If you've ever been frustrated enough to place a service call, you know that the call can either add to your frustration or reduce it. The call can either make you feel confident that the service professional has resolved your issue or armed you to handle it, or it can alienate you from the company, product, or service.

Often, such calls are routed through a computer or robot that handles each customer or client in the exact same manner. That routing process can be positive or negative, depending on the way in which the service architecture is structured. Should a human ultimately join the process, this can either enhance or diminish the experience.

Should a human become part of the process, as clichéd as it may sound, that individual should be prepared and able to judge when it is appropriate to teach the customer or client how to fish instead of just giving him or her a fish.

In thinking about a seller – or leader – or trainer – or support professional (as in the example) – the human does not need to have all the information at immediate recall; instead, he or she has to help another human move onto a path to be able to successfully navigate the information (and the path).

We interviewed Owen Jennings, product manager at Cash App, to gain some deeper insight into the ways in which service calls, in particular, flourish or fail based on the extent to which they are authentic, or the extent to which the transaction is overseen well by a human agent.

The biggest issue that you face when you run a support team is do you choose to solve the problem through technology or through people. “People” is much more expensive than technology. So, you could have a phone tree set‐up, meaning that a human never interacts with any customer and customers just press through the buttons and the case is resolved that way.

But that can feel terrible and doesn't always resolve the case and customers can get angry and then take to social media to express their views.

So the flipside is [to run a giant] call center with a big enough team that someone can always answer the phone in a timely manner for all the customers who have questions. This will lead to high customer satisfaction…at a high cost.

Ultimately, then, it pays to think about how you combine those two scenarios. How do you offer a great experience in a cost‐effective way? One of the things that we did when I was working at Square Register is callbacks. So there's a quick interaction with technology and then there's a genuine interaction with a human.

For us, it looks like this: If a customer writes into support, they get a text message or an email that asks, “When do you want to schedule the call?” Let's say they say, “4:00.” That's all automated. There's no human involved, and it's very, very cheap. Then at 4:00, a human calls them. And that experience is in the middle in terms of how cost effective it is, but way better from the customer perspective. (Personal statement, 2018)

Ultimately, Jennings' analysis points to a key insight, easy to overlook, for anyone considering efficiency and cost savings against the satisfaction of their customers, clients, or teams: “When you're interacting with a company, it's often a matter of what feels good versus what doesn't.” Establishing the conditions for authentic transactions, wherein customers, clients, and team members feel cared for throughout a process that may be difficult or stressful for them, is not an exact science. It can be expensive. But your success rate can be improved if you approach situations with a teacher's mindset. Without wielding a large budget or a team, a teacher succeeds by staying focused on his or her students. A teacher succeeds, in fact, by studying his or her students continuously to ensure that the class serves their needs and helps them to reach their goals.

Pause for a moment and identify your equivalent. Who, precisely, is your student? Who are you trying to teach? For whose understanding are you responsible? Envision this person or these people clearly before reading ahead. (Have some fun and activate your focus even more by drawing a quick sketch of him or her.)

Slow Down to Make Room for Learning

If your business is at all based on relationships, near‐constant interactions, or information transfers – and few, if any businesses, are not – you should ensure that speed and efficiency, some of the very things that computers can do best, don't degrade bidirectional understanding in your key relationships.

We'll touch upon this more in our next chapter, but essentially, you should always protect the manner in which you seek to build, activate, and confirm precise understandings with your clients, colleagues, managers, direct reports, and any other constituent we've missed. We call this the “understanding‐enhancing step,” and skipping it is the organizational equivalent of skipping breakfast.

Sometimes, as we now know, building understanding means uncovering false understandings first, so as to rebuild that understanding and to then approach firmer ground. Often, that means working like a patient teacher. And increasingly, that will mean disrupting the algorithms or technologies that have been assembled between us, ironically, to serve us.

We read this recently: “A majority of new jobs will not be strictly technical in nature but rather will focus on ensuring smart and responsible use of AI [artificial intelligence], the training, explaining, and sustaining of the algorithms. Such jobs will require basic understanding of the new technology but also human judgment and empathy to both guide it and explain it to those it affects” (Murray, 2018).

Here's what “training, explaining, and sustaining” might look like in the hands of a great teacher.

Enterprising students have been using online resources like Khan Academy since its inception to help them plug gaps in their understanding or move through curriculum more quickly. It has also attracted a mix of teachers. Some of them use Khan Academy as a replacement for actual teaching. They post the links somewhere online or simply direct students to the site with instructions about what to look at or find.

Others use this resource according to the “training, explaining, and sustaining” model mentioned above. They don't just post or share links without context. This would be the educational equivalent of bad automation. Instead, a teacher might personalize the exchange – the teaching – by embedding a link in an email to a particular student, at a particular time in his learning journey, and saying something like: “Hey, I know I explained that one way, but based on how you learn, here's another version that might make sense to you.”

Or, the teacher might watch the video alongside the student and talk about how the Khan Academy approach is similar to, or different from, the way he or she taught it. Comparing and contrasting is one more research‐based (and outstanding) teaching methods used by good teachers (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Such small, human touches can be very effective in teaching the eager, anxious, or struggling learner, rather than simply forwarding a link or placing a link on a website for all the students in the class to access.

Think about a time when you have just forwarded a link or posted a resource – something that you stumbled upon and found interesting or that your leaders are expecting you to share with your respective audiences (e.g., customers, clients, or team members). The lazy move is to just send the link and hope that some percentage of the audience investigates it, and that a smaller percentage is able to do something meaningful with it. The less‐lazy move might be to layer on some expectations. The winning move, however, is to correctly frame “why” the resource is important, comparing and contrasting how, without that resource having been explored and considered, the service, client, or customer relationship will be worse off.

The winning move points to the slowing down of a transaction, and if anything, we want to encourage such slowness and patience. We want to encourage throwing a spanner, as the expression goes, in order to welcome back into the fold human judgment, educational practice, the art and science of treating the people across from you as if they are capable of learning. If you can encourage others to become learners – a natural thing for most of us – then you can use the resulting understanding to help them make the best possible decision for their goals and situation.

In short, show up in person when the time is right, and be authentic in the way you engineer experiences for others.