Where the Personal Touch Trumps Consistency
I was at a meeting with a client this morning and on my way home I felt like having poutine for lunch. I don’t usually eat fast food during the day but the new Harvey’s in town was calling me. Harveys makes the best, most consistent poutine in the country. This is when consistency is good. I know when I travel and visit across Canada, I can have my fries, cheddar curd and gravy exactly the same as I do at home.
A the drive through, I was greeted by someone who was all too cheerful saying, “Hi, Welcome to the Harvey’s /Swiss Chalet drive-through, can I take your order please?” I thought it sounded oddly familiar and it sounded very rehearsed. I then heard a confirmation call from the drive through speaker asking, “That was two poutine, sir? That will be $8.03. Please drive through to the window.” This voice was completely different and it donned on me that the first voice I heard was a prerecorded message, as if I had called their customer service helpline. It made me feel icky and completely depersonalized. I would much rather have a half hearted attempt at a personal greeting from the underpaid teen or poorly educated single parent than a recording at a drive through.
User expectations are a big issue for marketing a company. When I go through a drive through I expect to be greeted by a person — no matter how insincere it may be — a person. Such is the case when in today’s world I call a large corporation, by and large, I will reach an automated attendant. In Canada this is especially true as we always have “press one for English, press 2 for french”. I was pleasantly shocked when I called Capital One about my credit card yesterday and got a person after I entered my card number. This is the exception to the rule and it exceeded my expectations. The automation of the drive through failed to meet my expectations and therefore leaves me wondering do they even care? Are greetings so meaningless they can relegate them to a recording? Are their staff so incompetent that they can’t do it themselves? Are the training manuals so focused on product delivery that they can’t spend a page on making first impressions?
People buy products and services and people sell them in a world where we are all grasping for the remnants of personal contact. In this way, I feel that personal contact indeed trumps consistency.