Let's illustrate them through a real-life service experience. The photos below illustrate a situation a priori The most mundane: buying a coffee (here at Luckin Coffee, a street-side chain). On the face of it, it's pretty straightforward, and you'd expect to see 2 people on either side of a coffee, as in the first photo. Except that this moment of intimacy appeared to be hollow - or to put it another way, there shouldn't have been so much intimacy during this service.
Let's illustrate them through a real-life service experience. The photos below illustrate a situation a priori The most mundane: buying a coffee (here at Luckin Coffee, a street-side chain). On the face of it, it's pretty straightforward, and you'd expect to see 2 people on either side of a coffee, as in the first photo. Except that this moment of intimacy appeared to be hollow - or to put it another way, there shouldn't have been so much intimacy during this service.
The relationship despite everything at Luckin Coffee
The first symptom of this relational reticence is digital. China seems light years ahead of France when it comes to the digitalization of services. A consumer equipped with a smartphone and a WeChat and/or AliPay account will have access to a very complete ecosystem of services (including buying tickets for monuments, ordering “didi” - the equivalent of uber, renting a bike... and therefore ordering coffee!), in addition to social networking and online payment functions, in “physical” (at a restaurant) or peer-to-peer (you can pay money to a stranger you pass on the street via your phone).
Luckin Coffee's process is based on this ecosystem, and involves the customer ordering via their phone, scanning the establishment's QR code (see photo below), choosing the type of coffee, any aromas etc., and then collecting their order from the staff on hand, with whom a minimal exchange will suffice. When access to the order via the (French) telephone is blocked, the whole system breaks down and staff have to intervene (in this case, the employee will end up using her own telephone and will be reimbursed thanks to P2P payment!).
Plastic is the second striking symptom of this relational reticence at Luckin Coffee. When the employee became involved in the interaction to help the French customer in difficulty (an obvious service/customer orientation attitude!), it became apparent that she was wearing plastic gloves. And, in what constitutes (literally!) an additional layer of distancing, she donned an extra pair of plastic gloves to grab the problematic phone and seek a solution. There are clearly no restrictions on the use of plastic in China at present, but here there is an extreme precaution in relation to physical contact.
What do plastic and QR codes stand for?
These two symptoms (plastic and digital) could just be exotic facts, independent of each other and specific to China. But it's interesting to ask whether they are not, in fact, highly indicative of a major trend taking shape in the world of services, and which the Covid crisis has greatly amplified, but which is by no means irreversible or universal. This trend is that of questioning the relationship in services, and its associated question: can a service be built without a relationship?
Visit customer relationship, It's the very essence of service, its fundamental ingredient. In fact, it is because the relationship is so important that contact personnel have gradually been recognized as key players in the success of a service. In a 2016 article, David Bowen, a renowned American service management researcher, described the history of service management as one of gradual recognition of customer-facing staff - those who embody the brand, bring a touch of empathy, are able to react in the event of difficulty for the customer, and so on.
But David Bowen predicts in the same article that this golden age may be coming to an end. With customers becoming more and more empowered, and technology becoming more and more powerful, do we still need contact workers? And a related question: do we still need relationships? From the café waiter we know well, with his white gloves, to the Luckin Coffee employee we should hardly see, with her plastic gloves: is it simply the service relationship we're seeing disappear?
Some questions to ask about the relationship
Behind this fundamental trend, there are three important questions to ask about customer relations.
The first question is whether all services require a relationship. A recent example is provided by hairdressers who offer their customers a silent cut. Our hairdresser will take care of your hair, but if you wish, he/she won't talk to you! This service innovation should make us question the value we place on the relational dimension of service. As a customer, as an employee or as a manager. The value delivered by a hairdresser can be seen as the result of a relational atmosphere, independently of the haircut (unfortunately, the two authors of this post don't need much more than a trimmer!), or at the other extreme, as the result of the professional's technical skills (e.g. color) and expertise (e.g. visagism).
The second question is whether we're not getting ahead of ourselves. After all, does the disappearance of contact agents mean the end of customer relations? A change of regime, certainly; but while we are perplexed by the emergence of romantic or friendly relationships between humans and conversational agents, and while anthropomorphic robots have long since joined the service scene (in retirement homes, for example), digitalization and plastics are perhaps in the end just the ingredients for a less human and more technological relationship. At the end of the day, for any service organization, it's always a question of asking which relational modalities will suit which customer typology! relati
The last point of vigilance brings us back to Luckin Coffee. Don't prioritize the relationship with the agent over the contact a priori - but don't prevent the relationship when it becomes opportune. The photo below almost takes us back to administrative hygienaphones, widely criticized for their lack of ergonomic communication. At Luckin, it's clear that the open windows at hand level were suitable for dispensing coffee, but not for verbal communication. The layout of the service area was so designed against the relationship that the contact employee had to overcome physical obstacles (in this case, she ended up walking out of the store) to help the customer. Not prioritizing the relationship should not be confused with going against it!
