The Personal Touch

Do you recall when you used to go into the local grocer’s shop and he knew your name? Or perhaps when you used to get things delivered to your door by the local store, and they knew everything there was to know about you within reason?

The service industry is based on the personal touch, and people go to certain restaurants for that. They may go to certain farming co-ops for that too. You don’t go to your local supermarket expecting much of that anymore — maybe Publix, but it isn’t quite the same.

It would be easy to dismiss the feeling that a return to the smaller scale shops is just reflective of hitting a certain age, and nostalgia creeping in, but isn’t something like Etsy borne from the very same impetus? To get something rare and to get something bespoke, and to get something that you know human hands touched.

Something of the gig economy is located in this sensibility too. It seems that being in closer contact with the person that is benefiting from the money that you are spending on the transaction changes the relationship, both for the vendor and the purchaser. There don’t seem to be an army of happy Big Box Store staff members lining up around the block, but some stores you go to that seem to value their staff members feel like a better option. You want to support something positive. When you deal with a company that makes its staff happy chances are you are going to be happier too.

Owner operated is a big thing — you know that when you deal with a company that has this kind of ethos that you are dealing with a company that knows its products, cares about the services delivered, and cares about the people who are on the other end of the transaction. And when the wave of automated stores with minimal human interaction start to proliferate, human operated is going to be a big thing — a good selling point. People like Made In The USA on things, and they like hand-made on things, and they will often pay for the pleasure of interacting with a person.

Why is that? Because they want some processes to be transparent — where does my food come from? Who packed it and are they ethical? More than half the problems with government and industry is that they are black boxes, and you have no idea what is being fed into the machinery, and what it goes through before it comes out the other end. Lack of transparency can also be the reason that it is so easy to game the system — you can’t see where something came from and the journey it traveled to get to you, so you are taking it on face value that it is authentic.

This is why the notion of something like Blockchain as a solution for everything is in vogue. The idea being that there is accountability, and that the ledger which records that account is not easily subject to alteration or deletion of records. Who is held accountable in the current system? Only the one who don’t play the game well enough. Cut down the length of the chain that something travel and lay bare who is involved in and it builds trust — people like to see that, and it is definitely one of the attractive things in some of the newly emergent business models which transpose older practices to a more technological setting.

Slick emotionless automation in anything is fine, perhaps, when you are in a rush, but try dealing with robo-diallers all day, or spending four hours in voicejail being told that your call is important only to get hung up on when you get through, and then argue that this is preferable to calling a company and speaking to someone live on the other end.

Personal — a person is involved. The touch suggests the involvement. You know your problem is handling. Sometimes it feels like a domino rally cascading through space in a free-fall when you are pushing buttons and answering questions and triggering pre-recorded responses, you start to wonder if you will ever speak to an actual person. I know some people have ditched one company in favor of another for this very thing. On some level it may be cool to have a robots doing everything, but on another level having a human doing it is cooler.