During these times of information explosion and digital disruption the scarcest commodity is attention. With information available at your fingertips, each one of us is suffering to certain degree of attention deficit syndrome.

As per National Institute of Health, of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -this syndrome is defined by an ongoing pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity. Isn’t it true for each of us whether shopping in store or online?

There is a plethora of attention demands that didn’t previously exist: advertisers want your attention before you watch the next video on YouTube; your friends want your attention on SnapChat, Facebook, and text; and your colleagues and every marketer out there want your attention in your inbox. Ask a business traveler, not a week goes by when they don’t get some impersonal mileage offer from an Airline in either mailbox or social media.

Attention is sparse amidst overwhelming abundance of content, advertisements, brand promotions. This the cacophony of noise and the pervasiveness of phonies and rip‑offs, makes another important aspect – trust, endangered as well.

According to renowned marketing author Seth Godin, Trust and Attention are scarcest in an overly connected world where more people are connected, and fewer are trusted.  The challenge for today’s’ content providers is -which is the most attention-grabbing genre? The key factor here of course is affiliation. In a world that scans instead of reads, that gossips instead of researching, it turns out that the best way to earn trust is through actions that build and reinforce that confidence in your audience that they are making the right choice to be with you.

Time has come for marketers to revisit concepts of segmentation, re-direct marketing communication and re-strategize on target marketing. Think about this, when you asked for a refund for a defective product, what did they do? When your online order was delayed, what did they do? When they decided to stop making a product you have and a part is required to fix a malfunction, what did they do? You will identify the huge vacuum between talking and doing.

People no longer trust the famous. Yes, fame breeds trust, at least in our culture. But time has come to be more trusted than famous. It is common for marketers to seek publicity. But what they probably need more than publicity is public relations.

Who do we trust — we trust our family, our friends and interesting “experts” that we feel aren’t biased by compensation and are sincere in their words and actions. That a small group of passionate, engaged, authentic fans can create a much larger impact than a rented mass.

Word of mouth is still the most potent form of marketing. Your ultimate goal should be to motivate your audience to share your content with their circle.  In fact, this 2016 Nielsen study demonstrates 82% of people trust their friends and family more than advertising. When you deliver a truly incredible experience or share in-depth knowledge that your audience is dying to know, they love to share it with others.

The two scarce elements of our economy are trust and attention.

Trust is scarce because it’s not a natural instinct and it’s exceptionally fragile, as it often vanishes in the face of greed, shortcuts or ignorance.

And attention is scarce because it doesn’t scale. We can’t do more than one thing at a time, and the number of organizations and ideas that are competing for our attention are enormous.

However, things do click in reality because more often than not, it seems as if it is necessary to trade trust in return for attention. We give in to gimmicks, or over promise and hype in order to catch other people attention. And of course, the dance happens because once attention is attained, asking for trust merely slows things down. The most viral ideas ask for nothing more than a click from your mouse, a share, more attention gained.

And so, we find trusted brands and individuals rarely on the top of the attention list. And those that pay the price to grab some momentary attention almost always do it at the cost of trust. But the fact remains, a trusted marketer earns enrollment.

They can make a promise and keep it, earning more trust. They can tell a story, uninterrupted, because with the trust comes attention. That story earns more enrollment, which leads to more promises and then more trust. And perhaps, if the story is well organized and resonates, that leads to word of mouth, to the peer‑to‑peer conversations that are at the heart of our culture.

In conclusion -trust—is the only one that pays for the investment required. And it’s nice that it’s also the easiest to live with.

In today’s digital era, customers are more used to obtaining instant information with least amount of effort and wastage of time. The higher is the satisfaction with a App or service, made possible either through FAQs or some common Q&As that helps these ‘Users’ to find what they’re looking for on their own.

Just try to recall when was the last time you called a service provider unless you had a ongoing issue or a complain. Today’s fast paced life gives little or no space to be on a 20-30 minutes hold before you get to speak with a human. Therefore there is this increased dependency on a hand held internet connected device.

Same goes for customer response and surveys. In the good old times, when companies use to send out paper questionnaires by mail hardly 8-10% responded. With the proliferation of internet , this rate had increased 5-15%. Today, those rates have fallen to an all-time low of less than 2%.

No matter how widely or exhaustively companies circulate their surveys, they never seem to get a holistic sense of customer experience. People just don’t have time. The dissatisfied customer would rather spend that much time to switch over to a competitor rather than ‘waste’ time providing a negative feedback.

Hence leading brands now use AI to measure customer satisfaction in more sophisticated manner. This technology differentiates factors such as speech recognition analytics, loyalty analytics, social media analytics, and a host of other tools to help businesses keep a more granular check on customer experience.

Analysts use various CRM tools to help companies measure customer satisfaction such as net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) to deliver channel feedback, and reveal marketing opportunities to retain customers. High Frequency Customer Contact centers have long relied on customer surveys to measure CSAT scores and make improvements to the customer experience.

Now, IoT and AI are the new disruptive forces in customer satisfaction measurement. It’s no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) is significantly impacting the customer experience.

AI, machine learning and virtual assistants will continue to be the leading technology trends in the years to come, companies are looking to maximize their opportunity in the customer experience space. For example a Telecommunications company will have immense chunk of data at it’s disposal, ranging from a mobile customer’s phone type to their data usage and location. With the help of AI, this customer data can be applied to create more personalized marketing messages and chatbot conversations, as well as to shape contact center interactions and online exchanges.is

Thus AI reinvents the feedback-gathering process for the better by using machine learning and natural language processing to gather reviews on the customer experience in a non-obtrusive way picking up on word choices and other customer-sentiment indicators during the actual customer service interaction. This tool allows the company to get the basic CSAT questions out of the way and focus on more meaningful, in-depth queries. In a way they can now use the customers’ own words to measure satisfaction [in real-time].

So, the key question emerges. While this is a faster, more predictable way to gather and analyze feedback , it is a puzzle when it comes to keeping customers satisfied. Because as per a ‘Customer in Context” report by Chief Marketing Officer Council, nearly 40 percent of customers say that getting “information where and when needed” is a top attribute of an exceptional customer experience. I would add a humane factor like empathy and pleasantries to that to make a wholesome ‘kudos’ customer service effort.

Another moot question that comes up is how does this use of technology help measure a customer contact representatives performance. Because the machine will pick up choice of words fed in its database, how many sentiments can a machine learn? Can it predict changing sentiments with the progress of a conversation ?

While we should embrace technological advancement and machine learning to keep up with the pace of changing times. There are millions of customer contact center representatives whose future hangs on the analyzing capabilities of a robot with no emotions.