Eric: All right, welcome to the show. Welcome back, we had a little break for the holidays. And so we’re excited to be back for 2023. And today I’ve got a special guest with me today, sitting across from me is Jason Junge, who is the CEO of Web Toq. And you’ve got a really interesting background. So I’m excited to have you here. Because you’re a graduate of MIT. You even like your professional background, you were at one point director of financial strategy at Microsoft. And you actually have a patent for the consultative e meeting platform concept that you got in 2018. And you’re also author of a book, which I didn’t know until I saw your bio, why freedom week, you could actually find it on bookstores online. But thank you for being here. It’s super pleasure to have you here today.

Jason: Yeah, thanks, Eric. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m excited

Eric: we talked about one part of your software, you know, we’re getting the people in, and now you want to have those deeper conversations with them. And you know, you’re talking about your software, how it helps facilitate that, that unique experience. that, you normally, think COVID That was one thing that really showed us how important those face to face interactions were, once they were taken away from us, like we need those back. And that’s not always possible, or it could be like you’re working with a company like me, and our staff are all the way on the other side of the world. So how does your software help help make that experience more meaningful than just just a transactional line?

Jason: Yeah, so in order to make the transaction more meaningful, and actually more experiential, so we went from the ground up trying to mimic a face to face conversation is basically what we did. And so, you know, there’s a, there’s a few aspects of that one, and a face to face conversation, it’s convenience, right? It’s like, you walk into the store, and there’s the agent, and you’re talking to them, you don’t have to make an appointment to talk to them in the future, right? You go into the store and say, All right, I’m gonna talk to you three hours now, come back. Yeah. You know, with the web conferences, that’s one of the big hindrances, it’s, what conferences are, are very useful and helpful. But at the end of the day, they’re not useful for for immediate sales, right? For convenience, they’re very inconvenient, we’ve had to make something that was extremely easy to use, right, where a grandpa could come in, and it’s, and they could use it. So you don’t have to download anything, you don’t have to go to any app, it’s, you know, you’re in and you’re in. And so our platform is designed that way, you know, if you’re initiating a session from a website, for example, and you starting a conversation through the chat or the Chatbot. Immediately, if you want to launch into the consultative e meeting, it opens up in that immediate window where the website is you don’t go to another tab, you don’t have to download anything, consultative meaning opens up from there, you can engage in in a video call, if you wanted to engage, you know, the phone, the web phone, or invite one engage in the video form, you could do that on the spot. And that, of course, brings body language into the picture and stuff like that, which makes the experience more memorable. Right? We may and, and better in branding terms, right? When you make something more memorable, you make it more brandable. So that’s, you know, that’s part of the expansion. And the other part is to be able to use tools on the fly and share them. Right. So that’s the other part of the web conferences that don’t useful is I can’t You can’t share marketing materials on the fly with you. First of all,

Eric: It’s clunky. Yeah, like, Oh, let me send you this email attachment. Did you get it? No. Okay, keep waiting. Yeah, something like that, right?

Jason: That’s exactly right. If I, if I want you to sign something, I have to email it to your fax it to you. And then if I want to show you something, I have to go into my computer to look it up, choose it, and then share it on my screen. So it’s very clunky. And it makes for a sale it makes for a non fluid sales process. So what we did is, our platform is all prefilled. So our clients, they pre fill all their marketing materials in the platform. So it’s a one click, you know, you know, everything’s categorized and filterable. So if you need a certain video on the go to Video section, and you can go to different categories, or filter and find it and boom, and you and you pop up the video and you’re sharing it. If you want to do a questionnaire, you know, like a qualifying question, or who are you? How big is your company? How many people you have stuff like that? Yeah. Then again, it’s in a certain area, you pop it up, and it pops up on the visitor’s screen, but they’re able to answer it. And you get those answers immediately and they pop into your CRM immediately. Right? So again, it’s I’m not pulling it up on my screen so you can see it. Yeah, I’m pulling it up on your screen so you can answer it. And that’s true of contracts. Like I can find a contract or an agreement, pop it up on your screen so you can sign it. And then I get a copy. You can copy on the spot, and I don’t have to fax it or email it. Yeah, it’s true. Whether it’s quotes, you know, I can put a custom quote together, share it with you, and we can whiteboard it, right? So you can draw on it, you can, you know, take terms off, and I can change the price and exactly, exactly like I would be doing on face to face. So, and then, you know, all of our tools are like that, you know, it gets whiteboarding file sharing website, sharing all those things. The whole point is to make it as convenient and as powerful as possible to make the sale productive, or the customer service, effective customer service experience. And at the same time, leave the visitor with a brandable experience. It’s like, you know, oh, my gosh, that was, that was easy. That was convenient. That was fast. Everything that I wanted, you know, and it was quick, right? I didn’t, we didn’t have to worry again, about going off channel to do other things. Take a call and throw a call go effects. We didn’t have to do any of those things. And so in for the agent, it’s so easy to train them on it because it’s you trained them once and done. You don’t have to then train them on how do I use this with Facebook? How do I use this WhatsApp what? It’s, it’s all seamless, right? Yeah, those sessions come in, whether it’s Facebook or WhatsApp, or your website, wherever it’s all seems to comes in one stack. And then I use the same platform, the same agent platform, whether it’s one or the other, to sell or to or to service.

