Don’t automate the customer experience

Paula Thornton at the Fast Forward Blog has a great post on innovation being a human ability. What I actually think is critically important for businesses to understand in light of my last post (It is about your customer... not about you!), is what she said in a comment that follows mine in her blog posting. She pointed to a conversation she had with a colleague of hers:

I asked him if he was aware that all FedEX truck drivers were owner/operators? I told him how they were free to optimize their own routes. I challenged him to rethink ‘mechanized’. If mechanized jobs are so simple, why use a human at all? Because they can manage variability. But are there not repetitive tasks that can be both process optimized and allow for variability? Consider the FedEX driver. He would love a system to take all of his deliveries and map them out in the most efficient route possible. Efficiency saves him costs. But does he also want to be free to decide to return to an important account to take care of a special ‘last minute’ large delivery to increase equity in that relationship? You bet! Innovation is not about avoiding automatic processes, but about leveraging them to free us up to manage more and more variability. It’s a matter of both…yin and yang, chaos and order. The greatest potential is in the moving middle.

It is critical that we understand the customer experience as being all important. By understanding that the customer is more important than the most efficient, automated process we can ensure that the customer experience will create a sustainable customer relationship.

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Corey Smith is the Vice President of Innovation at Fisher's Document Systems where he maintains a blog on business and technology.