De-humanizing the human part of business

Posted on | December 27, 2006 | 2 Comments

Nice rant by Chris Carfi about worshipping those false gods of gadgets and gizmos over the customer perspective last week. He makes a number of good points but here’s the bit that caught my eye.

He quotes Inc.’s Alex Salkever as follows: “Now, for the first time, smaller businesses can afford to send automated phone messages to targeted clients. With these products , a salesperson or business owner calls a toll-free number and records a brief message with a sales pitch. The message is uploaded to the Internet and broadcast using a voice over Internet protocol system to anywhere from a dozen to thousands of customers.”

This is really stupid.

Know why? Because one of the biggest competitive advantages that smaller businesses have is that they don’t generally do automated this or that. People like dealing with small businesses and microbusinesses because they get personalized attention from a human being. In fact, if the firm is a microbusiness, the odds are that any customer with an issue will find him or herself dealing directly with the business owner.

Talk about making your customer feel really important … ! In a world full of automated almost everything, there’s something to be said for that.

In fact, it’s one thing that the big boys do that we would be smart not to emmulate. They do it because it is a method of productivity enhancement and cost containment. But, as with all things, there are pluses and minuses to be weighed. What they gain in reduced customer acquisition costs they lose in human interaction.

And I’m just wondering … at what point will the American people dig in their heels and start abandoning firms that don’t have enough respect for their valuable custom to let them talk to real human beings? Or will people just do what they’ve pretty much always done and assume that they just have to take whatever the big boys choose to do to them if they want that product or that service at all?

How much consumers will tolerate fundamentally depends on how powerless they think they are. That’s when we get to see whether all the blather about the empowered consumer holds any water or not. In a world of empowered consumers, microbusinesses will often have the advantages because we just tend to treat people better.

The short form of the question is this: at what point, if ever, will the trend toward automation begin to reverse itself?

[tags]business systems, automation, customer acquisition, customer retention, sales and marketing[/tags]

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