Eric: Cool. Yeah, you’re speaking a lot of my language area, you know, I think there’s anyone listening, that’s a sales professional, I think you hit some of those challenges right on the head with your software, where you’re like, I’m on Zoom, I’ve got to get them a contract, I gotta get them to sign it. And I think if you’ve ever sold anything, you know, like in a b2b space, you dealt with those challenges. And yeah, it sounds like you’re like, Oh, here’s the problems you have, we’ll fix that with this software. It’s pretty cool to see. And now I’ve gotten to know you a little bit over the last couple of years. And I happen to know that one thing we both have in common, we both have a spouse that is a business owner. And I really believe that, you know, that, like my wife helps make my business better in multiple ways. You know, for one, like she has a marketing agency, she’s got dozens of clients were one of her clients. So yeah, she has a big impact on my business that way, but how has having a business owner spouse helped help you out and give you a competitive edge that you wouldn’t have had? If it wasn’t for her being in the business?

 Jason: Yeah, that’s, that’s a great question. And it’s invaluable. Having a spouse that’s also an entrepreneur, because, you know, she hits problems from a different angle. You know, both because you’re different person, but also because she’s female, I think, you know, she is very intuitive. And I tend to be more my head, and, and she helps me see things that otherwise, you know, I wouldn’t see again, because I, you know, too much in my head. And that is especially true when it comes to, you know, HR issues. So, one of the biggest aspects of any business as long as you have employees is going to be HR, it’s going to be hiring, motivating, managing firing employees, you know, always gonna be an enormous part. And it’s because it’s the most, probably one of the most difficult because it involves human emotions, right? It involves life. You know, I mean, people get sick, people get hurt, people have bad days, they have good days that you know, and it’s in, you’re gonna have to deal with that, as, as a manager, as an employee, as a entrepreneur, as a business owner, you’re going to have to deal with those things. And, you know, it’s not always obvious what, how we know what’s the right response? What’s the right way to deal with, it’s not always obvious, and you don’t get you don’t tend to get very well educated in that I can tell you from business school. I don’t do that. I don’t remember. I don’t remember, you know, learning. I remember about motivation, you know, dealing with incentive packages and compensation strategy, but, but the like, the life, you know, the day to day life aspects of it, you know, no one ever teaches you. And so, you got to learn that from the school of hard knocks. But you know, having, you know, my wife, being an entrepreneur, she’s gone through a lot of that. And she also again, it’s very instinctual. And so she tends to be a great guide and mentor when it comes to, you know, how do I think about this, how do I help this employee and at the same time, you know, deal with whatever they’re dealing with, and at same time also help the company? Yeah, it’s been invaluable.

Eric: Yeah, that’s awesome. Thanks for sharing. And that’s interesting to HR aspect of it because I, I’m fortunate enough that I have an HR amazing HR manager in our office, and they don’t envy the role that she has to play sometimes, you know, like last year with COVID happened like there are a lot of cuts we had to make

Jason: Right.

Eric:  And that fell on that person’s responsibility to talk to people. Yeah. And anytime there’s crazy stuff happening. Especially like company our size 200 plus people is like, I feel like we could make a reality show off the scenarios these employees come up with sometimes. But yeah, so that’s awesome. You get your wife to bounce that off of Yeah, I feel like I’ve been able to, you know, help identify some different needs in the marketplace, too, that I think my, my outsourcing business would be able to help solve, because she’s seeing challenges. Like she’s like, Hey, my clients are having these issues and that issues. That could be something that call center could handle, right? You ever come across anything like that?

