It cannot be unseen

Once you start to see how transactional and dehumanising our world has become it can’t be unseen and, as is the nature of such things we notice it more and more.

The reason that ‘People’ is the first of Scaling Up’s four decisions (people, strategy, execution and cash) is that without people there can be no business. The one thing every business has in common is that our customers are all people. No business, no people. And yet there is a tidal wave of business practices that seem to have forgotten that real, live sentient human beings are at the very centre of all businesses.

I can’t remember the last time I rang a business and the phone wasn’t answered by a bot, which will list a whole load of options and you end up trapped in their labyrinthine system with no option that ever seems to fit your personal situation, and then having wasted two whole minutes of your valuable time it will spend another two minutes telling you that all calls are recorded for training purposes- a passive aggressive threat to be nice-and then go on to tell you that rudeness will not be tolerated. Perhaps if they just answered the phone they wouldn’t need to threaten us.

Businesses are in such a rush to create processes and automation that they forget that the object of a business is to create raving fans. Has anyone ever said that ‘I loved having a conversation with that bot when I was trying to…..?

William James said that “The deepest hunger in humans is the desire to be appreciated”. A machine can’t give us that feeling. If I want to talk to a machine I’ll take my coffee machine out for a drink.

So the questions for today are:

• Do your human customers feel more human or less human after having tried to deal with your business?
• Do your human team members feel more human or less human when working for your business?
• What is the cost to your business of the answers you have given?