How to communicate in an over-automated world

Dan Martin
Jun 13
11 min read

TL;DR: The pendulum of “efficiency” has swung so far that organizations are now rushing to automate the very things that keep them in business. It’s causing catastrophic damage to brands and relationships that most leaders won’t see until it’s too late. This edition of Simply Great offers tips on how to set yourself apart from over-automated competition with clear, empathetic and human communication.

My home internet service cut out three minutes before a critical NHL playoff game. Try, if you can, to imagine the absolute horror of the moment. When I tell you that I unplugged and restarted that router 12 times, I’m lying because I did it more times than that.

When nothing I tried worked, I searched feverishly for the customer service number for Xfinity. It wasn’t on the website. It wasn’t on the first page of the Google search results; the number that was had long ago been disconnected. Eventually, I gave up and went back to my app. Surely there was a way in the app to get someone to fix this; I had already missed the first 10 minutes of the game.

In the app, I was forced into a conversation with Xfinity Assistant, a tremendously polite, generally non-responsive and entirely useless chatbot. It became quickly clear that the bot could only understand a few basic questions, sending me into loops back to the same clarifying questions as before. But it accepted all questions, instead of offering a drop-down, so when a user asks a question that the software doesn’t understand, the user sees three rotating dots as the bot is thinking about its response, then receives a generic and irrelevant “answer.”

More concerning, the bot was set up primarily to upsell customers. It tried to sell me Wi-Fi extension devices no fewer than three times throughout the conversation. I finally gave up and caught a little bit of the game on my phone using data.

I’m not writing this for sympathy; worse things have happened! I’m writing it because someone at Xfinity decided that this was the experience that their customers would receive when a service that routinely costs more than $1,000 per year doesn’t work. What it tells the customer is, “I care so little about you and you are such an inconvenience that I’m going to deploy a poorly trained bot just to make sure you can never talk to a real customer service person.” It’s an experience that makes us feel like they’re almost daring us to find another provider.

If I somehow found my way into the Comcast boardroom or executive team meeting, though, I’m sure I would hear the opposite. We care about our customers, we want (and need) more customers, we’re a customer-focused business. It’s only one example of a world we’ve created where the interactions we have with many organizations are entirely at odds with how they would want us to feel. And it’s getting worse, not better.

In this edition of Simply Great, I’m offering my tips on how to communicate in an environment that seems to have mostly forgotten about customer satisfaction. As so many organizations continue to follow the pack toward (and off the edge of) the Cliff of Efficiency, clear, empathetic and human communication will become a way to set yourself and your organization apart.

Over-index on empathy

Comcast isn’t trying to anger and alienate its customers, and in the same vein, organizations aren’t trying to show up as out-of-touch and thoughtless. The reason most organizations don’t build brands based on empathy isn’t because they don’t understand the value of sharing in the feelings of their customers; it’s because it costs money and ties up resources.

Empathy is like integrity. You can’t show up with empathy or integrity some of the time, and not in others. It’s truly an all-or-nothing proposition at the brand level. If you send your customers a heartfelt message in an email one day, then your salesperson calls at 6:00 p.m. to upsell them when their grandmother passed away the day before, you’ve lost them for good.

Being empathetic isn’t a marketing tool; you either really care that much about your customers, or you don’t. It’s incredibly difficult to fake, and even if you can pull it off for a while, you’ll eventually slip up. I do believe, however, that the organizations who have this level of passion for their customers, and who commit to building their brands on empathy in every interaction will be the big winners in their categories over the next few years and beyond.

So, what does it look like to over-index on empathy? The best example right now is Chewy.

If you know a pet owner, you probably already know what I’m going to say. Now think about that for a moment. Can you imagine a more powerful brand than one that generates a ridiculous amount of unsolicited positive mentions? I can’t. Chewy isn’t known specifically for its products for pets, although I’m sure they are competitive. Whether they are fundamentally better than other providers doesn’t matter, because of how they routinely go above and beyond for their customers.

Image of young girl with puppy via Pixabay.

When a pet passes away, the owner receives a handwritten note from Chewy. When they forget to cancel a subscription for a pet that has passed away, they receive a full refund and a gift to commemorate their companion. When they have any kind of issue, they can immediately reach a human customer service representative who is authorized to help them in any way they can. Chewy cares deeply for its customers, and they’ve made sure that their customers know it in every interaction, even if it costs a little bit more (or even a lot more, when you do the math on customer service hourly or salary rates) for the company. It’s a brand promise in every sense of the word because it’s treated like a promise.