Jason: Yes

Eric: Especially like company our size 200 plus people is like, I feel like we could make a reality show off the scenarios these employees come up with sometimes. But yeah, so that’s awesome. You get your wife to bounce that off of

Jason: Yeah

Eric: I feel like I’ve been able to, you know, help identify some different needs in the marketplace, too, that I think my, my outsourcing business would be able to help solve, because she’s seeing challenges. Like she’s like, Hey, my clients are having these issues and that issues. Hmmm that could be something that call center could handle, right? You ever come across anything like that?

Jason: Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. You know, cuz she also, she’s in retail services. And so she always has great ideas for how we can help our clients because she, herself is a client. And so, yeah, she’s got a lot of just great ideas for us, because she sees those problems day after day. And, you know, when we try to always keep in touch contact with our clients as much as possible, but obviously having her there is of enormous benefit to us. Because we get that immediate feedback, right from from a very important client, whereas

Eric: it hurts sometimes, though, right? Really yeah. And she’s, she’s not sugarcoating that one.

Jason:  So it keeps us on ball. You know, keeps us on track for sure. Yeah, definitely. It’s been just a great boon for us.

Eric: Well, speaking of a competitive edge, you know, we’re talking about our spouses, you give it a competitive edge for a business, customer service, you know, we’re both in the customer service space. And you and I were just talking yesterday about how, how hard it is for businesses to get it right. And I feel like if you get it right, it’ll give you a huge competitive edge. In fact, businesses out there they’re, like, famous specifically for customer support or customer service. And, you know, I feel like an irrelevant, really recent example of one to show how difficult it is southwest airlines would be talking about in the case study the poster child of great customer service, but man, did they dropped the ball. This is last December 2022, during the storms. So just to show you how difficult it is to get it right. So talk to me about that. Why is it so tough for businesses to get this down?

Yeah, it is, it is very difficult for businesses to do customer service. Right. And the reason being is because it’s a multidisciplinary, multi department department function. And, you know, it’s incredible that you can see fortune 500 companies that have basically unlimited budgets, and they all get it right, wrong. I mean, you talked about Southwest, you know, airline industry, you know, the telecommunication industries, these industries are just famous for being hated for the customer service. And so, you know, why is it multidisciplinary? Why is it multi departmental? It’s because it cuts across the company entirely, right? Because to get customer service, right, you have to get the product team involved, they have to define what are the SLA is related to your product or service, what are the service level agreements, level of services that you’re going to provide in terms of returns, refunds, managing problems, and issues, all those things have to be defined upfront, then you’ve got to get HR involved, because you have to define what kind of customer service reps you’re looking for, what kind of skills and so HR has to be involved in that in hiring them and, and helping them train and and helping them you know, fire and manage and all those things. Operations has to be involved, because operations is the one that’s Manning you know, the call centers, or the stores or whatnot. And so they’re involved in the day to day, then you’ve got technology, which also has to be involved, because these service reps nowadays, you know, are equipped with just very complicated technologies. You know, it’s you’re talking about unified communications, you’re talking about omni channel, you’re talking about online tools, you’re talking about very sophisticated technologies that have to have very high levels of, you know, availability, right, and, and so, you know, the IT folks have to be involved from the ground up, because also what technology you use is going to influence how these, what kind of people you’re going to look for, and what how you’re going to train them, right. So they have to be involved from the beginning. And so all of these things then have to be involved from a strategic sense and from the marketing group. Why? Because these are especially if you’re a high touch business. They’re absolutely critical to branding. So you know, if you’re in real estate or if you’re, you know, in, in car dealerships or something that’s naturally a high touch industry, the customer service you provide is inherently part of your brand.

Eric: That is your brand.

