While many trends are reshaping the customer service industry, one of the most dramatic and fundamental changes is being driven by something that few have yet considered. “AI” may be the Collins Dictionary word of the year, but what’s becoming even more significant is what I like to call the rise of “Machine Customers”.
Since the dawn of human civilization and commerce, customers have always been humans. After all, no other being was capable of commerce. But soon that truism will no longer be, well, true. Now, we’re seeing intelligent software and hardware “things” beginning to replace people for specific tasks, and those tasks can now include things that customers do: buying or returning a product, filing a complaint, or submitting a support request.
According to Gartner, Machine Customers will be more significant to enterprises than the arrival of digital commerce. And that is not surprising. Today there are already billions of installed Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and a plethora of AI-powered personal digital assistants. All of them are continuously improving their abilities to analyze information and make decisions. Very soon they will be able to make purchases and other decisions on our or even their own behalf.
As an example, you can think of refrigerators autonomously ordering milk, cars scheduling tyre changes and maintenance servicing, or elevators ordering spare parts. And these capabilities are just around the corner. This will, of course happen gradually. In the beginning machines will behave strictly based on rules defined by humans. But before long, they will be able to predict peoples’ needs and set their own rules – based on knowledge of our wants, preferences, financial situation and similar. Indeed, early examples of machine customers can be found at HP Instant Ink, Google Duplex and in the bots that stock traders employ.
Change in consumer behavior
As humans, we are always striving for convenience and technology has always been an important factor in achieving that goal. And the rise of the machine customers is an extension of that goal. Most of us enjoy buying things for our hobbies, or presents for our kids – and we will continue to do so, but few people enjoy buying toilet paper or cleaning materials. What’s more, no-one enjoys sitting in a contact center queue, talking with chatbot disputing charges or filling forms for product replacements. Machine customers will bring unpreceded levels of convenience by relieving humans from these boring and repetitive tasks. Just like chatbots automated routine contact center agent activities, Machine Customers will do the same on the consumer side – reducing customer effort practically to zero.
This has strong implications for businesses that want to drive loyalty with real customers. As people delegate boring and tedious interactions to machines, companies wanting to stay in direct touch with their customers will have to deliver emotional value and meaningful experiences – focused on fulfilling human needs for knowledge, achievement, gratification and self-actualization. Companies offering only transactional experiences will find themselves communicating with their customers only via machines and personal assistants, which will serve as gatekeepers between them and their customers.
Rethinking approach to CX
This shift has the potential to dramatically reshape the CX landscape, forcing professionals from the field to rethink almost everything we know about CX. How do we organize customer services for machines? How do we manage the CX delivered to machines? What even is CX for a machine in the first place? Machines don’t have sentiments and don’t care for empathy. A company cannot win the loyalty of a machine by appealing on emotions and they will respond to advertising like humans do. Adapting to business with machines will require a new logic, a new approach, new processes and even a new mindset. New standards for effectiveness, ease and convenience will have to be implemented.
Understanding how machine customers “think“ will be critical for success. Driven by algorithms instead of needs, emotions and beliefs, machine customers will make optimal decisions based on cold, rational logic. In their “thinking“ process, machines will consume much more information than we do, and they will not engage in human-like verbal communication. This means that data science will play a vital role in doing business with machines and managing their CX. Search engines will need to be optimized for machine needs and companies will have to provide much deeper product specifications, properly structured for consumption by machines. Transparency, security, reliability, low latency, consistency, and predictability will all be critical for winning the loyalty of machine customers.
One thing that will remain the same is necessity for journey mapping. This technique will be critical for understanding machine customer journeys and removing related inefficiencies and frictions. However, machines will not use websites and smartphone applications, so companies will have to provide appropriate touchpoints – based on conversational intelligence for AI assistants and IoT APIs for smart objects.
With all of these implications, the rise of the machine customers has the potential to supercharge economy growth, creating new industries and roles as it does so. But it will also reshape industries so that those businesses who rely too heavily on brand, and not on value, will struggle.
Machine customers will not replace humans in customer role – we will still continue buying what we want. Instead, machines will complement us by making our lives easier and enabling humans to focus on emotionally valuable and fulfilling experiences. Organizations should start preparing for interacting with machine customers by identifying processes and services where they can fit in.
