What is the future of customer service in an automated world?

I was born in the late 1970s. When I was a kid, the term ‘kiosk’ meant a building at the beach where we would go and buy ice creams and bags of candy with our loose change.

The drive-through at McDonald’s was a novelty and the quickest way to get fast food. Whenever you walked into a store or up to a counter, you were served by a human. The closest we got to self-service was the salad and dessert bar at Pizza Hut – an absolute novelty.

Nowadays, thanks to the many home-delivery services, you can order food through an app and have it on your front doorstep within minutes.

Nowadays, a ‘kiosk’ is a screen that replaces a customer-facing staff member, allowing companies to save on labour costs and customers to self-serve, check in, check out and get on with their day without ever speaking to a human.

Our world moves quickly, and companies aim to help us get what we want when we want it. The result is that humans are slowly being removed from service interactions at every possible turn.

Robots are taking over our world. Is that a little too dramatic? OK, perhaps a more accurate way to say it is that many tasks these days are being done by technology. 

We’ve never been more technologically connected, yet human service feels more distant. As we demand more self-service options and more convenience, what will the impact be on social cohesion? How strong will our social connections be in the future?

Stunted social skills

The digital revolution has caused a big shift in how we live, work and communicate, and continues to affect our daily lives profoundly.

Technology is reconditioning the way we interact and cope with the human stuff. It’s mostly unconscious, fed by our need for and addiction to productivity, speed, convenience and greater efficiencies in the workplace and life.

We expect personalisation, self-service options and instant gratification. The way things used to be in service, before many technological innovations kicked in, is almost unimaginable now; and perhaps we wouldn’t choose to return to that.

But there are consequences. These shifts and changes in working and being served by one another mean that people have fewer opportunities to interact with others and, therefore, they tend to get out of practice with their social skills.

The reduction in social interaction in various industries and workplace environments has contributed greatly to the deterioration of service standards. People have simply forgotten what it’s like to be around others.

Keeping humans involved in the critical touchpoints of the service chain and customer journey keeps people connected. If we become ever more reliant on technology for communication and collaboration, with ever fewer opportunities for face-to-face interactions, it may stunt future generations’ social skills. 

Stronger social connections

While technology is grabbing everyone’s attention, we forget that service roles always require a level of presence and attentiveness. The unwritten task for every person in service is to make each person they serve feel like they’re the only person in the room.

When we learn these skills in service, we’re learning social skills for life.

Service directly reflects how well we’re doing as a social species. Being together and mindful of our social interactions is in our biology, and our social relationships are essential to our health and happiness. 

Take the mundane activity of going to a supermarket. The push to transform supermarkets with speedier checkout lanes and self-serving options is possibly overshadowing the fact that a local supermarket, for some people, is their community.

In 2019, a Dutch supermarket introduced slow checkouts for lonely elderly people who want to talk to someone. The move proved so successful that they installed the checkouts in 200 stores and added a ‘chat corner’ where locals could meet and have a coffee.

My father, who is in his late 70s, lives on his own and quite likes it that way. He is consciously aware of the human interactions in his local town that make him happy. He chooses to go to the supermarket every second day to interact with people, see familiar faces and be recognised by them.

There are people all over the planet with a palpable need for connection, meaning and significance. The consequences of not having this human connection are remarkable.

One report the CDC mentioned found that social isolation increases a person’s risk of premature death at a rate that rivals smoking, obesity and physical inactivity.

Connection may be one of life’s most important aspects; serving people is a direct vehicle for this.

Service interactions, as ordinary and repetitive as they may seem, are, at scale and speed, conditioning society’s norms and what’s considered acceptable.

More customer journeys in all industries and businesses must incorporate human-to-human connections to maintain harmony and togetherness in society.

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