Feature
The Gist
- Brand evolution. Humanize the brand-customer relationship to drive growth.
- Data power. Personalization boosts loyalty by 80%, says Epsilon research.
- Tech touch. Artificial intelligence in customer experience needs human nuance.
Customers today yearn for an authentic human connection with the brands they patronize, yet many companies still rely on mass marketing tactics and transaction-based engagement models that treat customers more like metrics than people. Businesses that take the time to humanize the brand-customer relationship are discovering that it not only drives engagement and growth, it’s vital in our technology-saturated world. This article will examine the ways that successful brands nurture meaningful emotional bonds with customers and lift metrics such as satisfaction, loyalty and lifetime value in the process.
What Exactly Defines an Authentic Human Connection?
A human-centric relationship between a business and its customers is one that is based on mutual respect, understanding and trust. It is a relationship where the business sees its customers as individuals with their own needs and desires, and where the customers feel valued and appreciated. Such a relationship between a brand and its customers is characterized by the following traits:
- Transparency: The business is honest and open with its customers about its products and services, the technology it uses, the data it collects and its values and mission.
- Authentic: The business is true to itself and its customers. It does not try to be something it is not.
- Personalized: The business interacts with its customers on a personal level. It gets to know them as individuals and understands their needs and desires.
- Responsive: The business listens to its customers and responds to their feedback promptly and effectively.
- Empathetic: The business understands and respects the emotional needs and feelings of its customers.
When a business has a human relationship with its customers, relationships are more likely to be strong and lasting. Customers are more likely to be loyal to businesses that they feel understand and appreciate them. In fact, Epsilon research indicated that 80% of customers are more likely to do business with a brand when they provide personalized experiences.
Daniel Kroytor, founder of TailoredPay, a merchant account provider, told CMSWire that part of creating a human connection with your customers is the ability to demonstrate that you know their individual interests and pain points, and the best way to do this is through hyper-personalization. "Though personalization has been a part of business marketing for many years, new software technologies now allow brands to collect specific data that provides them the ability to tailor their communications to each individual customer," said Kroytor.
Related Article: The Importance of the Human Touch in Digital Transformation
Examples of Brands That Provide a Humanized Customer Experience
Zappos is a great example of a brand that has crafted a human relationship with its customers. It did this by building personal, emotional connections with customers and encouraging their employees to have open-ended conversations that go beyond mere transactions.
Zappos started out in 1999 as an online retailer for shoes in San Francisco, California, and is well-known for its exceptional customer service, which is based on the brand's core values of "Delivering Wow," "Customer Loyalty," and "Culture of Service." The company's culture is built on the idea that employees should treat customers like friends and family.
Zappos employees are encouraged to have more personal conversations with customers in order to learn more about their needs and wants. This helps employees provide more personalized and relevant customer service. Employees are also encouraged to go above and beyond to help customers, even if it means going outside of their job description.
For example, Zappos employees have been known to help customers with things like finding the perfect gift for a friend or relative, or even helping them to plan a vacation. Zappos believes that by building personal connections with customers, employees can provide a more memorable and satisfying customer experience. By building personal connections with customers, Zappos has been able to create a loyal customer base that is willing to recommend the company to others.
Trader Joe's is another example of a brand that creates a human connection with its customers. From employee attitudes to product labels, Trader Joe's conveys a sense of personality and fun. Trader Joe's employees are known for being friendly and knowledgeable about the products they sell. They are encouraged to make conversation with customers and help them find the products they are looking for.
Trader Joe's stores are designed to be welcoming and inviting, and are always clean and bright, with employees who are happy to help. The stores sell a variety of unique and interesting products that customers cannot find anywhere else. This helps to create a sense of excitement and discovery when shopping at Trader Joe's stores. Additionally, Trader Joe's is involved in a number of community initiatives, which helps to build relationships with its customers and the communities it serves.
In addition, Trader Joe's also uses its unique brand identity to create a sense of connection with its customers. The company's nautical theme and quirky product names help to create a fun and whimsical shopping experience. The brand also uses humor in its marketing materials and employee training to enhance relationships with its customers.
Related Article: Why Human-Centered AI Is a Winning Strategy
How to Humanize Technology
Brands can humanize the advanced technology used to interact with customers in several key ways. First, they should ensure that their personality and tone matches the warmth people expect from human interactions. Though AI chatbots can provide efficient customer service, they should be designed with human nuance, empathy, humor and conversational pacing. Simple tweaks like using first names and expressing understanding of frustrations can help.
Second, transparency builds trust in technological systems customers may perceive as cold or inhuman. Brands could explain how the technology works in simple terms, provide opt-out options if desired, and enforce responsible use policies around data privacy. Admitting limitations also reduces overhype. Being upfront that an AI bot is assisting, rather than a human agent, prevents deception too.
Third, showcasing the humans behind the technology personalizes it. For example, profiles on the developers, designers and product managers responsible for innovations put a human face on the brand’s technological capabilities. Stories demonstrating how real team members trained intelligent systems using real customer data further drive home that the people behind it are passionately dedicated to the customer experience.
