Humans are more than just statistics in a dataset. They can have feelings about a brand, and the people at Accenture Interactive are tapping into that emotion to create a different view of what a customer’s experience should be.

“When we’re thinking about the new creative and the ways that you can tell stories and create experiences, we look at experience very differently,” said Glen Hartman (pictured), North America lead at Accenture Interactive. “We call it the ‘Big E.’ It actually stands for empathy.”

Hartman spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas. They discussed use cases for building an empathetic customer experience and Accenture Interactive’s human-centered approach (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

New model to fit customer need

One of Accenture Interactive’s customers, a telecommunications company, came to the firm with a simple request: Optimize paid search. The Accenture Interactive team dived in and discovered that the company’s routing of customer contacts from a search result to a call center for conversion was not actually the best experience for potential clients. Customers wanted to stay within the original channel.

The result was a significant change in the company’s operating model and sales structure because that’s what the customer wanted. “All of a sudden this benign request from a marketing team to optimize paid search becomes a new business transformation,” Hartman said. “If you can optimize certain parts of the journey you can make a big difference.”

Supermarkets also offer an instructive example. Most grocers want shoppers to linger longer and buy more. But a customer might be pressed for time and just need something important, such as a prescription for a sick child at home. What if the customer experience could be designed to meet the need for speed, counter to what most retailers want?

“That breaks the whole model,” Hartman said. “But it’s wonderful for you. You’ll shop there forever.”

Accenture Interactive believes in a human-centered approach to creating customer interaction, by bringing experts in analytics, technology and strategic thinking together as a team to drive a more empathetic experience.

“We’re seeing more and more clients moving from some of these incremental changes to really trying to put the customer at the center of what they’re doing,” Hartman said. “It’s a new way of looking at things.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Adobe Summit 2019. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Adobe Summit 2019. Neither Accenture Interactive, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE