Balancing human touch with AI in customer service. (0:02)
Implementing AI in customer service, fears and opportunities. (5:24)
Balancing AI and human touch in customer service, with challenges and benefits of implementing AI. (9:09)
Personalized customer experience, AI, and loyalty. (12:22)
Balancing AI and human interaction in customer service. (20:33)
Maurits
Welcome, everybody, to Customer Friendship Conversations by Dixa, where we are really bringing you the latest trends, tools and insights for delivering customer service as it’s meant to be. So what we like to do in each episode is bring on a customer service hero so they can reveal some of their stories, some of their tips on how you can really build long-lasting bonds with your customers. So whether you’re a business owner, a customer service pro, or just someone who’s curious about the world of customer experience and service, then you’ve definitely come to the right place. As a quick intro to myself, my name is Maurits. I work at Dixa, a customer service helpdesk platform. I work in the partnerships field, so I work very closely with our customer success and product team, trying to figure out what integrations and partnerships and tech stacks out there essentially help supercharge customer service teams to deliver that experience. And the topic today that we’re going to be discussing is how to balance the human effect when implementing AI into your customer experience. And I’m very happy that today we have Suzanne, who is the head of customer service at Papier. Papier is a e-commerce company focused on personalized cards, paper, stationery and books. And actually, Suzanne, I think the last time we spoke was actually in person. We had a joint fireside chat in London back in November. But tell the audience a little bit about yourself, your background and also a little bit about Papier.
Suzanne
Yeah, so I’m head of customer service at Papier. I’ve been here nearly four years now. And as you said, we are a personalized stationery brand and our mission is to make each day noteworthy. So that covers everything from personalised notebooks that you might write your friend’s name on before you gift it, to photo books, from kind of holidays, birthdays and occasions like that, to wedding stationery for the big day in terms of invitations and table plans. So we really cover kind of customers, all touch points across their lives and all important events. Previously I was at LV, a femtech brand whose main product was a smart breast pump. So quite a different kind of company. But I’ve worked in startups, in customer service and customer experience my whole career, really, for the last ten years.
Maurits
Very cool. And the setup that you currently have at Papier, can you tell us a little bit about what your team looks like and why did you structure it the way it currently is?
Suzanne
Yeah, so we are a relatively small team, we’re all in-house, we have a London-based team, and then we have a New York based team as well, because we cover a lot of the UK and a lot of the US in terms of our customers. And really we are very close knit, we are very proactive. We play a big part in feeding back to the rest of the business in terms of the product, the customer experience, the marketing, the brand. So we are kind of really embedding within the business, which is something that I think is very important for a business. Kind of trying to scale at the rate that Papier is, and trying to really a relatively new business, really. We were founded in 2015, trying to build that brand and that trust with customers.
Maurits
I like what you mentioned about feeding the customer service data and results back to the other departments within the organisation. Has that always been like that? What role does it play when it comes to fostering relationships within your own team, but then also that with other departments within the overall business?
Suzanne
Yeah. I think something that I talk about a lot with other people in customer experience is that feeling of customer service teams feeling a bit siloed. Their workflow is quite different to the rest of the business. They’re not particularly project-based. They tend to be more kind of firefighting and dealing with immediate issues as they come up. So I think making that space for their customer service team to reflect on. Okay, here have been our main issues. Here’s what we’re doing about them, here’s what we’re telling the rest of the business and how they’re going to take a look at fixing it. That helps motivate the team. And then obviously, speaking to the rest of the business about those issues can only be good for the customer. But it’s definitely not always been that way.
Suzanne
And I would certainly say that nobody is perfect at it, no team is perfect at it. And I think it can sometimes be a case of trying to present similar information in more interesting ways. Or, you know, if there is a business initiative that’s kicking off around a particular thing to connect it to something that customer service has been saying for a while about like, hey, actually this part of the website doesn’t work particularly well for customers, and if you’re looking at, say, conversion on a particular product, that might be impacting it. So kind of couching that in terms that connect with what the rest of the business is doing is always really helpful.
Maurits
And so you kind of already answered my follow-up question, which was this, the importance of the human angle. And I think that’s so relevant today’s topic. You’ve clearly already described how important it is on how your teams work internally with other departments and from a schedule and mentality perspective. But could you give some of the viewers and listeners a little bit of insights of how your team, and perhaps also yourself and your management, how did they initially react when this whole wave of AI came into your field?
