Make Yourself Clear

2Recovering Human Judgment

If you've ever been frustrated enough to place a service call, you know that the call can either add to your frustration or reduce it. The call can either make you feel confident that the service professional has resolved your issue or armed you to handle it, or it can alienate you from the company, product, or service.

Often, such calls are routed through a computer or robot that handles each customer or client in the exact same manner. That routing process can be positive or negative, depending on the way in which the service architecture is structured. Should a human ultimately join the process, this can either enhance or diminish the experience.

Should a human become part of the process, as clichéd as it may sound, that individual should be prepared and able to judge when it is appropriate to teach the customer or client how to fish instead of just giving him or her a fish.

In thinking about a seller – or leader – or trainer – or support professional (as in the example) – the human does not need to have all the information at immediate recall; instead, he or she has to help another human move onto a path to be able to successfully navigate the information (and the path).

We interviewed Owen Jennings, product manager at Cash App, to gain some deeper insight into the ways in which service calls, in particular, flourish or fail based on the extent to which they are authentic, or the extent to which the transaction is overseen well by a human agent. ...