Digital Touch and Human Touch in the Digital Era!

• Digital Technologies, Digital Transformation, Digital Fashion, and Digital Food! These are some of the terminologies that have become pervasive in our modern life.  Businesses are trying to adapt to this new digital paradigm.  They try to bring in some kind of digital touch to create new experiences or optimize operations. While digital touch is creating a new kind of life experience, is it disrupting basic human values. Are we getting disconnected emotionally ?Are we moving away from giving the  uman touch in our personal lives? How do we create new values using Digital Touch and Human touch in the digital era?
• Some people spend more time communicating with mobile apps than communicating with people. It looks like Digital Touch and Human touch are paradoxical. However, some organizations are trying to bring the human touch into the digital journey. I believe these are rays of hope to bring in more human values and help humanity. This digital paradigm shift brings in new kinds of business opportunities and at the same time helps humanity to flourish.
• Some businesses are trying to bring in the human touch and  become strategic differentiator in the digital era

How some businesses are bringing in Human Touch in digital transformation

The case of Personal beauty care:

• • Shiseido is one of the cosmetics companies with a presence in more than 120 countries and is 150 years old. This company wanted to provide a personal customer experience. It developed an AI care kit, which scans the skin, and based on the scanning result, it recommends a customized skin care kit. The consumer can scan the skin by themselves with a small device and the results are managed through a mobile application. Every individual is different and the skin textures are different as well. This kind of personalization helps to address individual needs. But what If the user is not able to choose from the options that are recommended by the AI care kit? Shiseido is bringing in expert support who guide the individual consumers to choose from the options. This brings the culmination of human touch and digital touch creating new kind of experiences which was not possible earlier. This opens up a new market for the company. These kinds of innovations are creating breakthrough transformation not only in creating great customer experiences but also opening up new revenue streams and differentiated markets.

A tale of call center experience:

• • Some of us might have the experience of making a call to a call center and have been waiting for a long time to connect to the representative. In the end, the call gets over with frustration, because the other side of the person does not understand our needs and simply says that he/she understands and is keener to get off the call rather than addressing our real concerns. One of the reasons is found to be that these are standard scripts created by organizations. These are not tailored to individual needs. Here there is communication between two human beings, and I believe technology can play an important role. Nowadays there are models which can recognize the emotions of human beings based on the voice, When the emotions are different, the AI models can help the representative by indicating and providing options & suggestions to deal with the situation. The suggestions can be based on solving certain problem based on historical data on real issues and also based on behavioral handling aspects. This is where Digital Touch and Human Touch come together and create a great customer experience.

Finding the music that we like:  

• • Google Hum: Music is of the key aspects of human lives.  As many apps and AI models are hitting the market, which provide recommendations on the music that we listen. However, Sometimes we forget the lyrics of the song, but we will be able to hum the song. Find the song from humming. Just hum, Google fids the song for us.  Google searches for the right song, and start playing that song!

The future of customer experience

• While it looks like everything becomes digital, in my view the human element – human touch, personally connecting with people, and creating a personalized experience is becoming the key aspect of designing or redesigning new products or re-engineering products.

Creating New Value

• • Companies creating new value in customer experience will define a new set of boundaries for greater success.
    • For example – A banking customer contacting a bank representative.  The automated AI system provides the bank representative with the history, profile, and recommended services. The bank representative handles the customer request/complaints in a better manner with the available information. These kinds of services help the customers to get a better service. These services are not only for privileged customers but also for any normal customers. Services that are available for privileged customers are extended to any normal customers.
    • Already Health applications with recommended diets are available on the market. Some of the common self-medication and lifestyle diseases that do not require a fully qualified physician might become a potential business segment by themselves. This will create a new market. With the advent of technologies, modern small clinics will emerge which will help to provide service at a low cost and at the same time personalized services with the help of technologies.

Design of new products & services

• • What is at the back end will come to the forefront! In the Human-centric approach, the key focus is to design the products or services that focus on the behavioral aspects and the user’s usability aspects. It seems this already exists, but this is a shift from product/service features to human-centric factors with the aid of digital technologies.

Discovery of what customer needs? 

• • It is a new journey and a paradigm shift from existing feature-rich models.  It is a discovery journey of what customer really needs, and what are the challenges in utilizing the services or product. This is a new kid of intervention to discover the customer needs This area of specialization requires a special focus and I believe as we get more digitalized, the more the importance of the human touch, it becomes.

A world of digital touch & Human Touch – what is possible which was not possible earlier?

Being more human

• • Seamless integration of digital technologies in our life will help us to serve humanity with more empathy and with more efficiency.
    • The services are possible to reach untapped segments. Bank loans to the unorganized sector.
    • Health care services – Affordable services for the people. Technologies help to reach out to people for whom services were not available earlier!
    • Personalized education services – this is one area that deserves attention, especially in developing countries.
    • The list goes on ….

Cultural values

• • Diversity – Languages, values, cultural festivals. As technologies are helping to reach out to a large segment of diverse people, It brings new challenges of addressing diversity. However, the transformation of bringing together digital touch and human touch will enable addressing the challenges of preserving cultural values of different ethnicity.

Social transformation

• • While the differences across countries, language, culture, and other aspects remain, the key aspect is instead of trying to prove one is superior to someone else, this transformation enables us to celebrate diversity.
  • Bottom of the pyramid get access to services which was not possible earlier. The services span across access to education, health care, financial aspects, employment, and so on…

The aspects of bringing Human Touch in digital touch.

• Personalization
• Human Connect
• New value

Personalization

 Personalization is the process of delivering personalized value to the customer. AI models help us to understand customer preferences to a certain extent. These models provide recommendations that cater to the personal preference of the customers. In addition to reaching a large volume of customer base,  handling large data sets is also important.  While AI technologies help to build models for personal preference, Cloud technologies help us to scale and reach many customers.   This gives the convenience of accessing a personalized service by the consumer.  (Example: ANT, a digital financial company is providing loans to the unorganized sector by reaching out to a largely untapped segment. AI models  rate the prospective customer’s creditworthiness.  The shortened process time and as well as services tailored to his / her needs increases customer benefits  and customer experience.)

Human Connect:

The most important element of the Digital touch is the Human connection. As explained in Shiseido’s case, human intervention provides suggestions and help the consumer to have a pleasant journey of using the product.  This also enables the representative to have a personal connection and better understand the customer’s needs.

New Value:

When the two aspects of Human connection & personalization happen, new values are possible. In the case of Shiseido – a customized care kit is developed contrary to the mass traditional products. This has become possible because of digital technologies. Despite the advantages,  this may add new kind of processes to the organization. However this also becomes a differentiator !.

In the case of ANT, the processing time is reduced through automation to determine whether a person is eligible for a loan or not.

When we link the key elements, new values get created. The interesting thing is it is applicable in many scenarios. These scenarios are technology dependent; however, this becomes essential in today’s scenario in creating value and beating the competition. In a digital world and remote working scenario, what if we can approach the whole transformation by putting the above elements of human connection and personalization? I am sure we will be able to discover a whole lot of new values that can be delivered to our customers and needless to say that business transforms!

Benefits of the fusion of Digital Touch and Human Touch

• Opportunities beyond the boundaries: Business benefits – New business opportunities keep emerging as the barriers of existing boundaries across nation, culture and language are becoming borderless.
• Respect and Value: Companies are highly respected as the customer satisfaction increases.
• Innovation: New values requires different kind of business models. Hence, innovation in business models keep emerging to keep the competition at check.
• Higher Profits: Differentiated models, new value creates new revenue streams and better profit margins.

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