I like to think that I am fairly comfortable with digital tools and platforms, but I feel a backlash growing inside me when the digital option is pushed into my face. Here in Sweden for example, cash has become almost obsolete, there's an app for everything and shops are becoming increasingly self-service. When a shop forces you to use those awful self-service checkouts, or you can only pay for parking by downloading the special app (that I as a visitor to the town will probably never use again), or when you arrive in a new city and are faced with the challenge of negotiating the often complex automatic ticket machines (offering you a myriad of options but never the one you are looking for). The hours I have wasted on such frustrating processes that an old-fashioned human contact would have solved in seconds.
I sometimes feel I'm the only one who feels like this, but received welcome support from a post by James Clay, Digital should be a choice… The new digital solution may be welcomed by many but we also need to consider who we are excluding by installing even more self-service machines or apps. Offer us a choice and we can maybe accept the change in time, but if there is no choice people will suffer.
We often forget that sometimes people don’t like innovation and innovation doesn’t automatically always mean better. Actually most of the time innovation for a lot of people is rarely better. Sometimes its worse than what was before, most of the time it’s just different.
I simply don't want to install new apps every week that clog up my mobile's limited capacity and that I only use a handful of times a year at most. Most buses are now cashless and if you don't use the app or have a prepaid card you are punished by paying a high price for a single ticket from A to B. In many self-service shops there is a forest of machines and one manual checkout with a long queue (curious isn't it?). At one railway station with only self-service ticket machines I saw several members of staff who spent all their time helping bewildered travellers to use the machines!
James Clay applies this to education where an increasing amount of services on campus are being migrated to kiosks or chatbots. What about students or staff who for some reason can't or don't wish to go digital in this way. Is there any real person I can ask? What do I do if I don't have a mobile that supports the latest app? Some tech companies have rationalised all traces of personal contact from their customer service, replacing it with vast FAQ pages and self-help discussion forums. Sometimes I have a problem that isn't covered there or I'm not prepared to spend the next two hours combing through the site to find an answer. I just want a quick answer. Of course I can check in myself at a hotel and do everything by app but I do like to meet a person who smiles and can answer my questions (no, I don't want a humanoid robot at the desk either, no matter how polite they may be).
Whenever we innovate we need to consider whether we are excluding anyone and ensure that we have an option for them.
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