Suzanne
Yeah, I think it is a little bit scary sometimes. I think for managers who maybe don’t feel necessarily that their roles have been particularly technical before and now having a whole new level of technicality introduced, obviously with teams, there are fears around, will it impact my job? I think dealing with that is often sort of reframing it to look at it as an opportunity, which it definitely is. We have someone on our team who has started off kind of managing our bot and looking at our bot providers and then from there the springboard to kind of learning more about AI and becoming super proficient at it. And that’s a great skill to have and to use.
Suzanne
And then similarly with the rest of the team, helping them to see AI as a way, as something that is taking away maybe the more boring or repetitive parts of the job so they can focus on the stuff that they’re really good at. And definitely they are always super keen to feedback on what our AI solution is doing because they see more customer interactions than anyone else. So they can spot like, oh, actually here, the customer wanted this, but it’s kind of been given this. Can we fix that? They are a really good feedback loop in terms of improvement as well.
Maurits
Can you tell me a little bit more about the person or multiple people who are in charge of the selection process of AI implementing it? Because I’m curious to see how did that person take on the challenge and how do they position themselves within the team with such, of course, advantageous but risky technology for you?
Suzanne
I think from my perspective, I think with these things you have to look at it in terms of if everyone else has it and we don’t, our customer service and our customer experience is just going to behind and people are going to feel like we’re not giving them what they need. You know, similarly to when live chat was first introduced and people are adopting that, even, I imagine when email was first introduced instead of writing letters to a company. So I think I came at it from that perspective. And then Sian on our team, who manages a lot of our kind of bot dialogues and that side of things, she is definitely super empathetic and has always had that connection with customers.
Suzanne
And I think coming at it from that angle rather than a technical angle to be like, oh, look what we can do to be more. Be like, oh my gosh, there are all these customers and we could just, we could help them all in one fell swoop. And then the rest of my team doesn’t have to spend their days responding to. Whereas my order inquiries, they, instead of speaking to her wedding customer about designing their very large order for stationery and making tweaks, which is more interesting for them and is more helpful for those customers.
Maurits
So would you say that this colleague of yours took this as maybe a promotion? Maybe not as a promotion, but just in general an interesting step in towards their career, that they can still deal with the customer service and customer experience industry, but to utilise and monitor and quality control such powerful technology?
Suzanne
Yes, definitely. I would say Siana, having started as a customer service assistant and is now our UK manager, and part of that is managing some of our UK team, but part of that is managing our AI because obviously that becomes a massive part of, okay, if we’re ramping up for peak, it’s not just about managing these new hires or these new seasonal staff we might get in. It’s also about optimising our AI to make sure we can serve as many customers as possible. Possible. So, yeah, it definitely does give another string to your bow in terms of customer service.
Maurits
My next question was actually going to be, how do you find that right balance between AI and keeping the human touch? But I think you’ve in a way definitely answered that and it sounds like a sound approach. Rather than getting an external bot manager in to kind of just look at tech and efficiency, to have someone within the company working on the front lines and always delivering the human touch, to then supplement them with AI, I think gives you the ability to maintain that balance. Would you say that’s fair?
Suzanne
I think that’s definitely true and I think you can think about, well, what is being fed into that AI to make it helpful, and it often is, FAQ is written by your team. It’s loads of data that you have about the best way to respond to a customer that comes from those human interactions. So it does need to be based on your existing customer service team. If they are doing a good job and they are in charge of managing your AI solution, then the AI is going to be doing a good job as well.
Maurits
Many of the things that I’ve heard from you today seem all very positive. There’s of course some hesitation, of course implementing AI at the beginning, your competitors are implementing it and if you don’t do it. Will your customer service fall behind, quote unquote? But could you tell me a little bit more about some of the challenges that you’ve faced when you’ve started trying to craft your customer experience, how has AI helped it? What may be more importantly or interesting, how has it kind of shown some unforeseen challenges to you and to your team?
Suzanne
I think it’s interesting because if you’re talking to people outside of customer experience, if you talk to your friends, or certainly like my dad, the idea of getting through to a bot on live chat is like, oh my God, they’ve sent me through to a bot. It’s not going to be able to answer my question. And that is the mindset that some people will have. Like, this is not going to be helpful for me. It’s going to be frustrating, and I want to get the shortcut route to an agent. And the thing is, a lot of those people should be speaking to agents. If you have that profile of customer.
Suzanne
But we’re again, a relatively small team, we are not 24/7 so if in that gap that you have overnight, you can be serving the 50% of customers who do want to know, like, oh, does the sale apply to diaries as well as planners? If you can be helping them overnight and kind of either resolving their answer or triaging them for when we do have people back online, then the people who do really need to speak to a person are going to get a better experience. So I think there’s always going to be that challenge around people who are resistant. And I understand it because if you get through to a bad bot, it’s a really horrible experience, especially if you then are never followed up with by a human, if that interaction is never reviewed.
