Tech doesn’t make the strategy. Just like the new golf clubs don’t make you Tiger.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the face of work, especially the move from brick-and-mortar, in-person work to distributed, remote work.
In the process, organizations have gone through the gauntlet as far as adapting to the myriad of changes involved in making this transition work for themselves and their customers. And it’s been a predictably bumpy ride for many.
One of the most glaring missteps was the reliance upon technology as a crutch, band-aid, or magical potion to fix poor planning and half-baked strategies. One thing is certain; technology is only as strong as the strategic foundation it’s built upon.
Genie in a Bot(tle)? Not Quite
Chatbots; so hot right now, but your wish is certainly not their command.
The fascination with AI and Machine Learning isn’t anything new, but more businesses have been seduced by the potential of these technologies without considering the reality of successful implementations.
A good chatbot is only as good as the content repository it draws from. A well-organized content library that’s AI-ready needs to have a meticulously constructed information architecture, semantically defined metadata, and well-developed taxonomies. Because, again, AI isn’t magic. It’s a statistical analysis that works best when it’s given organized information it can understand.
Without content organization within a thoughtful information architecture, AI will only magnify the mess.
Software Can’t Beat Content in CX Strategy
Branching off the popularity of chatbots, another common mistake is thinking that software, as a whole, is a customer experience strategy. Despite the number of CX platforms out there, the entirety of customer experience can’t be wrapped into them.
CX tools are helpful ways to improve strategies, but can’t replace human beings and content. We’ve talked about content killing customer experience because it fails to consider the voice of the customer — something a piece of software isn’t capable of doing.
The human element of customer experience depends on communication, feedback loops, and responsiveness. Content is the place where customer needs and organizational communication meet to answer questions and provide helpful information.
Content Strategy Always Improves On Itself
Software can’t make those improvements but content developers can. Because the goal of content is to be helpful, relevant, and timely, an organization can’t replace content creators with technology. No matter how sophisticated they think that technology might be.
Returning to communication, a strong content strategy needs the ongoing relationship between customers and employees to be well-established. Because as an organization’s product changes, so will the needs, demands, and concerns of the customers they aim to serve. Without content and customer experience strategies in place to address these unavoidable changes, software can’t act as a quick fix to what’s innately a human problem.
In the end, technology will never replace strategy — because it can’t. The human connection to product and content strategy isn’t going anywhere. While technology can uplift a content strategy, it can’t make something out of nothing. Establishing lines of communication through content and support is pivotal to customer experience and harnessing the power of human empathy to engage people in ways technology simply cannot.
