Missing the human touch
How digital should engagement be?Digital, social and mobile technologies have so changed the way we interact with each other that it’s increasingly rare to think of any kind of experience that doesn’t include them.
Today, almost everything is possible, quite literally, from the palms of our hands. But that raises a couple of important questions. How digital can you, or should you, make any brand experience? And, perhaps more importantly, are we living in an age when the human touch has become secondary?
Or put more positively, have we found the critical ingredient that glues together experiences we have struggled to make holistic in the past?
There’s no doubt, as consumers, we are increasingly very comfortable that a large proportion of our interaction with brands has no human interface.
And there’s little doubt that expectations around customised service, lightning-fast responsiveness and 24/7 availability that come from retail have begun to transfer into all our interactions – and that includes how we engage with our employers, or look for employment.
Yet we don’t seem to have got that quite right yet.
For example, consider candidates’ on-going frustration with application systems that were designed to make life easy for the recruiter and not for them.
In many parts of business – and employee engagement and recruitment are two very pronounced examples – there is little desire to remove the human element from the process. Yet there are many instances where poorly thought-through technology seems to want to do just that.
Human vs. high-tech
In work we’re doing at Prophet, where all of our clients are evaluating the impact of digital across the range of business functions, we’ve arrived at a distinction that’s been very helpful.
Rather than seeking to become ‘more digital’, many functions are better off asking, ‘How can we be more human in a world that is increasingly digital?’
It’s not that we shouldn’t be using digital, social and mobile in our engagement and recruitment efforts. Far from it. The technology cat is out of the bag, and companies that don’t embrace it will find themselves alienating the people they need the most.
Rather, the idea is that these technologies and channels should be put to the purpose of further humanising our processes and approaches. In short, use digital to enable more – and better – human engagement.
There are already well-established examples. For example, there’s the Chinese telecoms company Xiaomi, where as a user you can speak directly to a software engineer through social media.
The grail is here
Two things are essential to address the digital vs. human dilemma.
First, of course, is a vision for the experience that is aligned to your employer brand – based on the ‘non-negotiables’ needed to deliver the red thread of the deal.
Second is an appreciation of your starting point, included in which is an understanding of the digital maturity of your organisation. Compromises might need to be made to accommodate the working reality.
And don’t forget the big prize at the end of it all – data. Data that enables insight at every level and actually quantifies experience payback.
It used to be talked about as if it were a ‘holy grail’ – now it’s here. And it can be used to measure the effectiveness, and to fine tune, those human touchpoints in the cycle.
About the authors
