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’Tis the human touch in this world that counts,
The touch of your hand and mine,
Which means far more to the fainting heart
Than shelter and bread and wine.
For shelter is gone when the night is o’er,
And bread lasts only a day.
~ Spencer Michael

“Aaarrrghh! I swear I’m divorcing this mobile network as soon as I get back from my trip!” shouted Rose angrily. This wasthe 4th time today she was trying to reach a living being on her customer service call. The automated voice on the phone says “Your call is important to us.” “We have a huge volume of incoming calls today and one of our customer agents will be with you shortly” but the shortly never happened, Rose was annoyed! All she needed was to get a simple International calling package activated as part of her phone plan for the next three weeks as she was travelling. The first thing she did was Visiting her mobile store but they informed her that they were a franchisee and for any changes in phone plans, she will need to contact the customer care. Hence, this situation. Her colleagues around her at the lunch table sighed in acknowledgement of how painful dealing with technology can sometimes be.

‘Human Moment’ – a term coined by Professor Edward M. Hallowell refers to the psychological encounter that can happen only when two people share the same physical space. The human moment is a quality of interaction.
In my recent interview with Andrew Zimakas, CMO of Tangerine (ING Canada subsidiary that was purchased by Scotiabank was renamed as Tangerine and is being grown independently of its existing Scotiabank banking service) expressed that one of the top concerns for his team is to ensure the human touch in their business model of an e-banking service.

A few industries where human-to-technology interaction is overtaking the time spent on human-to-human interaction are Medical field, Banking sector and Retail shopping. More and more services are shifting towards less and less human involvement from the organisation’s side which raises the question if all of that translates into a positive experience for the consumers or not. Various reasons are attributed to this move towards technology by the organizations such as:
1. Standardization of their customer services
2. Reduced overhead costs of training, reviewing and salary costs of employees
3. Advances in affordable technology
4. Maintenance costs and so on

What about the trade-off? Are the consumers equally happy talking to automated voices now instead of a real human interaction experience? The responses vary by demographics. Services like Medeo where you can take an online appointment with a doctor and get medical examined via a webcam push us to introspect how much is not much. According to a researchstudy, people in the age range of 40 and above like to speak to or be guided by a human during their service experience. A study by the Center for Information & Study on Clinical Research Participation (CISCRP) found that although 52% of patients surveyed prefer to hear about trials from their primary care physicians, only 20% do. Contrastingly, people in the younger age range prefer that they don’t have to deal with a real human being and like the anonymity and ease that comes with dealing with technology.

The implications for the market are the following:
1. Data insights v/s Observational analysis: It is a paradoxical situation that we have much more data about the consumers without really interacting with them. Is that resulting in better insights or less? Is increased data blinding us to cues we could have picked up only by observational methods?
2. Reduced number of avenues for touch points with business: The businesses now do not know their customers to the human extent that was earlier possible as their number of touch points have reduced with the consumers. There is no force deployed on ground
3. Increased business for Market Research companies? The companies will have to/ are having to rely on Market research companies to understand their consumer for them.

In conclusion, as we modernize and digitize we need to look at ways to still make the consumer feel close to the company with that human touch that the consumer expects.

But the touch of the hand
And the sound of the voice
Sing on in the soul always.

The courage to convert your intentions into actions makes you real.

Devastating floods hit a state in South India in 2009. There was a huge loss of life and property and the call for donations by the Government to help the victims filled the airwaves on TV and radio. I was glued to the TV for a couple of days hoping to hear news of improvement in the situation but somehow sitting there not doing anything just didn’t feel right.

One of the places that was affected was a town called Kurnool which was about 5 hours by road from where I lived. At 20 years of age, I didn’t give a lot of thought to the pros and cons of my urge to go there and help. I contacted the UNICEF who had their field agents in the affected areas for data and the next day at Google where I was working then, I gathered 3 like-minded people and against my parents’ requests not to, we headed to Kurnool for a reccee. The gory sights of death and devastation that met our eyes that day are things that will never leave my memory. Having talked to the rescued victims and having seen the effect of the natural disaster first hand, it only strengthened our will to do something to help the situation. We went back to our city and brainstormed on what we could do.

