In June of this year, I began my adventure here at Genesys. And it was new and different due to the pandemic. While I’ve moved to new companies many times throughout my career, my new post at Genesys revealed a unique challenge specific to the times we live in today.

The customer experience industry is one that I mostly understood as a consumer. But recently it dawned on me: This is the first time a vast majority of customer impressions were formed primarily from their experiences with a company’s contact center. As I grew to understand the technology that we deliver — and the businesses and people who use it — my eyes were opened to something quite remarkable.

I now have an entirely different perspective on what it means to deliver great customer service. It’s about people leveraging technology to be the best version of themselves — and delivering the best results for their customers. There’s a symbiosis at play here. Technology alone doesn’t make for great customer experience. Nor is it just about the people. It’s both, all the time, across every interaction. And empathy is at the heart of it all.

Empathy doesn’t just mean showing emotion. It’s getting a customer what they need, in the way they need it, based on understanding their unique experience and situation. This means using artificial intelligence (AI) to route them to the right place the first time. It means ensuring they don’t need to repeat things. And it means using their customer history, and that of others like them, to know what they want — sometimes even before they do. When customer service agents are armed with the right technology, that’s what we call Super Human Service.

Super Human Service is three words. Very intentionally. None of our customers (that we know of) have supernatural powers or abilities. Think of it as Batman or Iron Man. Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark are humans — just like customer service agents. But give them amazing technology and they do amazing things. So, like Iron Man’s suit, our technology amplifies human capabilities and integrates empathy along the customer journey, even in chat interactions with virtual agents. It’s simply: Your people + our cloud = Super Human Service.

I’m very optimistic about the future. Our vision of what can be accomplished with the power of empathy and how our customers engage with their customers in order to market, sell and service them is the Holy Grail. I believe that’s what is to come. And starting with Super Human Service will get us there.

While 2020 will be a year of many stories and challenges, it will also be a year where the depth of what it means to be human will be remembered with much gratitude.

Here’s hoping 2021 brings “far better things ahead than any we leave behind,” as C.S. Lewis said it.