When Efficiency Costs You Trust

It’s amazing how quickly losing internet can turn your world upside down.

Last weekend, ours went out for four days, and for the better part of three of them, I found myself in an endless loop of AI chatbots, automated troubleshooting and eventually a human being, only to be sent back into another automated process. An appointment would finally get scheduled, an outage would be reported, the appointment would be canceled, and then I’d have to start the process all over again.

I stayed calm through all of it because getting angry wasn’t going to get the internet back any faster. And this isn’t about calling out a company. I’ve never been a fan of using a platform to publicly shame someone because of a bad experience, especially when I’m pretty sure most of their competitors would present many of the same challenges.

But it did make me think a lot about trust and connection.

We’re all looking for ways to use AI and automation to become more efficient, and we should be. But somewhere along the way, efficiency can’t come at the expense of connection. What frustrated me most wasn’t even going four days without internet. It was the feeling that nobody was actually listening and nobody owned the problem.

By the end of it, I had very little trust that the experience would be any different the next time. If another company convinced me it had figured out how to combine all that efficiency with actual human connection, that alone might be enough to make me switch.

Automate the process. Don’t automate the relationship.

The more automated our world becomes, the more valuable human connection becomes. Sometimes something as small as making someone feel heard can be the difference between losing their trust and earning their loyalty.

That’s Small Ball.

Where could a little more human connection make a big difference in your business?