If it works for the Upper Class, will it work for you? Virgin Atlantic recently declared that its six-week Google Glass trial has been a raging success. The airline reports that by augmenting their customer service team’s capabilities with Google Glass and Sony smartwatches, they’ve improved the customer experience for their Upper Class passengers (like life was so tough for them before).
Let’s look at what Virgin tested, and then talk about whether you should follow suit: whether those of us in business (and those who are customer experience designers, customer service consultants, speakers and the like on customer experience and customer service) should hurry to launch similar initiatives for ourselves or for our clients.
Virgin’s Google Glass trial run
Let’s say you’re one of Virgin’s most valued passengers. (To be clear: by “valued,” I don’t mean that the red-clad professional Virgins like your smile, I mean they’ve weighed your wallet and found it to their liking.) During the Google Glass trial, a tech-bespectacled Virgin rep would greet you at your limo, confirm that your travel itinerary is up to date, and clue you in on the weather expected for your destination, “all without breaking eye contact.” [Uh huh: From what I’ve seen of the Virgin trial run, that “unbroken” eye contact is compromised by endless fiddling with buttons on the side of the glasses, right in the line of vision of the passenger.] Be that as it may, based on the success of this initiative, Virgin is reported to be now looking to broaden the application.
Unlikely to go the way of Virgin Bride
Now, Virgin is a company that rarely fails, and it simply doesn’t do to bet against them. Even their rare failures — like their spectacularly-named bridal shops, Virgin Bride – are interesting: Virgin Bride only failed, according to Richard Branson, “because we couldn't find any!” So if Virgin says the Upper Class test was a success for them, I expect they're telling the truth.
But what's good for Virgin may or may not work for you
However, what works for Virgin won’t necessarily work, or will require special sensitivity to make work, for the rest of us in business. Virgin is a fashion brand as much as a customer service-centered company; anything new and exciting tends to work well for them and their customer base, but the same approach may put your particular segment of customers off their feed, if not done with the proper sensitivity.
While technology is obviously integral to a modern-day customer experience, bringing technology to the foreground of the customer experience — in fact, to the foreground of the part of the customer experience that you’re delivering via human beings – is always a double edged pixel, and whether it succeeds or fails for you depends on how you deploy it, and with what objective.
Technology, in other words, can either bring you closer to the customer or send you farther adrift, farther away from the people you’re striving to serve.
That’s because there are two parts—two very different parts—to customer service, to providing a complete and superior customer experience.
1. There’s the transactional side of customer service—getting the details of your needs and wants in order. This is where Google Glass shows promise (as, for that matter, do kiosks with no human-delivered service involved at all): You’re offloading the transactional. You’re not having humans interfere in what, especially to an internet and mobile-savvy customer base, and especially especially to millennials, is something better carried out by search engine and wiki than by a human’s memory and faculties.)
2. There’s the emotional side of customer service. The other side of customer service, of true hospitality, is very different from the transitional side.
It’s a feeling, or the delivery of a feeling, of:
• warmth
• recognition
• being valued, of knowing that your business is valued, that your actual presence is valued in the place of business (whether that’s a physical location or otherwise).
This human touch, human recognition, human warmth is the side of customer service that is often where you can build a true competitive advantage in business. And it’s what you risk compromising in the inevitable upcoming rush to turn service teams into glasstronauts.
The scourge of faux hospitality
What you want to avoid with any new deployment of technology in the customer experience is this: letting it degenerate into faux hospitality, into a way of fooling yourself into thinking you’re providing the essentials of true hospitality when in fact the employees who could actually provide that true hospitality (the human touch, the recognition) are being compromised by the mechanization of the same.
It certainly doesn’t require deploying high-tech tools to give faux hospitality, half-hearted simulations of caring. And you undoubtedly can, and often should, deploy high-tech tools and combine them with — augment — real human caring. (In fact, it’s important that you do so, because millennial customers and others who have grown used to a digitally enhanced experience online and on their phones, want similar advantages in person, on the transactional side of the customer service equation.)
But there is a danger here. The danger is that you’ll get distracted by all that is shiny, and forget to do the hard work of hiring, orienting, training, and inspiring the warm, empathetic human beings needed to provide superior customer service. You’ll forget to do this because, you think, “hey, the machines are supplying the personalization.”
This is an easy mistake to made, the slipperiest of sexy slopes. It’s not inevitable, but the risk is there. And if you slip down this slope, you’ll find that your company, your hospitality or customer service organization, becomes what any smart businessperson dreads becoming: a commodity.
Keeping your eye on the business objective: connection
For Virgin, being exciting and cutting edge is authentic to their brand. For the rest of us, being exciting and cutting edge is probably good, or at least o.k. But it’s not central to what we’re trying to accomplish. What is central is our connection to the customer. Accomplish this by any means that work for your brand, including glasstastic technology and smartphones, but never break eye contact with your objective.
Micah Solomon is a customer service speaker, customer experience consultant, and author.
