Today’s interview is with Monika Jo, Director Of Communications at Mursion, a virtual reality platform for professionals to practice and master the complex interpersonal skills necessary to be effective in their roles. This blend of technology and human performance creates a highly realistic training environment that mimics the real-world challenges employees face every day. Monika joins me today to talk about the report that they recently published (The Human Edge in an AI World), what we can learn from it, the importance of EQ, building an empathetic musculature and what Mursion do to try help organisations and individuals get better at being more empathetic in their interactions with customers.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Pink Goldfish, standing out, portmanteaus and wabi-sabi – Interview with Stan Phelps and Dave Rendall — and is number 400 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Monika:

• Talking about Mursion’s new research report: The Human Edge in an AI World.
• Sia is a pronoun in Tagalog. There are no gender pronouns in Tagalog.
• Check out Anthro Vision by Gillian Tett.
• Monika joined Mursion just after lockdown happened last year.
• Mursion have developed a solution to help improve human interaction – it’s a blend of mixed reality artificial intelligence and human intelligence.
• Quotes and stats from the report:
  • “Being able to empathize with customers was the single biggest factor in differentiating their customer service. In fact, twice as many respondents chose empathy over being able to learn new technologies or knowing the competitive landscape.”
  • 71% say emotional intelligence is becoming more important than cognitive intelligence for customer service jobs. This stat is not just shining the light on the need for emotional intelligence, but bringing the human back into the loop.
  • “Two-thirds of respondents say building trust with customers will be one of the most critical customer service skills over the next two years.”
• According to Ruchi Sinha of the University the fundamentals around building trust involves three basic elements competence, integrity and benevolence. There is the package of emotional intelligence and cognitive intelligence. It’s hard to build trust if you don’t display right away that you’re competent to handle.
• Monika’s quote from the report:
  • “Both EI and IQ are important. The best customer service representatives balance product and systems knowledge with instinctive, human-centered capabilities that help them deliver extraordinary service — core to giving customers a positive brand experience.”
• Empathetic musculature is essentially about habituation.
• The missing component in skills development is often giving people more opportunities to practice.
• T-Mobile: Mursion designed and built a VR retail store floor for them that was used to allow their staff to practice different scenarios in an authentic and believable way as possible. In the scenarios they interact and practice with avatars, who puppeterred by a human, who is an expert at improv but are also trained on the scenario itself and how to make it safe.
• H&R Block is a large enterprise that prepares 23 million tax returns annually. Every year, H&R Block faces the challenge of onboarding new tax professionals in their call centers throughout the tax season. They partnered with Mursion to build a custom onboarding simulation designed to strengthen their agents on the job confidence, empathy towards clients and core competencies around issue resolution. H&R Block was able to save 131% of its spend with Mursion by reducing handling time by 4,119 hours and reducing both hold and talk times.
• We need to pay attention to the tension between the use of bots and what people want in terms of human interaction as that will come to a head.
• We need to be intellectually honest about the role of bots.
• When we’re automating more and more and asking technology to do a lot of the heavy lifting, it’ll put a major spotlight on the human part of the interaction. And, you have to make the most of those moments.
• Monika’s best advice: Practice, practice, practice.
• Hire an anthropologist to help you surface your blind spots and to make sure that you are not tackling the wrong problem.
• Monika’s Punk CX word: Avatars
• Monika’s Punk CX brand: Trader Joes.

About Monika

Monika Jo describes herself as an Applied Anthropologist in Virtual Reality. She is also the Director Of Communications at Mursion, a virtual reality platform for professionals to practice and master the complex interpersonal skills necessary to be effective in their roles.

Check out the work that Mursion do at their site, grab a copy of the report: The Human Edge in an AI World, say Hi to them and Monika on Twitter @MursionInc and @MonikaJo and connect with Monika on LinkedIn here.

Thanks to ph for the image.