I saw a Chewy commercial the other day, and it struck me that their advertising doesn’t mention anything about the company’s true differentiators. The ad was about saving money on subscriptions, reliability and customization; all things other companies could claim. Chewy can advertise this way precisely because of how they interact with their customers: all else being equal, going the extra mile to treat people like human beings will mean that their customers choose them every time.

Is what Chewy does the cheapest way to do things? No. Could they probably be making more money in the short term if they optimized and automated every part of the customer experience? Maybe. I’d make the case that how they treat customers at every possible interaction will deliver the most sustainable revenue of any company in their category.

Clarity and emotion over conciseness

Whether or not you buy the supposition that “nobody reads anymore” (I don’t), the art of writing (and thus communicating) has been fundamentally devalued in the pursuit of trying to “optimize” every sentence. We’ve shortened and adjusted and tweaked and keyworded and flattened and shortened again, and now we’re left with perfectly optimized, aggressively concise “content” that nobody wants to read, and just as importantly, isn’t doing the job it’s been optimized for.

My tip to avoid this trap is to create and review what you create through the dual lenses of clarity and emotion. Before you ask, “Is this short enough?” or “Does this have enough keywords without going over 100 characters?,” ask whether it’s clear. “Does this accomplish what I’m trying to accomplish with it?” And, equally importantly, “Did I leave out any important context?”

If what you have is as clear as possible, then ask, “Is there as much emotion as there can be in what I’ve written?” The emotion could be coming from you (or the brand if you’re writing for an organization), it could be what it’s inciting in the reader, it could be the subject matter, or all of the above. There’s obviously a sliding scale here, as selling bags of concrete mix and life-saving medical treatments are likely to naturally invoke different levels of emotion. The same could be said for selling things that are considered more fun, like pool toys, versus selling something industrial, like water filtration.

I saw my favorite advertisement of all time when my wife and I were traveling to Eveleth, Minnesota to visit the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. Beyond a landscape that’s beautiful in its way, there’s not a ton to see on the drive between Minneapolis and Eveleth. After another stretch of dense trees and greenery, we passed a billboard with a picture of a man (head and shoulders only), eyes closed, taking a shower. The tagline for the company offering water filtration services was: “You can live without soft water, but it’s hard.”

Knowing that I may never reach that level of copywriting genius won’t stop me from striving for it my entire career. Even more than the cleverness is the emotion it inspires. I smile every time I think of it. A water filtration billboard on a long stretch of Midwestern highway. The point being, you can do this with any product or service.

Yes, if you’re writing an ad, you won’t be able to include all of the important context, and you may not even want to. Yes, there are times when it’s better to be extremely direct and there are times when you want to be deliberately provocative by leaving things out. But there will never be a time when you want your communications to be unclear and emotionless.

Sometimes that means making what you write a little bit longer to include the context that the reader needs. Sometimes it means deciding to use a different medium to add to what you’re saying for people who want more information. Sometimes it means being vulnerable or brave or snarky or the many other things that make us nervous when we see them on paper or on the screen.

I know I’m in the minority here. I get that being concise is important, especially in certain mediums, and I agree that the best writing is often the tightest (at least in the way it’s used for business. We lose so much when we focus on optimizing for algorithms or trying to hack our way to success using questionable frameworks; instead, start with “Is it clear?” and “Is there emotion, or does it elicit emotion?,” and then optimize from there.

Take the next action

There are few louder clarion calls for societal change than the fact that “authenticity” has become a buzz phrase. It’s come to signify the very opposite of what it’s meant to: instead of humanity and reality, when someone’s talking about it in their latest video, you almost expect them to be telling lies or putting a fake Mission: Impossible mask over a thinly disguised sales pitch.

I asked the question on LinkedIn recently – “Do you think we're in an era where most people assume that what they're seeing or hearing is untrue, and must be convinced otherwise?” – and received the answer I expected: Yes.

If this is truly the case, there are massive implications for marketers and advertisers, and really for anyone who needs or wants other people to read, watch or buy something. Most notably, trust must become less of the lazy buzz word it's been treated as in many organizations, and instead get the spotlight it has always deserved as the most important factor in the success or failure of any venture. It means that, if our job is to get someone to understand what we do, consider us as an option, and ultimately buy something from us, we have to first climb out of the hole created by an unfortunately well-founded skepticism.

