I am not a number

Have you noticed how much modern life has changed? How often communication from organisations is bot generated? You call a company and speak to a bot. you want to sort a problem out and you are confronted by a chat bot. Even if you visit a health organisation the person who takes your symptoms, isn’t the person who looks after you or prescribes the medicine or carries out the procedure, as the patient you are constantly handed off from one person to another.

Systems are designed for process and the humans in the middle feel unheard and unimportant. Some would argue that this is one of the causes of people generally feeling processed rather than cared for and the source of lots of the anger prevalent in society. It amuses me the number of automatic messages requesting callers to be kind to the person they might eventually get to speak to, perhaps if there were more answering of the phone and less automated messaging people wouldn’t be so angry.

Is this what you intended? Did you intend to hack your customer off? Or do you genuinely value your customer? In which case perhaps you should treat them better, treat them as humans and design your systems for humans. That speaks of kindness.

So the questions for today are:

• Are your systems designed to make life easier for you or for the customer?
• The level of anger your staff are met with will be a good indicator of whether your business is human centric or not. Is it?
• How easy is it for someone to contact you?
• How easy is it to get an answer from your business?
• The best selling advice is make it easy for the customer. Do you?