Take for example the customer experience when one calls the “Call Centers” for any help such as your cable TV service or phone bill or whatever. The automated systems are designed to minimize interaction with human respondents at all cost. More efficient and modern the system, more are ways of routing the customers internally to as many automated options as possible. Only the most ardent and persevering customer may get through. The rest will give up merely due to sheer fatigue! :-(
In all of the above the “customer” is designed into the system as the “enemy” to get rid off as fast as possible. The myriad of options the company deals with have to be sorted through by the customer by listening to the endless pull down menu presented in so many ways. Poor application of data science on the part of the programmer is inflicted as the burden on the customer in the above interaction!
In the mean time and when the customer finally gets through to a real live person, the poor call center workers are trained to say “Is there anything else I can help you with?” when the original problem is not resolved or left to the next agent. These call center workers are endless chain of people with responsibility to communicate without any authority to resolve the issue on hand.
All of the above suggest a need for (a) Common Language (b) System thinking or integrated view of the problem from a larger perspective vs. task oriented actions seen as the “job”) (c) emphasis on End to End innovation and (d) Emotional Intelligence that treats customer as one with a need (instead of merely as a source of data). These are four of the seven Transformational Skills essential to be practiced by the service solution developers (who are in most cases technical professionals). For more details: https://stimsinstitute.com/20151207books/
STIMS Institute 