Emotional intelligence is a key skill in customer service roles because a company’s productivity and efficiency are directly related to the quality of conversations between service providers and customers. Thus, the personal dynamics of emotionally intelligent customer service employees play an important role in responding to any questions or concerns emotionally, which affects customer turnover, and increases brand loyalty by impressing customers with the organization functionality.
However, embracing automation technology in roles that require one-on-one interaction with customers presents new challenges to organizations that want to take advantage of its benefits, without affecting the service they provide to their customers.
Gartner, an organization that helps many companies increase customer service availability, reduce delays, and improve accuracy, has predicted that 25% of customer service operations will use virtual assistants powered by artificial intelligence in 2020, and this has led to the creation of a mixed workforce that combines human and digital elements in many organizations.
In spite of the fact that basic chatbots are still used in some organizations, companies that care about quality customer service prefer more developed digital employees who can respond to more complicated and subtle requests. In addition to dealing with simple customer inquiries directly, they can also assist human customer service personnel with providing faster and more accurate responses.
This can be applied in restaurants too. The digital employees at a restaurant are trained on a variety of food preparation inquiries. For example, if a customer asks about a foreign meal, and the human restaurant worker doesn't have an answer, the digital employee can help them with that.
While digital employees play a significant role in workplaces that require one-on-one interaction with customers, a major challenge for companies is to ensure that both human and digital employees provide the same emotionally-based service. To establish a common ground between digital and human employees about emotional intelligence, we must consider how that collaborative relationship aligns with the five components of emotional intelligence as identified by psychologist Daniel Goleman: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.
The original five components of Goleman's theory help us create a chart for emotional intelligence within the mixed workforce. While human and digital elements do not all work efficiently in the same areas, they do give us the opportunity to improve human expertise with the help of artificial intelligence without losing the “human touch.”
So how do the five components apply to mixed customer services?
It is important to recognize your emotional state and the way it will affect your actions when dealing with clients, but this is difficult for human employees, especially when dealing with unsatisfied or aggressive clients.
But through collaborative work, digital employees can assist human employees in these situations by adding previously recorded and analyzed information to the intelligent system, enabling it to consider the emotional side of the conversation when presenting the best response to that customer in a specific situation.
For example, when working on a cancellation line where most interactions are negative, it can be difficult for human employees to keep calm. However, artificially intelligent agents, that are automated to work in accordance with every different situation, are less likely to get emotional or angry at difficult customers.
Not only does this make digital employees the best ones to handle cancellations, as there is no chance of reconciliation and already unsatisfied customers may feel bewildered, but they can nonetheless provide human employees with responses that best benefit customers’ emotional states, while helping them to self-regulate their response.
Over time, the motivation for customer service roles has changed from simply making calls as quickly as possible to increasing the value of interactions and ensuring that each has a positive outcome. While this benefits clients, long hours of in-person engagement can be stressful for human employees, leading to a lack of concentration and customer dissatisfaction.
The digital employee also focuses on achieving the customer's positive emotional state and outcome when dealing directly with interactions, but due to its digital nature, it doesn't care if it spends ten minutes or ten hours dealing with a single query. So, it can make more prolonged conversations.
Even when working as an assistant, the digital employee helps strike a balance between the organization's need for a large number of inquiries that solve problems and provide better service and results, as it is able to provide the employee with the best response and most important information directly. This helps employees provide valuable information that benefits both customers and customer service roles.
Having a customer service representative, who is sympathetic to our problem and can demonstrate dedication to solving it, is a key element in providing emotional intelligent connections. Empathy is an important life skill for humans, but it has been very difficult for digital employees to be empathetic and demonstrate listening and understanding skills.
Even when monitoring and responding to a person's emotional state, digital employees can still appear stiff and mechanical when using empathetic language. So, digital employees need to have more self-awareness, which detects conversations that require compassion and empathy in order to be able to pass it on to humans.
Building a relationship with customers is vital to customer service, but it is often the most challenging aspect for digital employees. For example, no one has built a relationship with Amazon Alexa, which is a synthetic technology used on a daily basis.
However, in their role as assistants and by using their analysis of the emotional state and past interactions with customers, digital employees can help human customer service representatives build better relationships with them and direct them to the best way to engage with them.
Digital employees help to enhance customer service functions in organizations around the world, with their ability to track, advise, and respond to different emotional states. Through shared emotional intelligence, the collaborative relationship between human and digital employees helps improve understanding of customers and make each interaction as unique and positive as possible, while delivering the best results.
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