SHAUN READ | Digital transformation puts customer effort on tap

There is a viral video doing the rounds that captures, in a few minutes, much of what has gone wrong with our relationship with technology.

An elderly man walks into his local pub. He has apparently been going there for years. He walks up to the bar, as people have done in pubs for several centuries, and tries to order a beer. He cannot.

He is directed instead to a table, where he must scan a QR code to access the menu and place his order through an app. But there is a problem. His old Nokia is perfectly capable of making phone calls, which, quaintly, is what he bought it to do, but it is not terribly enthusiastic about downloading apps.

What follows is a painful exercise in technological compliance. Eventually, with some assistance and considerable perseverance, he manages to place his order. The app then tells him where to collect his beer. At the bar. The same bar at which he had been standing half an hour earlier, when a human being could simply have poured him one.

The story is funny because it is absurd. But it illustrates a far larger problem. Increasingly, technology is being introduced not because it makes something demonstrably better, cheaper, faster or easier, but because organisations have decided that they need more technology.

You see the same phenomenon in corporate strategy. Annual reports, investor presentations and strategy documents proudly announce that perfectly ordinary businesses are becoming “technology companies”. Why? You sell tyres or whatever.

Indeed, if you manufacture excellent tyres, distribute them efficiently, price them competitively and provide exceptional service to the people who buy them, you probably have a very good business. Technology may help you do all of those things. It should remove friction rather than creating it. It shortens processes rather than adding stages to them. It gives people choices rather than forcing everyone through the same digital funnel. Most importantly, it recognises that human interaction is not necessarily an inefficiency to be engineered out of a business. For some customers, talking to another human being is part of the appeal of a product.

Good technology removes the need to deal with a person when you don’t need to. Bad technology prevents you from dealing with a person when you do. Somewhere along the way too many businesses confused those two propositions.

Every technological investment should instead begin with an embarrassingly simple question: what problem are we trying to solve? And not: what technology should we adopt? Or, what is everyone else doing with AI? Or, how do we digitise the customer journey? And certainly not: how do we become a technology company?

The barman taking an order, pouring a beer and accepting payment may already be an exceptionally efficient technological architecture. It has a remarkably intuitive interface, almost no onboarding requirement and has survived several hundred years of user testing. Replacing it with four screens, a registration process, a password, a QR code and an app is not necessarily innovation.

This is where many organisations make a fundamental mistake.