You want to deliver a uniform experience for your customers. I understand.

The problem is that much of the experience can become devoid of the humanity. You squash out any individuality from the interactions.

I think about my favorite coffee shop. Yes, I’d like to know what I’m getting, so I want the same quality of my cappucino or mocha. But the rest of the experience is all about the barista who’s in front of me.

Perhaps they notice that I haven’t been there for a couple of weeks. Or they’re experimenting with a new design in the foam. Heck, or maybe we just talk about the weather and what traffic was like.

That makes the experience more pleasurable, right?

But maybe you don’t see as much opportunity in your online transactions with customers. Sure, you stuck a chatbot on there. But honestly, we’re all pretty tired of these interactions with tightly scripted robots. And most of the time they don’t even deliver a positive result at all.

So what can you do to make your online experience more human?

Start thinking about what makes your products special. Avoid the licensed generic photos that we’ve all seen a thousand times. Tell stories. Give access to actual humans in your customer service department.

Perhaps you doubt whether this can be done. Well, I happen to work with a software company that I consider to be one of the most outstanding ones I’ve ever seen. Their product is fairly specialized, so not something you’re run across all the time. It’s a smallish company, maybe a dozen people.

They have an array of useful webinars to help people evaluate the product and get up to speed after they’ve made the investment. These webinars are always live, led by people who actually know the product quite well. The tutorial videos are the same, often created by a lead programmer or expert customer service person.

The best part is that they always respond to service requests within one work day. Often, I’ll get a useful reply in less than an hour.

I had a chance to meet some of them in person at a convention last year, and was totally surprised that they recognized my name from the interactions we’ve had.

Now that’s feeling like an actual human-to-human relationship, right? What do you suppose that does for my loyalty to the company?