Customer experience starts with your company’s employees. ALL your employees. Why? Well, people are emotionally driven creatures and respond emotionally, so we need to engage our people in understanding the customer and customer experience. Too often employees are just expected to act on brand orders or guidelines. This means organisations need to spend as much time on their staff, helping them to understand what being human in the customers eyes is, so they can better understand the customers and adapt.

So how do you do this when your customer isn’t in your office or sitting around the meeting table using their voice to help you make decisions? A great example of how to deal with this was provided on Jeff Bezo’s empty chair approach (Amazon CEO). Jeff has an empty chair in every meeting that represents the most important person in the room - the customer. It helps remind everyone to think like the customer!

Technology has a vital role to play in customer experience for brands too by helping them be more human and empathetic. How can technology do this? Voice and facial recognition combined with machine learning (algorithms), means that brands digitally engaging with their customers can see, hear, analyse and respond to customers in a fraction of a second. They can personalise the engagement and remove bias human emotion out of the analysis and response.

Chat bots and are beginning to play a key role for brands in this area and are becoming more cost attainable for all brands to now use. Ironically, through chat bots and voice recognition, technology could allow humans to get back to being more human also, by allowing us to lift our heads up from our devices and engage visually and verbally with our surroundings.