Image of neon sign that reads "fake" via Pixabay.

So, how do we come across as authentic in an environment like this?

There’s probably enough in that question for another entire newsletter. One sneakily simple way to show up as a real human being who is interested in more than hawking your wares is to take the next action.

So much communication today is one-way. Founders pay a ghostwriter to write a heartfelt post and doesn’t respond to any of the comments. Executives says their door and DMs are always open and then cancel every 1-on-1 and don’t reply to messages. A “thought leader” posts about how you’re a dinosaur watching the meteorite about to hit Earth if you haven’t used the newest version of Grok, makes you comment “I’m a pathetic loser” to receive the eBook, and then never sends you anything.

Few things feel more robotic than one-way communication. To set yourself apart, make sure that every interaction is two-way:

After you publish your post, respond to every comment.
For every person who engages with your post, send them a connection request (without including a sales pitch).
Take the time to set a 30-minute meeting with the people you meet and talk to online.
After you’ve had an initial discussion, follow up with the person not to check on whether they’re going to sign the contract, but because they said their mother was sick and you want to know how she’s doing.
Even if someone is pitching you too aggressively, take the few seconds to say, “No thank you.”
If someone posts something vulnerable or brave or funny, engage with it and tell them they did a good job and/or why you liked it!

Take the next step to keep the conversation going and to show that you read what somebody wrote, watch what they viewed, thought about what they said, cared about them enough to really engage.

To me, this is more than a remarkably basic communications practice that has been somehow lost to history. It’s a small yet high-impact way to rebel against a world that seems to be trying to get you to close yourself off from everything but your phone or your VR headset (ugh); don’t let that happen.

Reframe to “What needs a human touch?”

Too often, we’re approaching the integration of generative AI and other tools like a toddler who gets their little mitts on the tack hammer. You know everything in your living room is getting pounded with that thing; to the toddler, everything is a nail.

Stop asking “What can be automated?” and start by asking what can’t be. Going back to the Chewy example, if they asked the first question without understanding the magic of what they’ve built, customers desperate for help for their pets might run into a chatbot like Xfinity Assistant. You and I both know that one interaction is all it would take for them to never come back as a customer.

For a real-world example, look at Klarna. The company paused all hiring in December, lost 22% of its staff due primarily to attrition, and asked its employees to fill those gaps with AI. Now, the company has made the decision to hire more humans for its customer service teams. While we can’t claim to know what’s actually going on in these boardrooms, from the messages we see from CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, it’s clear that customers were having major issues dealing with the AI bots that replaced many members of the customer service team (I imagine that his actual phrasing – “lower quality output” – is a bit of an understatement).

I credit the CEO for taking responsibility for the mistake and publicly sharing what happened and why Klarna is changing course. It’s also a perfect cautionary tale for every other organization who is considering these decisions; Siemiatkowski was brave enough to reverse course before more damage is done, and other organizations won’t be so lucky in their leadership. Especially with a decision like removing customer service staff, the results of this approach are likely lagging indicators, meaning that the actual impact may not be seen for some time after implementation.

I also don’t envy the CEOs and founders and leaders who are faced with making these decisions, as they are not as easy as some people make them out to be. Yes, as a leader, part of your job is to manage expenses to maximize profit. In the midst of doing so, it’s remarkably easy to make a big mistake by focusing too much on the spreadsheet and not enough on the human element.

Instead of trying to automate everything that isn’t bolted down, start by cataloguing every possible interaction someone could have with your company or brand. In my opinion, in every single one of those interactions, there should be a human being involved. Even if you don’t agree with that sentiment, go back to what makes you unique and what brings satisfaction, surprise and delight to your customers, and protect these things at all costs.

There are plenty of other things you can automate outside of those sacred things, and areas where you can prioritize efficiency and make whatever sacrifices are required to do that.

Automation and the pursuit of peak efficiency aren’t the problem. It’s forgetting that your customers are human beings.

Humanize yourself and your organization to a fault to gain and keep the trust of your customers or you risk automating yourself out of business.

Thank you for reading!

If you’re interested in talking through any specifics or have questions for me on applying any of this information to your work or organization, email me at dan@heliosmarketingllc.com or send me a message here.

And if you think this information can help someone you know, please share!