For years, Ben’s company enjoyed high customer retention. His team regularly received feedback praising their value-led service, practical advice, and innovative thinking.
But when the latest CX data came in, he was shocked to see a new theme emerging: Customers felt that they weren’t seeing a significant value add in the service they were receiving. Yikes!
Initially, Ben couldn’t place his finger on the cause for this change. With so many new AI and tech tools at their disposal, why wasn’t his team conveying the added value to clients?
Unfortunately, Ben’s not alone. Even as Customer Experience (CX) becomes key to winning business, many leaders are facing this struggle. Finding team members who can both leverage emerging tech and apply strong critical thinking skills to drive memorable CX by is becoming an industry challenge.
Creative and analytical thinking are likely to top everyone’s lists of essential skills for the foreseeable future. So what’s the hold-up?
The big barrier
A core reason for this increasing skills gap is the rise of a transient environment at work. Not sure what we mean? Let’s consider a couple of contemporary work-life truths:
- The average number of tools professionals use has almost doubled since 2019
- Change fatigue is a constant, keeping employees from being at their optimal best
- A staggering number of professionals are unsure about their work priorities (which may include CX)
- A majority of employees are struggling with additional responsibilities at work
All these work realities lead up to a mindset and behavior that focuses on “doing” over “thinking”.
When these processes become automatic, the switching off around critical thinking metamorphoses into a physiological shortcoming. For instance, researchers have long correlated the regular use of devices for navigation with the loss of grey matter in the brain’s hippocampus, impacting long-term spatial navigation capabilities.
With overexposure to quick tech becoming a growing reality, it is a barrier that demands a well-defined combat strategy.
The CX impact
Customers equate advanced intuitiveness with good CX; the loss of critical thinking is threatening your revenue and growth. While leveraging AI and automation is non-negotiable, these alone cannot drive differentiated CX. Your customers don’t want to pay for cookie-cutter solutions. If anything, they are willing to pay a premium for powerful CX.
In a fatigue-inducing digital environment, customers crave the emotional intelligence behind thoughtful personalized solutions. This calls for your employees to hone their creative thinking and problem-solving skills while working with AI and automation-generated output.
As a business leader, how can you make this happen?
Here’s what we recommend:
- Encourage employees to challenge AI assumptions and outputs with their understanding of customer psychology
- Create opportunities for select but deep customer interactions, facilitating direct fodder for thought
- Recognize and reward pattern disruptors in your company
- Introduce a clear distinction between AI-assisted tasks and non-AI-assisted tasks for every role
- Understand and shape EX to drive consistent critical thinking
The transformation opportunity
A key reason why your employees are failing to apply critical thinking is the very nature of tech-led output. Traditional CRM and customer feedback tools tend to focus on quantitative metrics. These keep your employees from addressing the complex, emotional side of customers.
To do their best work, your employees need access to the real, authentic Voice of the Customer. Rather than relying on a few cookie-cutter questions and ad hoc answers, it’s important to keep a continuous flow of feedback coming in. An advanced customer experience management platform can help to automate feedback flows, collect both metric and open-ended feedback, and provide deep analysis through review of key drivers, sentiment, and thematic trends. Keep in mind: The tool is not the solution, but it’s an important source of truth for those making decisions about next steps. Critical thinking is, well, critical!
For instance, when your employees use SogoCX, they are compelled to:
- Not just automate feedback but also ask the right questions
- Get past data silos for omnichannel insights that spark deep thinking and innovation
- Analyze customer journeys by creating custom filters based on their gut intelligence
- Close the loop on customer expectations with empathetic personalization
Accelerating critical thinking
All said and done, driving critical thinking is unlikely to come easy when popular culture is rife with the effortlessness of AI. Partnering with employees to help them navigate fears around AI and skills redundancy is the only way through. Professionals need to not only feel confident about their critical thinking skills but also correlate them to career growth. This is the only way the industry can get talent to embrace these innate skills.
It demands that you actively celebrate the role of critical thinking in business – discuss it at industry forums, highlight it in job descriptions and candidate interviews, prioritize it in your professional development programs, and establish its role in your company’s mission statement. As a business leader, you need to go the extra mile to spark conversations around the economic and social cost that we must attach to critical thinking.
Ready to foster critical thinking and CX at your company? Learn how customer experience management platform can serve as the core of an innovative CX ecosystem. Connect with our team today to unlock a competitive edge!