Jason: It is your brand.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: And so so the CEO, and the marketing team then has to be involved. So you’re talking about four or five different departments involved in this.  And do you think that the, that they ever do it? not very frequently, where, you know, you have a strategy session that comes together and defines your customer service, and how it’s going to work, and then, you know, from a top down approach, then make sure that everyone’s on the same ball? When it comes to customer service? No, you know, it’s not very often that, that management really, and executive management takes that kind of approach. Usually, it’s just like, alright, you know, it’s an operational thing, let them define them, figure it out and let them do it. And, and relying on outsourcing has been a way has been a crutch for them. Because here you have people that are singularly focused and experts on the technology on the people on hiring on the day to day stuff, right and working with SLAs. So they’re experts on this stuff. And so they think that that’s enough to think that outsourcing into a call center is enough. And so they never take a step back and look at it again and get it from a branding point, from a strategic point, they never look at it from that point, outsourcing has been both a boon and a problem for these companies. Because on the one hand, it’s, it’s great to have professionals and experts that do this right, right? so that they take it off your table. So you can focus on what’s important, you know, your products and engineering and whatever it might be. But on the other hand, they’ve used it as a crutch. And so they don’t, they don’t do the upfront work in terms of defining what your customer service is, and how it fits within your brand and how it’s going to help create your brand.

Continue streaming the interview with all the detail at: https://pac-biz.com/podcast-customer-experience-with-jason-jung/

Remote Control Your Customer Support

Outsourcing always made sense. Even before the pandemic, the reasons to outsource were many. As one Arizona State University paper put it:

• “Reduce and control costs of operation.
• Improve the company’s focus.
• Liberate inner sources for new purposes.
• Increase efficiency for time-consuming functions that the company may lack resources for.
• Use external resources as much as possible.
• Sharing risks with a partner firm.”

Remote Work isn’t anything new, but it is something that’s sustainable now. Remote Contact Center Agents work anywhere with their own equipment. This brings at least four benefits to mind as reported by Pic-Biz.com

1. Less Operating Costs

With remote agents working from home there’s less office costs. That includes any facilities and rent paid for office space. What’s more is that remote agents have their own equipment. Meaning companies in general spend much less on equipment acquisition. This streamlines a lot of costs.

2. Larger Potential Talent Pool for Customer Support Agents

According to Pac-Biz.com; Having a remote work aned not having limitation for location is a win-win for both sides. It is enchanting for employees the flexibility of remote work offers, and for hiring you can have a larger possibility of specialized talent around the world.

Get to know the other 2 of the 4 benefits for Remote Work at: https://pac-biz.com/benefits-outsourcing-customer-support-remote-agents-work-from-home/

In the last few months, many employers have decided that it’s time to “take a stand” on remote work. In the red corner, we have organizations like Tesla demanding that employees return to the office or be fired. In the blue, organizations like Twitter (ah the irony) loudly proclaiming that employees can work from anywhere forever. Somewhere in the middle are organizations like JP Morgan Chase, who started somewhere close to Elon, only to backtrack when employees threatened to revolt.

Regardless of whether it is good for them or not (and there is legitimate debate about that), when you ask employees if they want the option to work out of the office, majority say “YES”. It turns out that if you give people a taste of freedom (in this case in terms of choosing how and where they work) they prefer that to control. Who would have thought it?

For two years we’ve been asking employers a simple question – “How do you feel about your employees working out of the office?” The question IS simple, but often the answer is anything but simple. As a sample, here are some of the more interesting answers we’ve received….

“It’s the best thing we’ve ever done”

“It’s the WORST thing we ever did”

“It’s creating stronger teams”

“It’s tearing teams apart”

“I think it’s terrible, but if I bring my employees back they will all quit”

“I think my employees are always slacking off, but I still have to pay them”and perhaps most commonly

“I just don’t know what to do about it”

It varies by industry, At BillionMinds they are seeing fewer than 20% of employers fully embracing a hybrid work policy that includes out of office for anyone that wants it and who’s job allows it, forever. Many more are sitting on the sidelines, perhaps until the power dynamic shifts between employer and employee again and they can pull employees back in without penalty.

That might work temporarily, but it’s probably pretty foolish to make a medium term bet against history and human nature. If you don’t offer me the chance to work from anywhere, I’ll find an employer who does, and guess what, I won’t even have to move house to do it!

So, if you are an employer it’s probably time to go beyond gut instinct, and start thinking about how to implement a hybrid workplace policy that works for your organization today and will work going forward. But how do you get started?

We recommend it starts with what a Space and Time Profile – an audit of your current environment to determine which roles are tightly coupled to a traditional work structure across the dimensions space and time.

The Space Dimension

In your workplace, how many roles MUST be tied to location?

