Over the course of working as a UX designer , I've been able to work in several industries where, traditionally, a key part of delivering service to the customer involves an associate — sales, healthcare, and banking. But more and more, the servicing provided is transitioning to mobile or digital self-servicing.

Financial institutions are one of the no exception. Like all other industries, big banks are slowly transitioning from the old manual ways of banking days past towards digital banking where customers interact with, not human customer service associates, but the mobile app in their phone. And this is not accidental. Both direct competitors (like Chime) and aspirational competitors (like Airbnb and Amazon) have found that giving customers more self-service support options through their mobile experience helps cut millions of dollars from the cost to serve those customers in the form of reduced calls to call centers and visits to the branches.

Yet despite this truth, in every industry I've worked in, I have encountered teams who say something to the effect of "my customer is the internal associate" — the call center agent, the branch ambassador, the back office operations team. This way of thinking keeps teams from creating meaningful solutions for the actual customers.

What's the value of humans in customer service?

Now to be clear, internal associates that interface with customers are still extremely valuable to delivering the best customer experience. Customers depend on internal associates act as a support system when something unexpected and stressful happens and the digital experience can't solve it. Humans are incredibly important in those types of moments. They provide "peace of mind".

Internal associates can also be extremely helpful in teaching your customers how to use the fancy digital tools you've built for them. They have the opportunity to provide a service to a customer, but then also guide them towards self-servicing in the future (so long as the associate has been given the right tools to do so — more on that later).

But that still doesn't mean they are the same as customers.

When teams say things like "the internal associate is my customer" and they build new solutions aimed at solving internal associates problems, they are holding the company back from moving toward the future. Internal associates are typically too focused in the here and now; the issues that exist today. And they are usually a little myopically focused on their problems servicing the customer, not the customer's primary problem.

I once worked on a project where there were multiple teams working on rebuilding the call center servicing tool. Taking inspiration from Zappos, those teams put call center agents at the heart of their decision-making process about what features should be prioritized, and what information needs to be included, and how they want the process to work. And all this would be perfectly well and good, but there's one problem…

Customers don't want to talk to call center agents. At least not for most things. According to this article by Mindsight, as of 2019, 74% of U.S. consumers have called into customer service for some reason, making it the most common channel, even over email and live chat. Yet over one third said that calling in was the most frustrating customer service experience.

This was no different for the team I worked with. Customers frequently complained about long hold times, being redirected to multiple agents, having to tell the same story over and over again, and having zero continuity from their digital app experience to the call center. They expected our call center associates to have context about why they are calling in, but today, it's a guessing game.

So right now you might be saying to yourself "Well then we need to build better agent tools so that the agents have more context!". And I'd agree with you. However, before we do that, we should also talk to our customers about what types of things they want to call us for, and what they don't want to call us for — the things they want to do for themselves digitally. We need to ask ourselves… "if we are going to rebuild an agent servicing tool, shouldn't we figure out what we DON'T need to build as well?"

The case against building for your internal associates.

Internal associates are critical elements in delivering awesome customer experience, but what they want shouldn't dictate product strategy because they are biased by their own experience in two critical ways.

• Their own experiences in how they currently service customers today lacks the context of what the customer wants. They can only see problems with how it works today. Internal associates aren't typically as focused on building a future-state that satisfies key customer and business pain points as much as they are focused on solving their own.
• They might also want to make sure they remain an important part of the process in the future so that they can keep their job. Anytime that we can find ways to promote self-service, we are essentially reducing the need for associate-service. And that reduced need can be threatening to the humans in those roles today.

As an example, when doing interviews with call center agents, one of their biggest pain points was this complicated system they had to navigate in order to file a claim when something went wrong. The internal associates wanted us to rebuild that system so it was simpler to navigate and easier for them to use.

But when we spoke to our customers, we learned that they didn't actually want to call in for these claims at all. They preferred (or expected) that they would be able to file a claim right from their digital app, and the fact that they couldn't made them feel like we weren't as innovative as our marketing makes us seem. Ouch.

The deeper we looked into this, the more we realized that forcing customers to call in wasn't just going against what our customers wanted, but actually accounted for a significant amount of our call volume each month. And once the claim is filed, it kicked off a long process involving several back office operations associates to resolve the claim. If we could find a way to eliminate that call volume, or even reduce it in any significant way, we would save the company millions of dollars each year.

So we had two options: build a better claims system for our agents, continue to accrue millions in calls each year, and make our customers do something they preferred not to do … OR … shift resources over to build the digital option that enabled customers to do it themselves, which would eliminate call volumes and back office ops costs altogether, and reduce the need for a human being to support that type of call.

Make product decisions with your customer vision in mind.

At the end of the day, the goal of a product organization is to build products that fulfill the customer's and business' goals. While internal associates are critical members of fulfilling those goals too, their sole input shouldn't ever be the driving force behind innovation.

Instead, their input can help sharpen future solutions that are focused on improving the customer experience and the business outcomes for your company. And when you create self-service opportunities, you also have an opportunity to redesign the role of associate interactions around the moments that truly matter, where your customer really needs an ally, a subject-matter expert, or an advocate — where they need human help for "peace of mind".