of all, agents now had bandwidth to provide a bit more human service to customers who really needed it.

What's Next?

Forrester predicts that robots and artificial intelligence (AI), collectively referred to as "bots," will replace 7 percent of US jobs by 2025.

I'm hoping for a different trend.

History tells us the proliferation of automated teller machines actually led to an increase in bank tellers. The teller role just became more sophisticated since they were called upon to handle fewer simple transactions. 

I noted this is a 2016 post:

• Robots = good at simple transactions

• Humans = good at complicated transactions

Other customer service roles can follow a similar path. This should free up humans to be more human when customers really need it.

Five Ways to Humanize Customer Service

Humanity in customer service is getting rare.

We shop online without ever interacting with a person. Go on a trip and you can check in for your flight, summon a ride to the airport, and check into your hotel room all from your smart phone.

Got a problem? There's a self-service portal for that. Try to call and an interactive voice response system will do its best to dissuade you from talking to someone.

Even when you do interact with a live person, it doesn't always feel that way. There's a whole class of transactional employees whose jobs are at risk of being automated because they don't add any uniquely human value.

Self-service is great and makes a lot of things easy. Yet there's still times when a friendly word and a genuine smile is needed to create an exceptional experience.

Here are five ways you can make sure that happens on your watch.

Start with Vision

Unite your team with a shared definition of outstanding customer service, called a customer service vision.

The vision should focus the team on people, not transactions.

Shake Shack was one of the customer-focused companies profiled in The Service Culture Handbook. The company's customer service vision is Stand for Something Good.

You can see this vision in action when you visit a Shake Shack. Employees are smiling, engaging, and helpful. Their humanity is contagious. Even at a crowded New York City location, you somehow find yourself enjoying other people.

Create Connections

Interesting things happen when service providers and customers see each other on a human level.

In restaurants, one study revealed that satisfaction increased 17.3 percent when customers and cooks were able to see each other. 

One of my favorite restaurants is Glen Ellen Star in the Sonoma Valley wine region. Here, you can sit at the chef's counter and have a conversation with the chef while you eat. Its website has a great video of this in action.

Find ways to help people who don't normally interact with customers make real connections. 

One exercise Clio used to develop its award-winning culture was a "Know Your Customer" campaign, where each person in the company interviewed at least one customer. The idea was help employees do their jobs with more empathy.

Give People Time

Time pressure often prevents human-to-human connections.

Employees feel the need to rush through interactions to get to the next person in line. People instinctively struggle to maintain a warm and friendly demeanor when they are focused on speed.

Increased staffing is one solution. Another way is to focus employees on first contact resolution. While counterintuitive when we're pressed for time, slowing things down can actually prevent additional contacts which frees up more time in the future.

Use Connecting Techniques

Help your employees develop specific skills to create human connections.

One of my favorites is the 10 and 5 Rule. This is used in retail, hospitality, and other settings where you have face-to-face customer interactions.

Employees use this technique by giving a non-verbal greeting to anyone within 10 feet. This can be a nod, a wave, or a smile. Give people a verbal greeting when they're within 5 feet.

Another option is the Five Question Technique. Employees think of five questions they can potentially ask customers that break the ice and uncover an additional need to serve. At least one of those questions will likely be useful in nearly any situation.

Create Human Procedures

Whenever I call for customer service, I like to introduce myself and greet the other person by name.

This often breaks the ice and creates a warmer interaction.

Some customer service reps must follow procedures that discourage them from doing this. They must follow a script that requires them to ask for an account number or some other information.

These procedures are typically created for efficiency. This can backfire if the customer bristles at the lack of warmth. Studies show that people are less open to ideas when they're angry, which means the interaction can take longer than it would if the employee was able to develop rapport with the customer.

Want to Practice?

These certainly aren't the only five ways to make customer service more human.

You can practice your human-to-human skills by making this a two-way conversation and leaving a comment or dropping me a line. Let me know how you humanize your service!

How to Stop Automation From Stealing Your Job

The woman walked into Starbucks, glued to her phone.

She never said hello and wasn't greeted. Eyes fixed on her phone screen, she strode over to the counter where you pick up your drink and waited without saying a word. She continued staring at the phone until her drink appeared on the counter.

The woman grabbed her drink, turned around, and left without ever engaging with another human being.

You may have guessed she ordered her drink via the Starbucks app, a technology that allows customers to by-pass the cashier line. It may eventually eliminate cashier jobs.

Other positions may not be far behind. Computers, bots, artificial intelligence, and other forms of automation are threatening customer service jobs everywhere. 

But what about the barista who made the woman's beverage at Starbucks? That person was voluntarily giving up her job to automation because she never once brought something that was uniquely human to the service interaction.

That's the key to staving off the rise of automation — humanity.

