In customer relations, “we too often see digital as a means of replacing the human”

2023-04-23 18:00:18

Julia Velkovska is a researcher in sociology at the Orange Labs development and innovation program and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

How has digital transformed the service relationship?

To reduce their costs, companies and administrations today tend to favor remote and often automated relationships through chatbots. They transfer a whole part of the work to the users by pushing them to carry out a maximum of operations by themselves, from home. No need to queue at the counter to complete the procedures or to send a letter to the complaints department to express your dissatisfaction.

The problem is first of all that of skills. To apply for family allowances or housing assistance, it is not only necessary to know how to surf the website of the Family allowance fund, but also to carry out a whole investigation work in order to know the conditions to be fulfilled, the documents to be provided, etc. This dual competence, both numerical and administrative, is very unevenly distributed in the population, depending on age and social background.

Has automation reached its limits?

It is not the technologies themselves that should be called into question, but rather the way in which they are used. Today, organizations are in a logic of excessive rationalization. They focus the organization of the customer journey on standard requests. As long as your query stays within the frame, the system works. But if you find yourself in a complex situation that does not correspond to the planned boxes, you are quickly confronted with an impasse.

Also read the survey: Article reserved for our subscribers For companies and public services, the need to put people back into the relationship with customers

This explains why a certain number of users are forced to give up their rights or to “make a scene” on the telephone or in a physical contact point so that the organization deigns to deal with their problem. Often considered as “incivility”, these excesses are in fact only the result of managerial rationalization policies for customer relations.

What should be the place of the human?

Too often, we see the digital as a means of replacing the human. It should rather be considered as a complementarity. In 2006, a regional agency of the National Employment Agency, the ancestor of Pôle Emploi, tried to replace all face-to-face interviews with video communication. This turned out to work very well for follow-up interviews but not at all for registration appointments, where job seekers had to provide a bunch of supporting documents.

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