I have Picasso on my mind. On the way to a business meeting in downtown Barcelona, I stumbled upon an amazingly beautiful Picasso frieze across the street from the Barcelona Cathedral.

It reminded me of Picasso’s famous commentary on technology:

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

In Picasso’s day, computers only gave answers. That was their only job, and Picasso couldn’t comprehend a time when computers would fulfill an emotional need in the way art does. But, today, computers do help meet this need by making connections between people.

To me, every customer inquiry is not only a question that your computers must answer, but also an opportunity to fulfill a customer’s needs on a very emotional, as well as practical level. Technology must go beyond just answering questions to understanding all facets of the experience and helping agents meet customers’ inherent and unspoken needs.

When customers call your contact center, visit your website, or drop by your retail store, they are typically looking for answers to their questions. Yet, it’s the emotional impact of the experience that they’re left with. Customer inquiries like “How do I transfer funds?” or “Am I eligible for a phone upgrade?” or “My Blackberry says error 507—what does that mean?” are all over the map. They have a common thread; they are all questions. But they cannot be met with generic, blanket answers.

To improve the entire customer experience, your agents require a comprehensive, predictive intelligence. Today’s technology can rise to the challenge and help to support them. The following characteristics will ensure that your customer service solutions lead agents to the right experience, not just the right answer:

1. Manage the customer’s service-level expectations and be flexible enough to escalate/de-escalate based upon urgency and customer value.
2. Evaluate the question in context based upon previous interactions.
3. Provide the answer to either the agent or the customer in the most efficient delivery mode possible.
4. Offer a mechanism for immediate or delayed follow-up questions that lists these potential questions in the sequence that they might be asked.
5. Field questions via any channel and deliver answers via the customer’s requested or preferred channel (chat, email, IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
6. Present instantaneous feedback about how successfully the agent answered the customer’s question.
7. Provide a drag-and-drop service experience desktop to allow a business user to rapidly change any aspect of a successful or flawed agent-customer interaction.

You don’t have to be as talented as Picasso to provide an exceptional service experience. You just need to make sure your company integrates these capabilities into its customer service strategy, using them as requirements to invest in the right technology.

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