Tag: human factors

Who or what do you trust #1?

Chief Pixie

Despite some technology hype, there’s no such thing as ‘trustless’ transactions between humans. Just because I have a valid key doesn’t make me a trustworthy key holder and if my digital credentials are invalid it doesn’t necessarily mean that I am untrustworthy. Digital security and trust, like other themes explored in this blog, are evolving in ways that are often incompatible with a world that increasingly relies upon the blending of electrons and humans.

I recently visited my elderly parents who live in a beautiful semi rural area in the US where many of the people are holiday makers or retirees. The area has all the modern conveniences as well as some vestiges of the land that time forgot – including a local internet service provider that has aged along with many in the community.

This ISP offers email services and bandwidth that’s about a tenth of the speed and capacity at a similar price to national competitors. It also offers extraordinary customer support that reflects the community they support.

Soon after I arrived, both of my parents began having issues with their email. Their first thought was that I might have broken the home wifi due to my excessive (ie that of an average digital participant) data consumption through multiple concurrently connected devices (crazy stuff!). Looking into it, I saw that the ISP plan they were on offered very low speeds but the modem and router were working albeit slowly. As a trusted intermediary I asked them for their passwords so I could look at the ISPs email account setup and was given a collection of coloured post-it notes with three or for passwords on each marked with uncertain notes like ‘pc’, ‘ipad’, ‘apple’, ‘nokia’, ‘old’, ‘lulu’, ‘new’, ‘newer’ etc.. None of these seemed to work – not even the blue ones – and they suggested calling the ISP. I said that the ISP wouldn’t be able to help because their passwords were encrypted and we’d have to reset them – no, we need to call Mike or Lulu.

So I called, and the phone was answered in 2 rings (!) by Mike, who spoke to my Dad and got him to guess what parts of the correct password might be – I think it has this or that number in it – yes, says Mike, and there’s a short word before the number – what might that be? No, not that one, yes, that’s the one. Password (unencrypted on Mike’s end) confirmed – first problem solved, but my cyber security sensibilities were in meltdown.

Mike and I could then establish that my parents had thought that every email client had its own password (totally reasonable for those who became digital aliens around 1998). Each time a device was turned on (because of course you don’t want to wear out your mobile phone and tablet by leaving them on all the time) it would try to connect to the email account with a different (out of date) password and lock the account after three failed tries.

After an hour or so of deducing all this, everything was sorted – fixed the email set up on the pcs and portable devices and Mike and I tested each connection with me on the clients and his observation on the server. During all this time Mike had to stop and take other calls and then called me back!

Some of you reading this would have paused at the point where Mike was clearly looking at my parent’s unencrypted passwords and reading their email to see if test messages were getting through. Without this level of service though, my parents simply wouldn’t be able to reliably manage their email access on a day-to-day basis.

My parents trust Mike and his employer and Mike trusts that my parents are who they say they are – and that’s pretty easy because they have some consistent, unique and sometimes pretty frustrating analog characteristics. They have a human trusted relationship and a service arrangement that is ‘old fashioned’, and simply unavailable through ‘modern’, secure and less expensive competitors.

Thanks for your care and patience Mike – a pixie in human form.

The Great Digital Engagement Pandemic

Chief Pixie

Current approaches for business-to-consumer digital engagement are doomed. Self-service is great for businesses but doesn’t scale for consumers.

The advent of Covid led to unprecedented acceleration and adoption of digital business-to-consumer interfaces. There’s not much better ‘burning bridge’ than the prospect of your existing customer service model being fatal to your customers and staff. And just in case even this wasn’t enough of a change catalyst, some governments actually made it illegal to offer human customer service contact.

‘Contactless’ service is just that – service delivered to a human via a digital intermediary. While this model came of age during the pandemic, it had been growing from an immature, clumsy adolescent struggling for acceptance for over 15 years. The early drivers for digital transformation were, and to some extent remain, service delivery and business process efficiency. It isn’t usually about giving people a remarkably higher quality service for less – it’s about giving people the tools to access a consistent, reliable, reasonable quality service at a competitive price.

While digitally enabled services may appear less expensive, they come at the rapidly increasing cost of our attention and time – our most precious, scarce resources.

Over the last twenty years, digitisation and systems integration within and across business and government has delivered productivity gains and enabled new, sophisticated service offerings. Most of this has been achieved by automating tasks and making it easier for different computer systems to work together. Digital interfaces are designed to facilitate and optimise integration between digital things – not humans. Not surprisingly, most of today’s consumer-facing service delivery channels treat people as if they are a system on the other side of a digital interface.

By introducing a digital intermediary, service providers remove their side of the empathetic, messy unstructured human-to-human interface of traditional customer service. As more customer interaction occurs through digital engagement channels, organisations have found that they can ‘serve’ more customers at a lower cost with less staff by getting consumers to deal directly with the organisation’s computer systems rather than their people.

Human-to-human customer service isn’t going away – it will however continue to gravitate to more exclusive premium value interactions where the high cost and ‘inefficiency’ can be adequately rewarded. For the rest of us, our fate is clear – we are doomed to serve ourselves.

We have become self-service ‘Mechanical Turks’; poorly paid, gig-working data entry clerks, operating hundreds of different computers every week. Usernames, passwords, apps, electronic forms, automated SMS messages, chatbots, OCR codes, interactive voice response phone systems, biometric checks, and auto-generated emails are some of the computer interfaces we use every day to access the services we need and/or want to help look after the things we care about.

In the early days of the digital engagement model, there were clearly times when we could do things more easily and quickly ourselves than have to navigate through our supplier’s maze-like customer service bureaucracy. Digital transformation efforts could be seen as a win/win for providers and consumers.

The problem is that this model stops being viable for the consumer as the number of services and providers increases – and in today’s service economy they are increasing exponentially. Our ability as individuals to operate more and more computers every week just doesn’t scale. There’s a limit to the number of apps you can use – more for some, less for others, but still a limit.

Maybe you can already hear the early warning bells – more apps lead to more notifications – some of which share the same alarm tone… is my bank balance low, has my food left the restaurant, is someone breaking into my car, has a bid been made on my eBay item, or is dog food on special this week? Maybe all of the above! This design fails basic human factors alarm management 101. It wouldn’t be allowed in a control room – why accept it when you are trying to control your life?