Self Serviceless
Illustration: © IoT For All
When did companies give up?
Clear your own table, bag your groceries, do your own room check-in, teach English to a foreign customer service person, do your own store check out, spend 20-30 minutes going down endless phone wormholes for the simplest questions, or worse, never experiencing human contact? The requests to us go on and on as companies and brands try and disguise their DIY shenanigans as some kind of unique brand offering. Not to mention how many corners are cut in streamlining the bottom line. The quality can really suck. Really?
And then there’s the price. It’s as much if not more than something with real amazing customer service. The sales teams and marketers of these ideas must be brilliant—“Charge customers more, reduce quality, remove the service element and make the customer do it.” And yet, we are drowned every day with miles and miles of ads and commercials claiming great service and an experience like no other. Who’s falling for this? Well, we all are.
As designers of brands and experiences, one of the biggest strategies and mantras of every project is how the customer will be experiencing their time with a product or service. Putting yourself in their shoes has always been the compass for delivering great work. But somewhere along the way our thirst for convenience, speed and no-hassle attitudes has us all coming up a little short. Granted, not every experience needs to have 5-star service or an overdone experience. But when you see, hear and talk to no one while your anger and temperature rise, when you don’t see any value in the offer, something seems amiss.
Maybe instead of just seemingly throwing in the towel, brands could give customers more agency in the options at their fingertips. A fast track, a slow track and a “how are you doing track?” Technology and widgets of every kind have made life faster and easier, sometimes, but how many times have you’ve been left wondering, “who designed this thing, this process?” Maybe they are feeding their creative meetings with only data-fed trends and majority decision-making that seem to only oil the machine better and better allowing for greater and greater growth. But for what? At some point, the balloon gets so big you are left with a lot of space, hot air and no one to talk to. And the human charm has been thrown out along with the service. My recent visits to Starbucks and Target (and there are others) left me with empty emotions as I sat and witnessed leaders in their categories for two decades, who now just seem reduced to vapid, soulless voids that have so little personality and service. It’s shocking to think these companies were the ones to beat once upon a time.
The future experiences may seem to be entering even more automation with AI and other tools, but I think you will find brands jumping to figure out how to make the experience and service much more memorable. This will mean showing up more physically or virtually, actually delivering what matters to the customer and maybe just caring a smidge. They will have to—otherwise, every new modern experience will be identically bland.