Waiting for the ATM

The Harvard Business Review has an article on customers and their preference to use self-serve kiosks and web pages over personal interactions with real people.

The popularity of self-service kiosks must pose a dilemma for business marketers. They want to reduce costs and self-service are definitely a way to do it.

Yet I suspect that the self-service kiosks were a compromise, a business Faustian bargain to reduce costs. Marketers also want the "personal touch" -- to sell us more stuff.

We customers have had self-service things crammed down our throats since the 1980s with ATMs and telephone torture menus. We were skeptical at first, and sometimes even hostile. But after a while, we accepted them. Now it seems we like them.

The HBR article talks about a few reasons behind the motivations of customers. They talk about efficiency of self-service kiosks (a valid point) and the control aspect (also a valid point), but miss what I consider the big reasons.

I speculate that customers avoid personal service representatives for two reasons, beyond the efficiency and control aspects.

Reason one: Customers are afraid that the service rep will push some other product or service on them. This puts the customer in an awkard situation: either they say "yes" and regret the purchase, or they say "no" and regret rejecting another human being. (I suppose a few folks can say "no" with no regrets at all. But the number is small -- and I suspect they have issues.) Either way, the customer walks away with a sour feeling.

Reason two: Customers are afraid that the service will be poor. Not just slow, but agonizingly slow, or perhaps even incompetent. A good way to ruin my bright sunny morning is to stop by the Post Office and partake in their ruthless drive for complacency. Transactions that (in my mind) should take one minute end up taking several. Repeat that for the ten people in front of me, and the recipe yields frustration. Yet slow is a small problem compared to wrong information or the inability to deliver service. Businesses have trimmed their workforce and trained their customer-facing personnel to handle the typical cases -- and only the typical cases. The unusual case stymies the average customer service representative, with more delays as they consult with a manager. In some cases, I don't get answers. (And this is service?)

Given the state of personal, face-to-face service, it is much better to deal with a machine.

Of course, the marketers have not asked us if we even want a personal relationship. They take it on faith that the personal touch will make us feel appreciated. (And it does, when it is done well. When it is clumsy, or forced, the effect is insincerity and the awareness of the theater of sales.)

What does this mean for software? Well, an obvious outcome is the continued use of self-service kiosks and web pages. A not-so-obvious conclusion is the use of better support software for the poorly trained sales droids.

But perhaps the biggest lesson is to understand your customers and deliver quality service, regardless of your industry.