BUSINESS: Research + Stats Empowering Employees to Provide Excellent Customer Experiences By Staff Tuesday, February 12, 2019 11:50 AM Excellent customer experience starts with superior employee experience. That’s a key takeaway from PwC’s Future of Customer Experience Survey 2017/18. According to the survey results, human interaction matters now—and 82 percent of U.S. and 74 percent of non-U.S. consumers want more of it in the future. That makes it crucial that the technology supporting human interaction is unobtrusive and works seamlessly across platforms. Today, 59 percent of all consumers feel companies have lost touch with the human element of customer experience. And there’s a mismatch between customer expectations and how employees deliver: only 38 percent of U.S. consumers say the employees they interact with understand their needs; 46 percent of consumers outside the U.S. say the same.Automated solutions should “learn” from human interactions so those experiences also improve, according to PwC. This shift allows your employees to be more engaged when they’re needed, provide better service and get necessary support from technology—as part of the seamless experience. This will require a change in how companies measure customer service performance. A focus on innovation, and equipping employees with technology and the information they need to best serve consumers could help close this gap. So could incentivizing employees to provide a good experience, boosting relevant training for employees and fostering a corporate culture of empowerment.Click here to see the full survey results.