Suzanne
So you never like the bot, never improves and never learns. I know that. I’m sure everyone’s had that experience, particularly speaking to bigger businesses through bots. But I do think over time that perception will change because the technology is advancing so rapidly. And it’s just a case of making sure that your customers feel comfortable with the level of automation that you have.
Maurits
100% the advantages of AI, how it can help your team deliver new SLA’s cost, efficiencies and benefits. But like you just mentioned, when it messes up, when it makes a mistake, when it’s a poor experience, it can be an extreme driver of disloyalty too. And I would assume that could be quite a fearful thing to have. I mean, how you just mentioned that the technology, maybe the expectations of end customers is probably only going to get better and more flexible, right, as AI just becomes more of a common thing. But do you see even more importance to the humans behind the technology for your particular team as you move forward, if you get higher resolution rates, if you use it for more use cases, like how do you see the humans behind the AI developing?
Suzanne
I mean, I’m a really big advocate for customer service as a skilled profession. I always have been. And I think now that we are getting to a place where AI is taking over the more repetitive and really the easiest parts of the job, even if they are quite annoying, that level of skill you need to be a really good customer service agent will increase in, it will be more recognised. So I think having the right people, hiring the right people in those roles who are really empathetic, who genuinely care about customers, will only get more important, because if you don’t have that bedrock, then you’re not, you know, nothing you do will work, even if you do implement AI.
Maurits
Absolutely. And tell me a little bit more about the bot that you have implemented. Does it primarily focus on customer service oriented intents and use cases, or does it also act as a shopping assistant for when people are browsing your website? Can you tell me a little bit about some use cases that your bot delivers on the front end?
Suzanne
So it is primarily around resolution. But because Papier is kind of a unique proposition in the sense that every customer goes to an editor stage where they can do actually quite a complex thing with a product. You know, add text boxes, add a QR code, italicise the text, all kinds of fun things, which is quite a different experience from like, adding your size and buying a dress, for instance. It does mean that those kind of customer service type queries are often shopping queries as well, because it’s around, like, how do I use the editor? If I use this yellow, will it match with this other yellow I’ve used on this different product? We do have a mix of those shopping queries in with all your usual stuff about delivery or cancellations or refunds or things like that. So it’s a real mix.
Suzanne
And we actually also have a really fun thing now with our greetings cards, where you can ask AI to write a message in the greetings card or, well, ask whatever you like, write a poem. So we’re definitely experimenting with it in ways that are practical but also fun for the customer as well.
Maurits
You said the word experimenting and that definitely bodes well with customer experience and AI. Are there any exciting experimental things that you’re currently testing or that you want to test in the next month, six months, twelve months that, you know, listeners might be interested in hearing.
Suzanne
I think we are always keen to expand what our customer service team does. And as our wonderful AI is able to take over more of the stuff that were previously doing, it means we get to do stuff like more design work, for instance. So adding even more bespoke things to what customers want in a way that makes our proposition stand out. Kind of dealing with social media and having a really active customer service presence on that side of things as well. Papier is obviously huge on Instagram and growing that community is becoming part of customer service too. And we also have now started going into wholesale, so we’re available in stores and we have all those questions coming in and those relationships. So I think really just expanding beyond what you think of as traditional customer service.
Suzanne
And again, keeping the team integrated across everything is really exciting.
Maurits
And is this one of your ways where you’re trying to drive loyalty to your customer, your current customer base? Or is this also a combination of how you’re trying to differentiate yourself to some of your competitors?
Suzanne
Yeah, it’s a bit of both, I would say. I think in terms of loyalty, obviously customer experience is massive for that. It’s having a customer come back again and again because they’ve had a good experience and people have clearly put time and thought into kind of creating that experience for them. But also, yeah, it is about that word of mouth then, when your customers become promoters and someone is a brand new customer coming to your site for the first time, what can you offer them that is? Yeah, fun or different or personalised compared to other people.
Maurits
I like it. I’ll be honest, I’m not the biggest e commerce shopper out there, or just general consumer, but of looking at a lot of our customers and even prospects. I like the personalization of using AI in the shopping sequence to help end customers personalise their own messages, birthday gifts, anniversary cards. That’s a cool touch. I haven’t heard of that before. In the next section, we do this on every episode. We try to get different responses because obviously everyone has different experiences and opinions. But I’m going to ask you maybe two or three questions and try to keep it short, to the point. And we’re just going to see what are some of your initial reactions that might be interesting for the viewers to take as they take away. First question would be, how do you provide personalised customer experience?