The Rise of Self-Service

Look everywhere and you'll see machines doing customer service jobs that were once performed by humans.

Banks are replacing tellers with ATMs. Hotels are starting to offer mobile check-in options, a feature airlines have had for years. Contact centers operate automated phone menus, self-help websites, and use bots to respond to text messages.

The IBM Watson artificial intelligence platform is being tried out in multiple customer service roles, such as retail salesperson. Uber might soon offer a fully autonomous car service, right after Amazon cuts out delivery drivers and sends your order via automated drone.

Andy Puzder, the CEO of the CKE Restaurants, the parent company of the Carl's Jr. and Hardee's fast food chains, has openly talked about opening a fully automated restaurant in response to rising wages. Puzder is also Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of Labor.

What Drives Automated Customer Service?

It's helpful to understand why businesses might want to automate your job. There are three pressures businesses face that drive this trend: speed, cost, and quality.

Speed is crucial because you can generally serve more customers faster in an automated environment. Do you remember waiting in line at a highway tollbooth? Now you can whiz past an array of sensors that automatically deduct the toll from your account.

Cost tends to decrease with automation. You have to pay customer service employees for every hour worked, and that cost is ever-increasing. In my hometown of San Diego, minimum wage just increased to $11.50 per hour and many businesses, such as restaurants, are struggling to absorb higher labor costs. You typically pay less for automation over time.

Quality is another concern. Automation leads to greater consistency since machines can repeat the same task over and over. There are also several studies that show customers spend more in fast food restaurants when they order via a kiosk, so machines may be outselling humans.

The Big Risk: Employees Who Act Like Robots

If automation will eventually win on speed, cost, and quality, the only area where humans can continue to excel is being human.

People like human-to-human interaction. When we talk about great customer service, we still inevitably talk about people. 

Perhaps it was someone who was extra kind or engaged us in some way. It could be a person who solved a persistent problem, or maybe it's just someone who has become a friend over years of service.

A lack of humanity is where many customer service employees routinely put their jobs at risk. 

When I go to the post office, I usually use the kiosk because it's faster than waiting in line. I'm always amused at the end of the transaction when the screen reads, "It's been a pleasure to serve you." Unfortunately, at my local post office, I'll likely to get just as robotic a thank you from a live person. Why wait longer to get the same level of interaction as the machine?

Supermarket cashiers are another example. Too many fail to engage their customers. Or they don't know what to say when they ask, "Did you find everything OK?" and the customer says, "No." We're all excited to see how the Amazon Go grocery store concept works out because the supermarket checkout adds no perceived value to the customer.

Contact centers are seeing an increase in complex phone calls, primarily because customers are handling simpler transactions on their own. This means phone agents need to be empathetic, problem-solving humans who engage customers and make them feel better. All too often, agents instead sound like monotone robots and who either lack the caring or capability to resolve an issue.

If you want to save your job, you need to bring humanity to service.

Five Ways to Bring Humanity to Customer Service

This isn't an exhaustive list, but these are five things you can do to make yourself indispensable to your customers and your boss.

Build Rapport: Customers like feeling special, and people can do that in a way that no robot can. Find ways to develop rapport with your customers like learning and using their names. You can search the Customer Service Tip of the Week archives for more rapport-building tips.

Listen Intently: We've probably all yelled "Live agent!" at a phone menu. The frustration comes because the machine isn't listening. You can transcend that by becoming a good listener. It's harder than you think. Our listening skills erode with experience. We also find ourselves robotically using stock phrases like, "How are you today?" which causes us to miss amazing opportunities.

Empathize: Machines don't express genuine empathy, but you can. Try to understand and acknowledge your customers' feelings, especially when they are annoyed or frustrated by a problem. You can find some good empathy tips using this guide.

Develop Expertise: Find ways to solve problems that automation can't. My local UPS driver once brought a package to my house that had the wrong address on it. He explained he knew it was mine because he recognized my last name and it was wine. He succeeded as a human because he understood his delivery route and his customers better than a machine.

Find Icebergs: Help your customers avoid getting stuck in an infinite loop by finding and fixing recurring problems, called icebergs. I recently had to contact Time Warner Cable 23 times to get new cable, phone, and internet service. It was a frustrating experience because everyone I encountered was so heavily scripted they couldn't see the root cause of the problem until I connected with Rich, a Tier 3 specialist who spent several days unraveling the mess that Time Warner's automated system had created.

Let's go back to the Starbucks example at the beginning of this post. It's inevitable that some customer service functions will become automated, like ordering via an app instead of a cashier. That doesn't mean that the people in the service chain should act like robots too.

It's up to us to create such a fantastic human-to-human experience that companies will recognize the irreplaceable value of having people involved with the process.