“So, your sons are around five and six now,” said the dentist to me a few years ago.
“You have a great memory,” I replied.
He looked sheepish, then confessed that this information was on my computer patient file. It didn’t bother me, but it didn’t warm me up in quite the way he wanted.
This snippet of memory came to mind as I read an item by Ron Margulis on Abasto, a site serving the Hispanic food industry, about enhancing the customer experience.
Since AI is all the rage now, of course the author asked how AI could be used to that effect.
The article starts with a reminiscence of his grandfather, who ran a supermarket in New Jersey. “He would routinely engage [customers] in the aisles, chatting about their lives, their families, and their needs. If one customer liked to make her own pickles, he’d have a bag of Kirby cucumbers waiting at a reduced price or free. If she misplaced a coupon, he’d arrange for the discount. And if she were making a cake for a child’s birthday, he’d give her the candles.”
The article continues, “’I’ve always thought that if a technology company could capture the essence of that sensibility, to be a merchant in every sense of the word, they would truly have something unique and totally worthwhile to offer food retailers.”
Possibly. It would be an improvement on the consumer experience at, say, Target, where screens at the self-checkout stands display your own not-always-attractive mug back at you, Orwell style.
Yet I have to wonder how an AI simulacrum of personal interest might hit the customer. You’ve seen Old Man Margulis for years at the market, and yes, he knows you like to can pickles. But how would you like it if some clerk is standing around with an app that does a facial ID on you and tells him the same thing?
How would the clerk know this anyway? Maybe because you made some remark to that effect to another clerk a few weeks back, who duly tapped it into her phone for future retrieval.
Feel good about that?
I know I wouldn’t. I don’t care if my dentist has a record of my sons’ ages (he’s their dentist too), but maybe I wouldn’t like details about my canning proclivities circulating on some retailer’s database.
Here is the point: yes, customers—many of them anyway—like the feeling of individualized personal service in retail. But using AI to create a simulacrum of this personal attention is likely to backfire. Many people are already suspicious of using technology to gather all sorts of data on them.
The process goes full circle: the more you try to replicate personal attention with technology, the more you are likely to alienate your customer.
When it comes to personal attention, there’s no substitute for personal attention.
