I had a difficult conversation with a longtime client recently. The immediate issue was relatively small, and after working through the details, we both understood what had happened. But somewhere in the conversation, I realized we were no longer really talking about the original problem.
She was talking about how doing business had changed.
Modern organizations have become extraordinarily good at standardization. Calls are routed efficiently, transactions follow defined workflows, decisions are documented, and service levels can be measured across thousands of interactions. There are good reasons for this. In regulated industries like mine, consistency is not simply about efficiency. Clients should be treated fairly, records should be accurate, and important processes should not depend entirely on which employee happens to answer the phone.
Scale requires systems. The problem is that customers do not experience our organizations as systems. They experience moments.
A billing issue. A confusing letter. A claim. An unexpected change. A telephone call made because something simply does not make sense.
Those moments are often exceptions, and exceptions are precisely where highly standardized organizations can struggle. The system sees a transaction. The customer may see twenty years of history. The system sees the next available representative. The customer remembers the person who knew their family. The system asks whether the correct process was followed. The customer wants to know whether anyone understands why they are frustrated.
Neither perspective is necessarily wrong.
The answer is not to abandon standardization. Personalized service without adequate systems quickly becomes inconsistency, inefficiency and, in some industries, genuine risk. The more important question is deciding what should be standardized and what should remain stubbornly human.
Technology should remember details so people do not have to. It should automate repetitive administration, move information efficiently, identify errors, and make routine transactions easier. But perhaps the value of those efficiencies is not that they allow us to remove people from the relationship. Perhaps they should create more room for people to handle the moments where judgment, empathy, context, and trust actually matter.
That is particularly important in professional services. Clients rarely remember how efficiently the system operated when something went wrong. They remember whether someone took ownership of the problem.
That conversation did not make me nostalgic for inefficient processes. It made me think more carefully about what efficiency is supposed to accomplish. If every improvement makes an organization easier to operate while gradually making the customer feel less known, we should at least be willing to ask whether we are measuring the entire cost.
Sometimes the first warning will not appear on a dashboard.
It will simply be a longtime client saying, “This doesn’t feel the way it used to.”
Leaders should pay attention when they hear that.
Standardize the process where you must. Never standardize away the relationship.
I am a Canadian business owner with a longstanding interest in leadership, strategy and decision making. I write about business, risk, leadership and the systems and incentives that shape how people and organizations make decisions.
Chazz.ca is my personal writing project and a place to explore ideas drawn from experience, education, reading and conversations with people building and leading organizations.
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