According to BillionMinds.com it can be 3 dimensions: 1. If you work in a factory, its likely that there is some equipment you interact with which would look awkward at best in your dining room. It just wont’ work. 2. even when a role can be done remotely, there may be good business reasons for it to need certain types of role in a physical workplace. It’s possible to have bookstores that are entirely online, but an independent bookstore with a cool location and nice couches is likely to do much better fending off competition from Amazon than an online clone. 3. This third role what´s causing it to be in office is culture. Like call centers. In most cases it is cheaper and more efficient to run virtual call centers, but many organizations still have physical ones, just because they always have!

The Time Dimension

In your workplace, how many roles MUST be done at a certain time?

If you are a software company offering technical support during certain hours, working outside those hours doesn’t really make any sense. If you are a Radio presenter on a live show, you probably need to be on time..Again there are also business reasons why working something approximating fixed hours makes sense. For example, if a large part of your work requires real time collaboration with others you need to be working at the same time as your collaborators.

There are potentially many roles where the only reason time constraints are observed is culture or policy. For example you may individual software developers that COULD work any time, but who are encouraged to abide by traditional office hours.

Creating an Organizational Profile

Once you have evaluated your organization across space and time, you are now in a position to create your “Space and Time Profile”, based on these two different dimensions in your organization.

Business Profile 1 – The Nomad

To illustrate this, consider two different types of organization (in this case categorized by percentage of employees in each category). The first category, we’ll call “The Nomad”. This organization has a large proportion of its employees who are not tied to the work environment at all, by either time OR place. The organization therefore has a high degree of flexibility in terms of its hybrid work policy.

Business Profile 2 – The Settler

The second category, which we will call “The Settler” has far more employees who for business reasons, or logistical reasons are tied through either time or place. This organization probably needs a different set of policies that will work for them, most likely centered around meeting the needs of those employees.

Cultural Impact

The organizational profile we described above helps you take the emotion out of WHAT is possible, but making changes requires a detailed assessment of the current culture and what kind of change will work best. For example that just because 80% of your workforce may want to work out of the office, losing the other 20% could be devastating to your business. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that the desire to work in or out of the office is strongly influenced by how many of your colleagues are doing the same.

As you do this, you should consider what your business currently needs, what it will need in the future, the preferences of people who currently work for you, and the preferences of people who COULD be working for you in the future.

Skill and Trust – The Missing Link

If you give employees the practical skills they need to work from anywhere with excellence, and then trust them to do so – the vast majority respond in ways that benefit the business – with improved individual and team performance, reduced ethical violations and better business results.

Continue Reading at BillionMinds.com

Reference:

The Space and Time profile – A new hybrid workplace model for employers. (2022, August 3). BillionMinds. https://billionminds.com/the-space-and-time-profile-a-new-hybrid-workplace-model-for-employers/

Here are five simple recommendations we make to organizations we work with that are serious about helping their employees be more effective.

Step 1 – Reexamine Readiness

In the workplace, we often think of readiness as a set of skills that are associated with a particular job. Managers get manager training, sales people get sales training and so on. These things are important of course, but ignore the fundamental people need to be effective. To try to resolve this, over the past few years, many organizations have turned to mindset training – designed to infuse characteristics such as Grit and Growth Mindset.

What is missing in many organizations is practical skills training to help people be more effective, and particularly to optimize their day – to move from surviving to thriving in the reality of an unstructured, ambiguous workplace.

We need to help our employees navigate that change, and provide the right education, support and accountability to do so. Personal effectiveness is something you can measure as you hire someone, but it’s also something you can build and maintain in your existing workforce.

Step 2: Consider the Whole Person

According to the opinion of BillionMinds work life balance is so 2010s. The very idea that you have a balance with work on one side and non-work on the other is kind of ludicrous when work and our non-work environments are basically merging together. Your employees ARE parents, partners, friends, and in some cases they have one or two other jobs in addition to yours. If we can give people the tools to do that, they will show up more present at work, do better work, and be more committed to their employer as a result.

Step 3: Emphasize Rest

Whether employees will rest adequately depends HUGELY on culture. On a day to day basis, if the CEO and executive team are seen to be working all hours, so will the vast majority of people in the company. This extends particularly to policies such as unlimited PTO, where in many cases people end up taking LESS time than they would with traditional policies.

