While COVID-19 has accelerated the move towards digital technology and platforms that allow people to connect, work, shop, learn and play online, these digital experiences are also causing major opportunities (and disruption) for brands. At the forefront of those industries that are facing long-term risk are the ones that rely on branded environments and physical locations, such as banks, retail stores and services.

This article does not argue against technology, but instead focuses on how to humanize the digital experience and find the right balance between technology and human interaction. When done right, digital technology can empower businesses and lead to greater employee engagement and customer satisfaction. Without this balance, though, we believe many of the things that we take for granted when visiting a physical store will disappear, leading to fewer jobs, a worsening of service experiences, and ultimately the lessening of consumer’s buying power.

There is no denying that technology has allowed humans to be more connected through social media, AR and VR platforms and video conferencing. In the banking industry, it has allowed for frictionless transactions while reducing the cost to bankers. In China, it is becoming a standard practice to have robots as lobby greeters to help direct customers to the right department. For retailers, online and mobile shopping has allowed for a new channel to engage with their customers. All of these trends have been accelerated due to the pandemic and the need for self-isolation. However, scientists have identified that not all is great in the Kingdom of Digital Oz as we get a closer look behind the curtain. Many studies are identifying the negative impact technologies are having on consumers beyond putting job security at risk.

With search engines such as Google, behavioral scientist Matt Wallaert has identified that we are becoming dependent on the ease they provide. By having our search queries pre-populated and the results curated for us, serendipitous discovery (a core tenet of what separates us from animals) is becoming less common. And it’s not just undermining our ability to challenge our thinking through discovery. The heavy reliance on mobile devices is turning humans into mobile zombies, altering everything from how we interact with people face-to-face to how children are being raised. Unfortunately, these emerging behaviors have led to disorganized and lower development levels in the brain’s white matter for children – an area key to language, literacy and cognitive skill development based on a study published in 2020 that involved MRI scans of brains.

The biggest concern for businesses, as outlined by Neema Moraveji, Director of the Calming Technology Lab at Stanford University, is the fact that sensory dynamism could be a problem when it comes to an over-reliance on computer technology. Moraveji explains how computer and mobile screens can sometimes cloud our sensory judgement as consumers, with only factual and textual information instead of an array of human emotions coming into play. He explains that technology drives us to be less human as we become more isolated and individual in behavior rather than interconnected, and primarily competitive rather than mostly collaborative. The loss of sensory judgment undermines consumers’ ability to emotionally connect, opening the door to apathy and losing brand loyalty.

The ability to connect humans to their emotions, something machines cannot accomplish, provides a considerable payback for retailers and banks. For example, a study by Motista found that emotionally connected retail banking customers hold more products, concentrate more of their balances, remain customers longer and are more interested in opening more accounts. The study identified these customers hold 20 percent more products with their banks; have an attrition rate 78 percent lower; consider their bank as their primary bank 32 percent more often; and express, on average, 900 percent higher purchase intent for cross-selling products — credit cards, mortgages, personal loans and lines, and brokerage accounts — when needs arise in their lives. The facts are pretty compelling: a more human digital service experience pays dividends for banks and retailers.

Our own immersive experience study identified consumers view the real value of technology as an enabler to better customer service as opposed to replacing human service. The research found that consumers describe an immersive experience as one where they receive the best service and can be fully engaged participants. It is important to note that consumers link immersive experiences to a benefit. Therefore, “the use of virtual reality and augmented reality technology” and “a place where digital and physical come together” ranked extremely low in the study as a way to describe an immersive experience. This supports the hypothesis that consumers are less interested in the type of technology and its features, and more focused on how these technologies can improve the service experience.

Digging deeper to identify the one key benefit of an immersive experience, consumers in our study reported that the ability to find what they are looking for is the benefit they value most. The next most important benefits were increasing the service level, making shopping efficient and providing a great reason to shop. Millennials also ranked the ability to make the shopping experience more personalized, increase service level, allow access to videos, testimonials, price comparison and advice significantly higher than the total sample size.

If emerging technologies are all about better customer service, creating an emotional connection that has proven to drive loyalty and growth is the other side of the equation. A Gallup study identified an emotionally connected service experience keeps customers returning, netting an additional 23 percent of revenue. Emotional connections are driven by customers engaging with staff, not machines. You could also argue that more reliance on technology makes the customer experience less human.

Ensuring empathy delivered by human engagement is a key driver of consumer loyalty. Even before the pandemic, consumers wanted to bank with real people and seek advice through human interaction. Along with our own Stealth Attrition study, an Accenture report found that access to humans in a retail bank also leads to a better branch experience. The report found that 40 percent of respondents like their overall branch experience when they have access to front line staff. Not surprisingly, those who use the branch prefer “full-service branches” over all other formats (61 percent) and close to 50 percent indicated they trust their bank more when speaking to someone in person. Given the fact that our own study found that only 4 percent of bank customers view their bank as a primary source for financial advice, ramping up the human interaction with bankers can be seen a critical factor in long-term success.

The fact that digital transformation is eliminating repetitious, low-value tasks is also rewiring how we live our lives. There are strategies retailers and bankers can take to find the right balance between digital technologies and humans as part of an ideal service experience. However, it’s essential to identify first what is the perfect service experience for banks and retailers.

An ideal service experience, at its core, answers deep emotional consumer needs. For example, customers want expedient banking transactions where they no longer need to wait in line or fill-out massive amounts of documents to open an account or take a loan. However, if we look at the relationship from an emotional, humanistic perspective, we can see that customers need to reduce their economic anxieties about retirement and growing their financial security. Can a machine do that? Whether you are looking for a special outfit for a friend’s wedding, a new set of noise cancelling headphones or a healthier lunch, connection comes from recognition of the emotional aspect of the underlying need – in these examples, perhaps the consumer needs to feel attractive, to work from home with less stress or to address a concerning health need. If we start from empathy around consumers’ needs, we can see that technology falls short at certain points in the customer journey.

When you deconstruct an ideal service experience, what you discover is that the positive outcome has as much to do with the front-line staff as it does with the merchandise, services and marketing. This is one of the core reasons digital transformations have failed to reach their ideal outcome. They have forgotten the employee in the process, which has led to a disconnect between the external digital transformation and the service experience. The ideal service experience finds the right balance between answering deep consumer emotional needs and providing frictionless transactions or a wide range of product offerings. It allows organizations to leverage the full power of an empowered workforce. To achieve this, brands must lean into gleaning more significant insights from employees than third-party websites and search engine queries. Simply asking your front-line staff what your customers need will provide you with much greater insight than your expensive algorithm. Their input might even help you build a better algorithm.

The future of service experiences will rely on creating a knowledge-based, digitally-enabled ecosystem, one that puts people at the center of the experience. Marketers will need to have a deeper understanding of their customers beyond the conventional demographics and purchase behaviors to get at the root of their hidden needs and aspirations. As brands get better at collecting and utilizing data, they will have a much richer, in-depth understanding of their customer. Coupling clean data with AI will allow for a more robust predictive platform to anticipate and respond to each customer’s individual needs.

However, for all its benefits, if front-line employees do not activate the insights and customer-centric knowledge, much of the investment in knowledge and technology will fail to benefit the organization. The future value will be derived from linking data-rich insights to human-centric behaviors and service models.

We have identified five criteria for an ideal service experience that leverages both technology and humans.