Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Reclaiming Our Humanity


I've often heard it said that service is losing its humanity because people are increasingly turning to digital channels to purchase goods and services instead of being served by people.   In effect, when customers research products on the Internet, purchase from a vending machine, make a withdrawal from an ATM, or get support from a mobile device, they are interacting with a sterile mechanism rather than a real human being.

All things considered, I cannot argue that customers interacting with a device or machine have a different sense of interaction than they do when interacting with human service providers – though there are human beings who rival mechanical devices for their coldness and impersonality, as well as instances in which the warmth and friendliness of a person interferes with the simplicity of a task and it is entirely more desirable to interact with a device that does not want to make small talk, ask intrusive questions, or attempt to redefine your goals for you.

While it may be true that interacting with a device is generally less satisfying than interacting with a flesh-and-blood person, I do not think it is necessarily so, nor do I think that the notion of being served "by a machine" is entirely accurate.

Consider this: when you call a company for service, you do not believe that the telephone is having a conversation with you.   You are aware that the device is just a channel through which you are communicating with a human being on the other end of the line, using a device to overcome distance between your physical locations and your physical selves.     Thus, you are receiving service from a person even though there is a device (a network of multiple devices, in fact) between you and the person to whom you are speaking.   I don't expect anyone could argue otherwise.

To go a step further, even when the voice on the telephone is a recorded message and there is no human being who is actually speaking at the same time you are listening, there was a human being speaking at some point, and the recording spans a distance in time in the same way a telephone is spans a geographic distance.   Thus, you are being served by a person who anticipated your needs and prepared the service experience in advance.   Though there is some argument to be made that because the voice is recorded, the experience cannot be adjusted in a truly interactive manner, changing the presentation in response to your reaction in real-time.   This is a point of frustration, but little different to having a face-to-face encounter with a pompous and dismissive person who seems to be ignoring your part of the conversation and speaks as from a script.   So I would argue it is not the machine that is the source of frustration, but the lack of foresight of the person who prepared the experience.

And to go further still, what if the voice itself is computer-generated?   I would suggest that while the voice is no part human, a person wrote the script and programmed the machine to speak those words, and it's little different to conversing with a mute person who uses a device to "speak" for them - it is not the device that emulates the sound of a human voice with which we are speaking, but the person operating the device, providing the words it speaks.  Thus, you are not being served by the device.

Perhaps I've belabored the point  ... but it seems to need belaboring given the frequency with which it is forgotten or ignored: that a machine is a proxy for a human being, and that the customer is not "served by a machine" but served by the people who designed the interactions to be delivered by means of this proxy.

Thus understood, if we find interacting with a machine to be unpleasant, it is not because of the machine, but because of the interaction designer.  They failed to sufficiently consider the needs and desires of the user in designing the way in which their proxy would support interaction.

Or to go off on a tangent, perhaps they were not capable of doing so in the first place.   I have to admit that I am to some degree idealizing the concept of interacting with people - and some people are so unpleasant that interacting with a machine is preferable.   I often pause to wonder at some of the personalities I encounter in the design community - staggeringly many designers are socially inept in face-to-face interactions yet feel themselves to be adept in designing interactions through a proxy.  It would seem that, at best, the interaction they design would be as thoroughly unpleasant as dealing with them in person.   But that's a separate topic.

To return to the point, the machine is a proxy for a human being, a proxy leveraged to overcome the limitations of time and distance.  It is merely a proxy and not a substitute because, until artificial intelligence is perfected and machines are making decisions independently rather than executing commands written by a person, there is and will always be another human being who is responsible for planning the interaction.

This considered, I would make the argument that the machine-human interaction is not necessarily dehumanized or dehumanizing - it is only dehumanized to the degree that the interaction designer has forgotten to apply, or has never been quite adept at applying, his own humanity and has failed to regard the users with the dignity and respect that they (rightly) feel they are owed.

There are some improvements that can be made to the technology to facilitate this - to do a better job of communicating the humanity of the designer - but technology has already progressed to the point that it can have only marginal improvements.  Instead, it is the designer's adeptness at applying his humanity to his work that is a serious deficiency, and ever has been.

And to smooth over a few ruffled feathers, "the designer" is not intended here to mean the individual who attends to the role of designing the interface - they are often the human hands directed by others.   Many can speak to the frustration of not being able to provide a good interaction because they are beholden to clients and sponsors who want things to be cheap and efficient, and who require the person in the role of designer to set aside their humanity and do the job they're being paid to do, to the satisfaction not of the customer but of the authority who signs their paycheck.

That, too, is a transition to another diversion on the nature of corporations, which have become dehumanized and soulless, and who dehumanize and smother the souls of their employees.  While that is an entirely separate argument, it is likely a prerequisite to the present one: even where service is provided by a living, breathing human being, they are disempowered by process and procedure, such that the service experience is rigid, inflexible, and unpleasant and they can do little to deviate from policy to do what clearly needs to be done.   If a company can transform a human employee into an automaton who follows procedure and is prevented from interacting naturally, what hope is there of finding much humanity when the employee is replaced by a machine or an electronic device?

Dragging myself back to topic (again), I would suggest that the main problem with customer experience is indeed its lack of humanity, and that the machine is not to blame, any more than a human who is compelled to read from a script and follow rigidly documented service procedures designed to maximize efficiency.  And the blame is then to be passed along to the administrators who created and insisted on those procedures, and likely to the management who demanded efficiency to the detriment of all other priorities.

If we are to improve the customer experience, we do not need to polish our functional skills or seek to employee better technology - these things help, but only to a small degree.   Our greater challenge is in reclaiming our humanity and respecting the humanity of those whom we serve.  Until we have done so, we will fail.  And until we stop blaming the machine or the employee who carries out our bidding, we will remain focused on the wrong elements of the customer experience.

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