More broadly, every time a manager sends an e-mail out of hours, or lauds an employee for working weekends, they are subtly reducing the normal amount of rest in the company. So if you really want to change the norm, consider policies that strongly encourage rest – including more radical solutions such as cash bonuses for taking vacation, and 4 day work weeks. After all, the workplace has changed dramatically since working hours norms were established, and most of us work outside those hours anyway….

Step 4: Recreate daily structure

In many workplaces, we shifted from 9-5 to flextime, and more recently, completely flexible hours, where traditional work hours and meetings with others create a loose agreed upon expected time window when people work. This of course gives people more flexibility, but it also puts the onus almost completely on the employee to figure out how to be effective. In the absence of any structure or processes, all employees have as guidance is the culture of the organization.

According to BillionMinds (2021) some options to help employees to have daily structure is to schedule brief morning standups and evening reviews to have a start to end day. Also they comment to bring back break rooms so that the leaders can meet with the employees so they can follow some behaviors.

The goal here should not be to impose a structure and force everyone to conform, but rather to make it easier for people to create their own structure and repeatable method that is sustainable.

Step 5: Help Employees Find Their Why

In an unstructured ambiguous world of work this last recommendation may be the most important. Perhaps the biggest single challenge with unstructured ambiguous work is understanding WHY we do what we do. Most companies shortcut this badly and just pass the responsibility down to managers.

Continue reading at BillionMinds

Reference:

5 steps to a more effective workplace. (2021, July 21). BillionMinds. https://billionminds.com/effective-workplace/

1. Going Directly to the Sale: 

Sometimes when the users do not know your service, they first want to check out your website. You must know how to approach them and not go directly to the sales process. A live agent can be very helpful so you can start a conversation with the person and aim at getting to know the potential customer and his goals. Doing this helps create rapport with potential customers, and you can even get to a point where people come back to your site just so they can talk to one of your live agents.

2. Too Little Visual Content: 

When talking to a human being, gestures and facial expressions help understand the person. When you write a message online, you don’t get those visual cues, so talking to a chatbot is often impersonal and even boring. Think about how you communicate online using text: we normally use some emojis, stickers or GIFs to show a recipient our emotions but what we cannot show are our gestures.

Share videos, images and even presentations wherever possible to convey human and emotions and connect customers to your brand.

 3. Believing that the Chatbot Will Solve All Your Problems:

Conversational Marketing is not just chatbots. It is the way you can connect live agents with your customers in ways that are simple, useful, and effective. Chatbots are great tools for answering FAQs that would otherwise take up expensive agent time, as well as being effective filtering tools to get the most promising interactions in front of your live agents.

Consider this for website chat, text messages, messenger, WhatsApp and other means of communication.

4. Not Updating the System From Time to Time:

Glitches and errors are very common in a chatbot. A successful conversational platform is one which is maintained and updated regularly. It is highly recommended to establish a periodic critique and maintenance schedule to guarantee this optimum level of success.

After you have given the customer a certain amount of essential information, evaluate his response times, analyze cases of misunderstandings, make sure you are able to decipher the queries, even when they are very long or misspelled, and ask the users if they have received a satisfactory answer to their question.

Remember that your interactions via your different media and tools reflect your brand and its values. Give your customers exactly what they need exactly when they need it. To satisfy your visitors, you must know them well, master their language habits, and learn from the interactions that have resulted in a high satisfaction rate. If you continue to enrich your knowledge of your market’s goals, you will notice a definite increase in interactive marketing success.

I think that we all have heard about Artificial Intelligence and maybe some of us might understand it more profoundly than others but you can look at it from a very simple sentence: Information Programs that simulate human intelligence and/or human behaviors. As it implies the management of the data or looking for a new one for its better functioning.

 AI can work with virtually anything or data that can be digitized, whether its alphanumeric characters, language spoken and written in different languages, static and moving images, sounds, temperatures, and things that can be picked up by a sensor, camera, microphone, mousse, keyboard, or touch device.

With this mentioned we can imagine that AI can be present almost anywhere and involved in various things of our daily lives. Quite useful for certain sectors such as banking, education, medical, industrial and many more.

Artificial intelligence has the ability to revolutionize our workplace and increase profits. It also takes over the repetitive and dangerous tasks of humans, providing enough time for employees to focus their intellect to further improve the business. Artificial intelligence has gradually become the tool that consolidates the ideas of humanism and takes them to the next level.

