This summer I have been traveling around Norway and I have been surprised to see how most of the stores adopt to a greater or lesser extent the self-service model to offer their services. For example, in coffee shops it is common to find coffee machines where the customer makes his own coffee. At the airports there are check-in and bag drop machines, and specifically at Evenes airport, this is the first time I have seen an airport without people at the bag drop counter. We even boarded the plane with a machine…
In restaurants it is not uncommon to have to go to the bar to order your food, and then the waiters bring it to your table. Many hotels don’t have a front desk, they send you a code with which to open the door, and it’s quite likely that you won’t see any hotel staff for your entire stay. I don’t know the reason why this is like that, but I do know that the culture allows it. The feeling is that it is a very safe country where people follow the rules, which makes it easy to use self service.
In general my experience is that things work pretty well, but the lack of interaction with the staff makes the experience somewhat cold and dehumanized. Of all the hotels I went to, I got by far the best impression from the one that had a person at the front desk, who turned out to be very attentive and gave me very good recommendations for my trip. He even recommended me to go to see the Northern Lights one night, even though it was not the season, and indeed I saw them (hence the photo).
Self-service seems to be a capability that is in line with the automation of the world in which we find ourselves, seeking efficiency and cost reduction. But it leaves out of the equation other variables that are important for customer satisfaction, such as a friendly and personal treatment, more humane recommendations or special requests, among others. If we add automated stores and self-service experiences everywhere to a world in which telecommuting is consolidating, we run the risk of reducing physical social interactions because they are considered more inefficient and uncontrollable. And of course there will be those who will say that AI will make the human touch more human, but for now we are far from the point where looking at an AI on a screen is akin to interacting with a human.
I think there is no doubt about all that technology and automation brings, but like anything else we should ask ourselves where the balance is, and what tasks we want humans to keep doing in order to have the best customer experience, not just the most efficient one.