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JON GELBERG: I'm Jon Gelberg, Executive Editor Content Strategies at Inc, and this is a special segment from Inc and Principal. In this conversation, we'll hear from an industry expert about how smaller businesses actually have advantages over bigger companies in dealing with customers and clients and how company leaders can employ more of a human touch in today's tech-driven business landscape.

Joining me is Kathy Kay. She is the Executive VP and Chief Information Officer at Principal. Thanks so much for being here, Kathy.

KATHY KAY: Thanks for having me, Jon. I'm excited to be chatting with you today.

JON GELBERG: Are you ready to dive in?

KATHY KAY: I am ready.

JON GELBERG: OK. So tell me, in what ways are smaller businesses at an advantage in dealing with customers and clients?

KATHY KAY: Yeah, so obviously Principal does a lot of work with SMBs, and one of the things that I find is they have quite a good pulse on their customers. They can be nimble. They understand how what they're doing, how they're serving their customers, whatever service or goods they might be providing, how it truly impacts them.

Sometimes, as an example in a larger company, not all employees might understand how they really impact customers. But in smaller businesses, rather, I mean, they know exactly the impact they're having on customers. They also have the advantage of getting feedback very easily. They can respond to their feedback very quickly and then also be able to react and make changes to help them solve problems really effectively as well.

JON GELBERG: Interesting. But in today's technology-driven business landscape, is there still a place for the human touch?

KATHY KAY: This is a really interesting thing. So one of the things I can say, as the pandemic started, we saw a huge uptick in customers wanting to leverage digital solutions. They needed to have ways to interact digitally because you couldn't meet with people.

But there are things that we are seeing, and we see it across all lines of our business, and our business owners are seeing this as well. Customers want the flexibility sometimes to talk to a human. And when we see it the most is when they feel they are making a really big decision, a really impactful decision. While all the digital data might be available to them, we find continually our customers and our SMB owners are seeing it too. They still might want to reach out to a human.

And so what we've been saying is you have to make a seamless customer experience regardless of the channel. If they're coming in digitally but they want to flip and talk to somebody, you have to make that simple for them to do.

There are some companies who are trying to do all digital. In fact, they make it super hard to ever get to customer service. You have to go through five different IVR paths and things. And what we're seeing from our customers and listening to our small-business owners is that's not what customers want. They want that choice, even though a lot of times they'll do it all digitally. But when they feel they are making a decision, that is a big, impactful decision, they want to talk to somebody, and we need to make that easy for them to do.

JON GELBERG: That's a tremendous point. And speaking of humanity here, what is a human interaction audit, and how can smaller businesses use such audits to improve interactions with customers?

KATHY KAY: We do a lot with, how do we get feedback from our customers? How do we respond to it? How do we listen to their problems? and how do we provide solutions that they can give us feedback on to make sure we're solving the right problem? And that's really what this is all about, understanding, what are those moments in a customer journey where they might want to talk to somebody, where they might want that human interaction? And then how do you, as a company, as a service provider, make it very easy for them to do when they want that choice?

But you've got to give them the choice, be it a digital interaction, human interaction. And that's how we think about this human interaction audit.

JON GELBERG: Well, that's interesting. But that's it for this special segment. This custom episode is produced by Inc in partnership with Principal. I'm Jon Gelberg. Our producer is Avery Miles, and our editor is Nicholas Torres. Thank you all.

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