Have you heard about Technological Humanism?

Technological humanism can be described as a philosophy or ideological current that focuses on the intersection between ethics and technological innovation. In this sense, it defends the responsible use of innovative technology for the benefit of society and promotes innovation through ethical channels that guarantee the development of human beings.

  This ideology aims to put the human being before technology by protecting him and his information. Many times, we give access to our information by accepting the privacy notices that are in the cell phone software, applications, web pages and others.

   “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race” — Stephen Hawking

These are some of the objectives with which technological humanism is formed:

– Pattern recognition for process optimization: Automatation leads to higher production rates, devolp data consistency, increased productivity, reduced lead times, and more…

– Error reduction: Increasing accuracy and precision considering opportunities based on previous analyzed data.

– Takes care of repetitive and dangerous tasks: They can provide accurate work with greater responsibility and not wear out easily.

– Time for employees to focus bentheir intellect: AI can do a lot of repetitive tasks as part of our daily work, such as checking documents for flaws and mailing thank-you notes, among other things. Letting humans focused on more creatuve things.

Humanistic Technology at WebToq

AI vs. humanistic technology: Our company, WebToq, was created with precisely this movement in mind: to create humanistic technology. Human beings are naturally social, individualistic and creative beings, destined to extract meaning through interaction with others.

Using automation or artificial intelligence (AI) to remove human agents from business interactions loses the sense of human interaction in general (extracting meaning from other human beings), and loses the potential productivity derived from human creativity specifically. The true potential of AI is to make human interaction faster, cheaper, more productive and more comfortable, but not to replace it.

Our CrozTop platform has been designed with these advantages in mind: allowing consumers to browse websites productively with the help of automation when needed and for as long as possible, and then integrating human agents at the end to complete the transaction and increase satisfaction, basket size and carry out essential consumer education.

The result is a happier, better-educated customer who spends more money compared to a self-navigating customer, and with much less labor involvement compared to a call center transaction.

Companies seek to give the necessary importance to the customer experience to have a positive customer response. 82% of brands believe they are delivering an optimal experience. However, 90% of consumers believe that brands fail to deliver a good customer experience.

This is where it comes into question what companies are doing wrong, how to remedy it? 71% of consumers who have effective experiences with brands on social networks, recommend them to family and friends. Likewise, when they have bad experiences, they will tell others about them.

To solve this lack of satisfaction it is important to identify it in depth, as can be done with satisfaction surveys and from there to perform a Design Thinking to design the solution to the problem. Some fundamental practices or methodologies for a well-planned customer service are: Costumer Journey, Sales Funnel and Buyer Persona.

Continuing with the experience, reading customer experience and user experience may seem to refer to the same thing, don’t you think? You are right, the user and customer perform similar activities.

The difference lies in the fact that the customer is someone who has a more general experience, it can be of the set of brand channels with which he interacted and depending on this experience is when loyalty is generated with it or not.

The user experience is more specific as it can be directly with a product or service of the brand. This is where the interaction comes in, whether it was easy or not to use and whether it generated a positive or negative experience. The user experience is a part of what encompasses what is the customer experience.

What does the customer experience consist of?

It can be simplified with this formula: CX = UX + Customer Service + Marketing

For a better understanding of Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience (UX) here are some elements of both:

As we can see, both are very important and although both have the same objective, which would be to generate a satisfactory experience, they are measured in different ways. It is common to pay more attention to the customer experience because for years that is what has been done. Nowadays, since the beginning of the pandemic, more emphasis has been placed on the experience and use of digital platforms that are as friendly, simple and comfortable for the user.

It is not about exceeding the user’s expectations and that the user does not even know what to do with so much, no matter how modern it may seem, what should be focused on is to minimize frictions, at what points along the way the user may get stuck or there may be a higher abandonment rate.

Example to differentiate user experience from customer experience

Let’s suppose you sign up for an online event, you are redirected to a landing page with all the information about the event, you register your data and receive your confirmation email. Up to this point you had a good user experience. The day of the event you arrive and they don’t let you in because apparently you were not among the registered people, nobody paid attention to you to solve your problem and you had to wait more than 45 minutes to access. This is where the customer experience failed on the part of the company and even though you had a good user experience not being able to enter the event will result in a bad satisfaction.