CX Membrane: Usability with Empathy

The technology surrounding the customer experience and, in particular, artificial intelligence, is a growth and learning process that it doesn't stop evolving. When we relate to customers, we have established quality parameters, sales objectives and results, but are we really contemplating the essence of CX or can we go one step further?

In this context, The CX Membrane plays a key role: it defines what types of interactions will or will not be allowed with customers when there are conflicting company objectives.

Sensitive interactions

The ability to send the right message at the right time through the preferred channel is a maximum in the CX universe, as well as in instances of lead scoring,lead nurturing,upselling,Cross Selling and more. Even when these processes are optimized by strategic automations, Many times may have interests, policies, and messages that overlap or they must intelligently adapt to the current mood and recent history of the customer.

‍Gartner defines CX Membrane as a set of company policies and interaction labels that determine how you relate to your customers and they to you. It's an evolution of the traditional customer experience that takes into account their needs, context and expectations with a particular focus on empathy since the relationship began.

The work of the membrane begins with the signs, the data collected during an interaction with the customer. This is continued in the relationship stage with the customer, the inferred and automated condition of their thoughts and feelings about the quality of interaction with the company. Finally, the Principles of interaction are the textual description of the conditional rules of etiquette that define how to react to a certain stage of the customer.

How does this look in practice?

Las customer engagement technologies have provided automation at scale, but they must also help organizations build holistic relationships. The membrane is relevant to customer experience design, particularly when interacting with different functional domains such as customer service, sales and marketing.

Suppose that a customer states that they have recurring connectivity problems on their local dataphone or posnet, which threatens their work. However, two different marketing departments plan to send multiple communications about new services and hardware they want to sell to you. The customer experience membrane accounts for this scenario and the response tag includes the following empathetic policies:

• Don't send marketing messages or additional sales offers.
• Do not send satisfaction surveys until you provide an estimated time for resolution.
• Offer free services to a customer in a “crisis” phase for more than three days.
• An agent should contact the customer who has experienced more than three recurrences of the same problem.

Even if the problem is resolved, the membrane also determines that the customer has a risk of desertion, since you may experience the same problem again if you continue to use the same device. To rescue the relationship, the membrane maintains rules for upsell offers and service credits monthly. These actions lead the customer to recognize that they need new hardware and that the vendor wants to keep the customer's business.

As Gartner explains, intelligent coordination is a way of human and technological orchestration. An understanding of the relationship with the customer and the principles of empathy prescribe a single set of coordinated actions to be executed throughout the organization, which results in relevant, frictionless CX.