Based on our observations, we decided we didn’t want to do things that would bring in relief for just a day or two. We wanted to help the affected people to get back to normalcy. For this, we decided we’ll work with the fisher people community and rehabilitate them. After making a couple more trips and understanding their not-so-obvious-problems, we categorised our action items and worked on them. Our action items were:

1. Bring back their livelihood means to them.
   For this, we collected donations among friends and families back in our city and bought boats, fishing nets and other tools for fishing to get them started given all their belongings were washed away or broken into pieces in the floods.
2. Keep the children occupied in a safe place so the parents could give their 100% in re-constructing their houses which didn’t exist anymore.
   For this, we kept the children busy in a small camped area with fun and learning and making sure they had meals at the right times.

These two action-items were diligently followed and done and within a few weeks this fisher community of 60 families had their houses rebuilt and were back at sea, their only known way of livelihood.

Back then, I was too young to reflect or dissect what we did and seek learnings from the experience. My most important thing was that I wasn’t being a passive spectator hoping for something to happen but jumped into the field to take charge of things and do my bit. Looking back at it now, I realise why the UN field agents had such quizzical looks on their faces when I landed outside their door to collect real-time data and advice. Maybe it was quite a courageous thing to walk into carcasses, dead bodies, filth, diseases and offer support and stand by people who just lost a huge part of their lives. I liked how we quickly took in observations from our visit and how these insights helped in forming an action plan. A plan which helped us concentrate our efforts in a small area and sustain the initiative with a focused and suitable approach by not biting off more than we could chew.

The best part was that our efforts of raising funds for the fishermen community helped us find a person, who encouraged by our work, decided to adopt an entire village and help with its rehabilitation.

Here’s a BBC news report covering the floods:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8292606.stm

Being very passionate about people and their potential, it is very gratifying to make individuals realise, explore and believe in their potential. With all the extensive travelling, exchanges with a huge-set of inspiring people from India and abroad gave me an opportunity to experience leadership in all its forms with all its challenges.

My areas of interest are Crisis management, Social consulting and Government policy & implementation. It is a dream to provide resources and create sustainable income sources for skilled and unskilled women from low-income groups in the developing countries. For example: In India, the % of employed women is just 33% (this includes women who are actively seeking employment and are not employed yet) which is a sheer waste of the immense amount of talent women possess and results in a huge opportunity cost to the country. This sector interests me the most because I’m passionate about bridging equality in society by assisting in making accessible key facilities and creating equal opportunities.

A few challenges that I foresee are specialised qualifications create entry barriers to getting employed and the low number of strategic job profiles that are open. In addition to that, the payscale is relatively lower and might become a hindrance to taking up the job. The vulnerable position of this industry which greatly depends on funding from external sources other than endowment funds and with the fluctuations in global economy, there are ebbs and tides in the work. However, with all the research I’ve been doing; a few organisations stand out. Gates foundation, Ford foundation are the closest that come to private global organisations working in key areas of development in the most sensitive regions of the world. While Gates foundation takes a hands-on approach, Ford foundation limits itself to making available grants and monitoring the utilisation of grants. They also provide competitive salaries and benefits.

The good news is that other than on-field areas they are located in key geographic locations like Seattle, Washington, New Delhi which are hubs of for-profit corporate conglomerates. With my experience in the non-profit sector the last 5 years which helped me improve key areas like crisis management, decision-making, holistic approach, taking calculated risks, etc., I believe I’ll fit into these organisations’ culture very comfortably. My work experience in Google and consulting for two PR firms have polished my communication, analytical, innovation skills which will definitely come in handy for the professional roles I’m looking at. Roles as Strategic advisors, media management, communications officer, project researcher, program officer, etc. would greatly interest me and I look forward to breaking into the non-profit sector and learn and impact in a  big way!

Sources:

• David Lam library research articles
• IBIS world
• Factiva
• Gatesfoundation.org
• www.philanthropyjournal.org/news/
• www.urban.org/nonprofits/
• http://www.globalgiving.org/

Just indulging the voice inside my head here.

In A.D., In B.C. at the same time; now calendar, take that! Hah!