Jessica Leving Siegel, marketing consultant at Sing Creative Group, a boutique PR & communications firm, told CMSWire that our ability to understand and appeal to the emotional experiences of our customers has become more valuable than ever before. “To that end, I recently led a workshop on how organizations in the social sector can use AI to further their missions without losing the human part of what they do,” said Siegel. “Essentially, we discussed that AI is an incredibly useful tool that can help you plan, research, and execute your projects — but it will never replace savvy human marketers directing and checking its work.” Siegel emphasized that understanding things like context, complexity, and nuance — and ultimately, what makes other humans tick — is not AI's strength. “It's yours,” she emphasized.
Storytelling Is a Human Trait
We are all natural storytellers, as we have been hearing stories all of our lives. Your mother and father told you stories, your brothers and sisters told you stories, your grandparents told you stories — practically everyone you’ve ever known has been telling you stories. Conversely, you have also been telling stories your whole life. The main character in your stories is you, and all the others are secondary characters. As humans, we love to hear stories, and can’t wait to share our own.
Storytelling expresses our creativity, imagination, empathy, planning, meaning-making and identity, and is a cognitive evolutionary adaptation that is uniquely human. Stories are the threads from which the tapestry of human culture is woven.
Stories present a narrative that usually involves both villains and heroes. For businesses, the villains are the problems, needs and desires of their customers, and the hero is the business itself, who solves the customer’s problems, and provides them with what they need and desire.
By using storytelling, a brand brings the human element back to its marketing and advertising campaigns. The act of listening to a story creates an emotional experience for the listener. Scientific research has indicated that when a person listens to a story, cortisol, dopamine and oxytocin are released in the brain, and these chemicals each play a role in creating, deepening, or maintaining deeper connections with other people.
Siegel believes that every person and every brand has a story to tell. “No matter what industry you're in, appealing to the part of your audience that makes them, and you, human is the #1 way to convert customers and create lifelong brand relationships,” said Siegel. “Whether it's the major beauty brand that becomes known for its commitment to body positivity and boosting self esteem, or the solopreneur professional organizer who blogs about how helping clients tackle projects makes a tangible difference in their lives, every brand can benefit from focusing on the genuine human experiences we all share.”
Rather than worrying that the story one tells is boring or bland, brands should reestablish the passion they initially felt for the products and services they provide. Siegel suggested that if you're worried people's eyes will glaze over when you talk about your brand, ask yourself why you entered this field. “What aspects of it do you genuinely enjoy? Maybe you’re an accountant who finds fulfillment in empowering others to understand their finances, or gets a thrill out of bringing order to chaos. If you’re passionate about it, your clients will be, too.”
Another approach to storytelling can be seen when brands allow customers to tell their own stories. Jas Banwait Gill, growth manager at SwagMagic, a global corporate swag platform, told CMSWire that User Generated Content (UGC) is a powerful tool that humanizes a brand, fostering loyalty and community engagement. "By encouraging customers to share their own experiences, stories, and opinions, a brand demonstrates a genuine interest in its customers' voices and experiences."
Gill said that this human touch is a stark departure from traditional one-way advertising and marketing approaches, which can often feel impersonal and detached. “When customers see their content featured or acknowledged by a brand, it creates a sense of validation and connection that's hard to achieve through other means,” explained Gill. “This emotional resonance makes a brand more relatable and approachable. Over time, this creates a sense of community.”
The Challenges of Humanizing the Brand-Customer Relationship
Although brands must balance the use of technology with the human element, there are several challenges to doing so effectively, including transparency, authenticity, customer expectations and generational differences.
Because brands today depend on technology in practically every aspect of the business, transparency is vitally important to customers. Is the brand using customer data to personalize the experience? Is the customer talking to a customer service agent or an AI bot? Are they using emotions to manipulate the customer into buying a product or service? These are all elements of the customer experience that brands must be transparent about.
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Is a brand authentic in its interactions with customers on social media? Are the stories the brand is telling organic and authentic? Nobody likes being lied to, and if customers get a hint that brands are being disingenuous, inauthentic, or otherwise untruthful in their social media posts, marketing or advertising copy, or product and service descriptions, they are likely to switch to a competitor.
The customer experience that brands such as Netflix, Amazon and Apple provided during the pandemic have influenced customer behavior and expectations. Customer expectations have continued to shift after two years of pandemic thinking, and many brands have struggled to keep up. Although most businesses strive to personalize their interactions with customers, it can be challenging to achieve the level of hyper-personalization that the big tech brands provide, although AI is beginning to change that.
“By implementing the use of AI and other information collection technologies, businesses can gather data from social media engagement, business website queries, and chatbot interactions, and then create individualized databases that allow them to speak to each customer’s individual interests and needs,” said Kroytor. “This creates a human connection in which impersonal broad based methods are unable to attain.” Kroytor suggested that by using hyper-personalization methods, you can make each customer feel unique and important and better bond them to your brand.
Finally, generational differences can be challenging for brands, as there may be no middle ground that meets the needs of all generations at once, and the things that one generation appreciates may not appeal to other generations. For example, Gen Z is much more likely to place a high level of importance on sustainability and eco-friendly packaging, and they are much more receptive to images and videos, while boomers may be more receptive to traditional advertising mediums such as print and radio.
Final Thoughts on Humanizing the Brand-Customer Relationship
Humanizing the brand-customer relationship requires commitment, authenticity and constant refinement, but delivers immense value. By embracing storytelling, personalization, transparency and empathy, brands can nurture meaningful bonds with customers that engage, satisfy and connect on a human level. Brands that maintain a human touch will earn loyal brand enthusiasts and stand out from the competition.
