User experience and customer experience have long been a focus for organisations aiming to drive loyalty and customer retention. In a changing world, UX and CX are no longer enough – now organisations need to focus on human experience (HX) for a competitive edge.
This is according to Luke Willemse, Sales and Marketing Manager at Decisioneering, a data engineering and AI specialist, and local partner of Medallia – a leading real-time experience management platform.
Willemse explains that HX encompasses more than just whether a customer received the goods they ordered, or whether an application was easy to use. It relates to how the customer interacted with the organisation at every point of their journey, how they felt about those engagements, and how they perceive the entire experience and the organisation as a result.
“Customers want to feel heard – especially the younger market. Organisations that show empathy, address any negative experiences immediately and make customers feel heard are more likely to improve customer loyalty, repeat business and referrals,” he says.
He cites the example of a patient making an online booking for a doctor’s appointment: “The interfaces might be slick and easy to use, so in theory the user experience is good. But the patient may be nervous and not understand the medical terms used during the consultation, so the HX isn’t good enough. However, if empathetic engagements happened before and after the appointment – say the doctor made a follow-up call to check how the patient was feeling and if they understood the prognosis and treatment plan, the overall HX would be better.”
To improve HX, organisations should break down silos between operations to share real-time information about the customer journey, and have the right systems in place to track both the journey and the customer’s sentiment throughout it.
“When you capture the customer’s experience and sentiment from everywhere – through e-mails, chats, call-centre transcripts, social media, web behaviour and then also through employee feedback, you get a better understanding of why they might be frustrated, and you can address the issue,” he says. “You can follow up, make it a bit more personal and try to catch the issue at the right time to turn that feeling of negativity into a more personalised engagement that makes that person feel like they are heard.”
To build HX into business, organisations need to start with building empathy at their core, he says.
“They need to put both the customer and their employees first. They also need to take a look at experiences holistically, not in silos,” he says. “Most companies are still very channel- focused, and each department is running its own playbook. But humans don't think in channels. They remember how a company made them feel across the entire journey. So organisations need to map and design around the full end-to-end experience, not just the isolated touch points. They've got to break down those internal silos. HX is not just about marketing or the CX function – it needs to bring together the product teams and the data teams, HR, operations and IT, with a shared commitment to the experience you're wanting to offer.”
Willemse notes: “Importantly, HX is about listening and acting in real-time. That means not just collecting the feedback once a quarter, but instead having systems that continuously capture the voice of the customer and voice of the employee and interpret that through advanced analytics and AI to empower frontline teams to respond quickly.”
Organisations also need to build with flexibility in mind, he says: “They must be flexible enough to adapt to changing market needs. To align with what the market wants now, they need empathy, holistic thinking, cross-functional collaboration, real-time action and agility.”
Decisioneering positions itself to help organisations transition from UX to an HX.
Willemse says: “We have trained our team on how to go about building solutions that keep the customer journey and HX in mind, and we offer solutions that are leaders in this regard. In our opinion, Medallia is the most powerful platform out there for enabling a true human experience approach from a software point of view.”
With years of expertise in data integration and CX, Decisioneering partners with industry-leading solutions like Medallia to enable omnichannel integration and deeper data insights that foster improved HX.
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