It's true. I don't want a relationship with any companies. So long as their service works flawlessly as advertised, that is.
And if "self-service" involves a finicky IVR that is pretending to be a person and pretending to 'listen' to me by voice pattern-recognition, then I'd rather speak to a person, even if it's one person in a call center of 1,000 who deals with hundreds of customers every day and doesn't really care about establishing a relationship with any individual one. I'm a problem they have to solve, even the really friendly ones see me that way. Although I'd rather have had an internet service work properly the first time so that I didn't have to deal with any of that crap. Would I enjoy a real relationship with someone at the company? I don't know. No big company's "customer service" has ever achieved this, so I have nothing to compare.
Restaurants might be interesting to look at, though. Although my tastes are fickle: at 5:00 I might like the idea of a long, relaxing dinner where I interact with a cute and cheerful waitress after being seated by a friendly and professional maitre'd. 6:00 might roll around and I might have changed my mind, now I want to walk into a fast food restaurant and pay up front to have a bag of grub left on the counter for me to inhale as quickly as possible on my way somewhere else. And in the latter case, if I could just send a text of my order in advance and it would be waiting for me-- even better.
And if "self-service" involves a finicky IVR that is pretending to be a person and pretending to 'listen' to me by voice pattern-recognition, then I'd rather speak to a person, even if it's one person in a call center of 1,000 who deals with hundreds of customers every day and doesn't really care about establishing a relationship with any individual one. I'm a problem they have to solve, even the really friendly ones see me that way. Although I'd rather have had an internet service work properly the first time so that I didn't have to deal with any of that crap. Would I enjoy a real relationship with someone at the company? I don't know. No big company's "customer service" has ever achieved this, so I have nothing to compare.
Restaurants might be interesting to look at, though. Although my tastes are fickle: at 5:00 I might like the idea of a long, relaxing dinner where I interact with a cute and cheerful waitress after being seated by a friendly and professional maitre'd. 6:00 might roll around and I might have changed my mind, now I want to walk into a fast food restaurant and pay up front to have a bag of grub left on the counter for me to inhale as quickly as possible on my way somewhere else. And in the latter case, if I could just send a text of my order in advance and it would be waiting for me-- even better.