When Technology Is NOT the Answer
Last week I went into a superstore – one I haven’t been to in a while – and was shocked to see how many self-service checkouts were available. This was a store that converted nearly 50 percent of their checkouts to self-serve. And while I usually lament the fact that stores have too few self-serve checkouts, this particular night I needed the help of a trained cashier to help me with the shear volume of stuff (including tons of unlabeled fruits and vegetables) I was buying. Unfortunately the store had only two cashiers working compared to the 11 self-serve checkouts. Ugh…
It illustrates the false idea that technological capability is – in and of itself – enough of a reason to implement it.
Hey, I’m not some old curmudgeon here. I believe businesses should leverage technology to its fullest, but just because technology allows us to do something, doesn’t necessarily mean we should.
Take Dewey Knight, Associate Director for Financial Aid at Ole Miss. After updating his school’s computer systems to allow students to complete all of their financial aid processing online, Knight noticed something very peculiar: the number of inbound calls from students didn’t diminish even as more students turned to online processing.
Huh?! Shouldn’t self-serve technology decrease the number of inbound customer service calls? Not always.
Just like me at the superstore, students still prefer traditional forms of customer service in some instances. Knight had to look to other ways of helping his students besides pushing online self-serve technology. (See the upcoming May issue of the Greentree Gazette to see how he did it!) That included reassessing his students’ needs and implementing some old-school, yet still innovative forms of customer service.
Just because a business can blog, does that mean it should? Websites are incredibly cheap and easy to put up, but does every business need one? Is it always in a company’s best interest to move customers into self-service, online technologies?
Organizations would do better to ensure that whatever program, technology, or other solution they implement, that it’s done to support their core mission.
Everything else is periphery… and note to Meijer, please bring back my cashiers!
If Meijer was more meticulous about labeling their products you’d have less need for cashiers. However, I’m not advocating eliminating jobs by way of favoring technology and cutting costs. Balance the two and keep customer service as most important.