Humanify’s ExpertConnect feature. Humanify
If you’re anything like me, perhaps you’ve considered that customer service agents are actually behavioral scientists, conducting some massive psychological experiment on you.
It’s like they’re trapping you into these endless cycles of confusion, repetition, and bureaucratic stalemating as part of some grand plan to measure how much systemic nonsense the average person can take—how long the average person can remain polite. I, for one, usually max out sometime during the third loop of hold music.
But of course, this theory gives the industry way too much credit. In reality, customer service purgatory is nothing more than the product of inefficient, outdated technology, engineered to ensure that customer service agents and customers will never get along.
TeleTech founder and chairman Ken Tuchman. TeleTech
This is precisely the type of thing that Humanify, a new startup emerging from stealth mode on Wednesday, is setting out to correct. Humanify, a subsidiary of the publicly traded company TeleTech, is building software products that enable businesses to track their customers as they browse the business’s website or mobile app.
If, for instance, you’ve been trying and failing to change your cable package online, Humanify’s so-called ExpertConnect product would automatically infer what you want, give you the option to call or chat with someone, and automatically route you to an expert who can solve your problem. Before you connect, that expert will already know what you need and have a complete profile of your history with the company.
That means no interactive voice response system, no getting accidentally routed to the wrong department, and no wait times. It’s a big promise, but one that Ken Tuchman, chairman and founder of TeleTech, says businesses must live up to in order to compete in the new tech economy.
New World Collides With Old
According to Tuchman, companies like Uber and Airbnb have forever changed the way businesses are expected to behave. They were designed with complete disregard for the existing systems, and instead, they fixated on making the experience as simple as possible for the customer. Whereas Uber shrunk the sometimes lengthy process of calling a cab into one click, phone companies, cable companies, healthcare companies, and more have yet to truly put customer convenience first, because doing so would require a massive overhaul of their legacy systems.
“You have the new world and old world colliding right now, and what’s happening is customers are getting a taste of the new world, and saying: ‘You know I don’t think I like the old world anymore,'” he says. “People are going to start choosing who to do business with based on who respects their time and knows them, and if you don’t respect their time and don’t know who they are, they’re going to say: ‘You know what? You don’t have your shit together, and we’re going to go over here where they do.'”
That’s a big admission for Tuchman, who was a pioneer of this old world. He started TeleTech back in 1982 as a call center outsourcing firm, and today, the company monitors millions of customer interactions everyday. But Tuchman says TeleTech’s mission to improve customer relationships is crippled by the technology its clients use. Three years ago, he started work on Humanify to change that.
Online Meets Offline
Its ironically robotic name aside, Humanify stands to drastically improve the relationship between businesses and their customers. Not only does the system know what you’re searching for in the moment, it knows what you’ve searched for in the past, to extrapolate patterns and make targeted suggestions.
It can even bridge the gap between the online and offline world. If, for instance, you’ve been searching for a certain product online, when you go into the store, a sales clerk could access the record, so you don’t have to start from square one in the store.
“Consumers today spend 80 percent of their time trying to solve problems on their own,” says Mike Betzer, who Tuchman hired to be CEO of Humanify. “We listen to all that. We know, where you’ve been, what you’ve done, and what you’re trying to solve.”
The Big Caveat
The big caveat to all this is that in order for Humanify to track a customer, that customer has to either be logged into a website or using a mobile app. If, say, you call the 1-800 number on your cable bill or walk into a store, without ever touching a company’s digital platforms, none of that information is being tracked.
That’s one reason why Ian Jacobs, a senior analyst at Forrester focusing on customer service technology, calls Humanify’s proposal “a half step” toward solving this massive problem. “It’s one of the right approaches,” he says, “But connecting that online and offline experience is the Holy Grail of customer service.”
But Tuchman says he believes 800 numbers and other, older ways of communicating with companies are on their way out. “And you’re talking to the guy who started the whole process of people dialing 800 numbers back in 1982,” he admits.
Instead, he’s focused on ensuring the new ways work as efficiently as possible. “We live in a world where we’re going from innovation to commoditization in 18 months or less,” he says. “So the only thing that will differentiate a service going forward is how you serve.”
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