What Customers Want Is Invisible To The Eye

In 1961, Ray Kroc bought a small restaurant chain off of the McDonald brothers. The rest, as they say, is history: the exponential expansion, the investments in real estate that made the parent company so financially successful, the rigid systems and processes — including forced revolution of the potato-growing industry — that ensure every Mickey D’s french fry from Finland to Fiji tastes identical.

Kroc wasn’t the first to come up with the idea that consistency and scalability through systems and technology are the foundational pillars of a global franchise. From Henry Ford to Walt Disney, from H&M to Home Depot, the Western commercial landscape has become dominated by this type of factory-produced, churned-out offering.

But it’s not just products that have become standardized. The automate-and-replicate mindset has extended, Borg-like, from what-we-sell to how-we-behave, and is now seeking perfection everywhere from analog customer service scenarios (“Welcome back to the Four Seasons, Mr. <Lname>; would you like Room <RoomNumber> like last time?”) to digital email missives (“Dear <Fname>, We truly value you as a customer.”). Engagement is governed by scripts, bots, and autoreplies. Quantitative metrics over qualitative relationships. Bland repetition over quirky uniqueness. And the more pervasive technology becomes, the stronger the temptation to rely on it in every possible scenario.

I understand why management loves automation, really I do. People are expensive, unpredictable and hard to train. We don’t scale well. Sometimes we say stupid things. We have emotional baggage, controversial opinions, conflicting belief systems. We aren’t always as compassionate as we should be, or as clever as we could be, or as thoughtful as we need to be. It’s easy to see why service organizations (and, believe me, every organization that has customers is a service organization) would want to ensure absolute consistency in customer interactions.

To be fair, we as consumers often want absolute consistency as well. We want products to be consistently high quality. We want websites to work consistently well. We want people to be consistently honest, genuine, professional and attentive.

But when we engage with one another as human beings — whether it’s face-to-face, on the phone, through email, or via social media — we don’t want to encounter automata on the other end of the interaction. We want people who can understand our actual needs, who can relate to our actual desires, who feel as we feel and laugh as we laugh; if a policy or a rule makes no sense, we want to deal with people who can change or override it. As the Frank Herbert character Darwi Odrade says, “Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time.”

Consider, for example, our surprise and delight when we do find ourselves on the receiving end of a truly human connection — as happened last year when a Netflix customer service rep introduced himself to a problem-reporting customer as, “Captain Mike of the good ship Netflix.” The “Captain” asked which member of the crew he was speaking with… and, when the customer replied as an officer of Star Fleet, the entire ensuing conversation was held in character. A VentureBeat post about the interaction was shared almost 15,000 times on Facebook; who knows how many times the screengrab of the chat was shared.

Or, on the media front, consider the difference between spam and true personalization. Newsweek’s Zach Schonfeld recently did a week-long experiment in which he replied to every email he received (instead of directly deleting the hundreds of press releases that jammed his inbox). The irrelevant missives he received are simultaneously hilarious and depressing, highlighting the need to ask two very simple questions: who is going to receive this communication, and why should they care?

“Over the course of the morning, I respond to a release about a French company specializing in the production of mechanical components with a chirpy ‘I don’t know much about drilling and optronic assembly, but thank you for sharing!’ I get an email about a professor who is available to comment on Hong Kong’s democracy movement and reply saying I’ll be sure to keep him in mind if I cover Hong Kong’s democracy movement even though I know I probably won’t wind up covering Hong Kong’s democracy movement… At one point I get an email about USA Insulation — ‘the country’s largest retrofit insulation company’ — opening a location in Rockland County.…”

As engagement becomes more and more automated, we respond more and more strongly to people who feed our desire for human connection. We don’t want to feel like we’re being stepped formulaically through a pre-determined funnel. We want to be seen as individuals, appreciated for who we are, tamed the way Antoine de St. Exupery’s Little Prince tamed the fox:

“ ‘One only understands the things that one tames,’ said the fox. ‘Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me…’ “

In the product world, there is pushback to the automate-and-replicate world of Wal-Mart and West Elm, and the market for handmade, local, craft items has become insatiable. For large companies, the challenge is now to resolve the inherent contradiction: how do you satisfy customers at scale, when the very thing they’re after is uniqueness?

The answer lies in understanding what to scale. Etsy has achieved a $600-million-plus valuation by automating the platform through which people can engage with each other on a personal level, and their success holds the secret to the future of engagement. They scaled the bits where we want maximum efficiency, so that we could more thoroughly enjoy the bits where we don’t.

Do not seek to automate that which should not be automated, and do not seek to systematize that which must remain alive. Automate your logistics, your inventory, your accounting. But when it comes to connecting a person in your company with someone who patronizes your company, for any purpose whatsoever, allow humans to be humans: quirky, unexpected, responsive, and alive.

It is harder to quantify this kind of engagement. But that doesn’t make it any less valuable, as St. Exupery knew:

“’Goodbye,’ said the fox. ‘And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’”

Kaila Colbin is a co-founder and trustee of the non-profit Ministry of Awesome, an organization dedicated to watering the seeds of awesome in Christchurch, New Zealand as well as the Curator of TEDxChristchurch and the founder and director of New Zealand social media consultancy Missing Link. She is also a PMP certified Project Manager, Chairman of the Board of the New York-based Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts, a board member of CORE Education Ltd. and a member of the Advisory Board for the Christchurch Transitional Architecture Trust.

Next: The Disconnect Between Analytics and Engagement: How Publishers Can Bridge the Gap by Sachin Kamdar, CEO, Parse.ly