Suzanne
Every time I’m going to sound like a broken record on this one. But it’s about the right people. It’s about hiring the right people and having the right people on your team and treating customer service as a skilled profession. Those things that we talk about as kind of soft skills in air quotes are not common. They are very rare. And I think, you know, finding someone who as part of their job, can pick up the phone a hundred times and give each customer a personal experience, that’s a rare person and they need to be taken care of and you need to take the time to find them.
Suzanne
So yeah, I think it does come to the people because those are also the people who, because they’re interested, will provide that feedback and will say, will keep saying over and over again, actually, customers don’t like this. They don’t like this bit of the website, they don’t like this bit of the product until you fix it and you make your customers happy. So yeah, it’s the people.
Maurits
It’s the people. And then of course, the people behind the technology. If the technology is going to use.
Suzanne
More and more of it.
Maurits
Very cool. The next quick fire question, how do you measure the success of your customers loyalty to your brand?
Suzanne
I think obviously there are metrics like Csatrite, like NP’s, that will give you, that will highlight areas where you need to improve and will tell you what you’re doing well. But I think the best customer experience I can see is where something goes wrong and you turn it around for that customer and they go from being annoyed to actively promoting you or your brand. And I think you can have a business that is incredible what it does and runs incredibly smoothly. But there are always things that are beyond your control. Courier delays, provider outages or downtime. You cannot predict those problems, they are going to happen. And so having people who can deal with that and who can say to the customer, look, we’re really sorry, this isn’t the experience we hope for. Here’s what we can do to fix it.
Suzanne
And turning that experience around is super important.
Maurits
At the start of the podcast today, obviously you described to the audience and to myself a little about where your background came from in the customer service industry. Are there any learnings? Maybe someone told you some key insightful tips that you wish you would just learnt earlier. Maybe it was at your time at Papier or your previous firm, but something that you go, I wish I knew this learner.
Suzanne
I think it probably is advocate for the customer because it’s usually the right thing to do for the business, and it might make you a bit unpopular and it might take you months or it might take you years. In a few cases I can think of for an idea to come to fruition and be delivered. But if customers are telling you something repeatedly and making something clear to you need to communicate that. And I think that can be hard, particularly maybe at the start of your career where you feel like, oh, I don’t want to keep bothering these people. Like, our tech team are really busy and I don’t want to keep going over and keep bothering them about something.
Suzanne
I don’t want to keep raising this with my C suite, but do raise it, because that is your job, that is your value to the business, I think.
Maurits
And just before I round up Suzanne, our podcast and what we’ve talked about, I mean, are there any other takeaways or insights you’d like to share with the audience?
Suzanne
I would say, I mean, we’ve talked about it a little bit, but experimenting is really important and that can feel a bit scary because there might be real customers involved, but not being scared to make a change on a limited basis and say, all right, well, we’re just going to see how this works for a week, and if people hate it, then we’re going to stop doing it. And if they like it, we’re going to do more of it. I think that’s really important. And stops you kind of getting stuck in a rut and helps you adapt to new technologies and new ways of.
Maurits
Doing things, I would assume also, and I like that approach, by the way, if you implement a one week project or one week trial, that if there is success or not success, you’re probably still giving yourself and your team fresh energy of trying something different. That probably also helps team morale. So it’s not the same and the.
Suzanne
Same and the same every time. Yeah, absolutely. That’s definitely the case.
Maurits
Fantastic. Well, you know, I think today’s session covers a lot of really cool topics. We learned a little bit more about who you are, Suzanne. Also, the journey that Papier has been through when it comes to customer experience. What I liked, obviously relevant to the topic, we got into how you started using AI and how your team initially thought about it, and then most importantly, how you balanced getting team members to stand behind the technology to make sure that you kept that balance of human versus AI when interacting with your end customers. I’d like to thank you, Suzanne, very much for joining the podcast today. I hope the viewers also very much enjoyed and can take some key takeaways in learnings and looking forward to the next session on Dixa’s Customer Friendship Conversations.
Suzanne
Thanks so much for having me, Maurits.
Maurits
Thanks for listening to today’s episode of Customer Friendship Conversations! If you’ve enjoyed the show, then make sure you’re following us on your podcast platform of choice. It means that you’ll get notified each time we release a new episode, so you won’t miss out on any of the other amazing customer friendship heroes we’ll be showcasing in the coming months! Of course, a rating or review is a huge help to the show, so we always massively appreciate those, as well. And if you’re interested in learning more about customer friendship then head to dixa.com to discover everything you want to know about customer experience as it’s meant to be. I’m Maurits Pieper and another huge thank you to Suzanne for appearing on this episode of Customer Friendship Conversations!