> Here’s where most stories would end with “so they moved everything online and fired the reservation staff.” That’s not what happened. They did move to online booking, but they kept the entire reservation team and repurposed them.
wait, so the restaurant owner's answer to a fully booked schedule is to... change everything?
clearly whatever is happening is working
That is something that AI is not giving us today. By design. Companies are not switching to AI customer service because it's better or cheaper for the same service. They are choosing to replace customer service with AI chat bots that simulate the customer service experience without actually providing the service part.
Every time a business tries to make a "connection" its really just an avenue to exploit or manipulate me. I've never had them making a connection for my benefit (i.e. take a hit to their bottom line).
I'm not asking for altruism but I am asking for them to drop the pretense and quit bullshitting me.
I'm not going through anything. I just want some dinner.
And to be clear, the only reason they are doing this is strictly transactional. Good friends don't ask you to pay the bill at the end of dinner.
My parents used to go to the same restaurant every Friday night, for many many years. A little chit chat at the register each visit, it doesn't take long before you actually enjoy seeing that person. I began to suspect they continued going just so they had an excuse to see their friends.
You can't engineer these relationships, but you can encourage your staff to be open to a little chit chat. Make sure your team has the time and energy to be friendly. Your team has to be happy, and its needs to show.
I have no problem with the idea that you are going fill your place with good vibes so people actually want to go and hang out there!
it goes both ways. Good friends aren't expected to be free-loaders.
To "go beyond their expectations" requires understanding what they expected to begin with. They just told you that they want a transaction, not a sales pitch or series of intrusions. Things are considered trivial when they do not fit that person's lifestyle. Doing a whole lot of "yes and", rough personality profiling, or goal guessing isn't going to cut it either.
Many people just want to be left the hell alone. Many people have even shouted from the rooftops they'd pay absurd money to be left the hell alone. I guess nobody wants to make money, nor provide a "true connection".
Businesses say they're trying to build "connection", but all they care about is getting customers to spend more and remain loyal to them. They don't care about connecting, which is why they will always fail.
I have. Go to a car place, build a rapport and the guy will likely apply discounts to your order. Go to the same place, make sure they know you and they'll give you discounts or extras because they know you're a repeat customer.
Many retail workers have some discretion. They're the front line workers. If you tell a manager at McDonalds that he's gotta listen to you yell for 15m to make the company an extra $10, that's not a trade they're willing to make. Hell he would even take it out of his own wallet if he had to (I would).
The whole "businesses do everything for their bottom line" is just some MBA bs and not at all how real businesses work.
I imagine if I did reply like that there'd be some profuse apologizing, to which I'd think "Yeah, yeah, whatever, just leave me alone.".
All the businesses asking for a rating after I interacted with them also piss me off. Or worse, apps. I give them a bad rating on the play store with the text that the low score is due to the "Spam begging for app store ratings."
Singapore Airlines automatically emails passengers after a flight asking for a Net Promoter Score rating [1].
I have a feeling those ratings are mostly unseen, and cabin crew have chimed in that those ratings are unlikely to affect their promotions in any way.
What does help with their career is qualitative feedback written in through their feedback form.
That's because we don't make connections with businesses - we make connections with people. That one nice hair dresser. The pharmacist that goes out of her way to make sure my mom's medicines are right. A cashier that's just pleasant to talk with.
Years ago I did most of my grocery shopping at Target. I cared almost nothing about Target the chain. Or Target the super store. I did care about Betty the checker and wanted to know how her grandkids were doing this week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbr3JZAXDxA
"How to Rip Off the Dealership - Bastard Negotiating Tactics"
Without giving too much away, I liked this approach so much that when I bought my last motorcycle, I found a Kenco-equivalent in the Bay Area. It was a fantastic buying experience and I'm so glad I did.
High dollar purchases are stressful and a human touch, from someone that is genuinely interested in not only this sale but the next one, really helps.
I certainly don't want a service to come early morning and wake up my kids or in the afternoon polluting the whole neighborhood with noise and fumes when I want to spend time outside.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
I don't care about service at a gas station - I want to fill my tank, pay, and get out. It's different when I take it to the mechanic - it's a rather old car, and I appreciate them talking intelligently about what the options are and what repairs they would suggest.
Frivolous employment maximisation with words like human connection do not make sense for survival necessities. It works better with discretionary spending
There is no marketing like Uber did sometimes of like: "personal service, free water bottle", and it's still killing it.
Of course, I personally always enjoy a chat with the driver, but many people I know prefer actually not talking.
I avoid first-party taxi apps because they're shit and do dumb stuff like charge a 10% surcharge for credit card payments. They could get away with it 20 years ago, but I'm so glad Uber, Grab, and all the others are eating their lunch.
One of the great lies of the modern world is that this actually happens.
It really was much better than most cable related tech calls I've had.
You’re not connecting with them. They put on a smile and listen to you hoping for a tip.
I do want a connection. Because connection is what ensures that the transactional interactions continue to work outside of the "happy path". Connection is what ensures that you can return those expensive headphones you bought because extended use makes your neck hurt, even though the return window has passed.
Just make it pleasant and human.
1. AI has gotten better - or eventually most people would like reading AI generated content 2. Author is just using AI to post-process - content is original
Anyway I did love the content.
The author didn't use headings like that in their 2024 blog posts.
> He called the restaurant. He was put on hold for thirty minutes. When someone finally answered, they were apologetic but firm — the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door.
If that was written by a human, it's embarrassing.
I suspect over time it will get good enough that I'll need a larger sample size to identify it, however that won't solve what I think of as the "why does this need to exist" problem, I've noticed that a fair bit of AI content hits that mark, it can be fun, but I've not experienced that feeling of engaging with something that's been well thought out / executed, maybe we'll hit that point[0], but I suspect it will take a while
-[0]: https://xkcd.com/810/
We don't. Pangram is HN's astrology. It has 99.99% accuracy (according to Pangram.)
"Detect AI-generated content with 99.98% accuracy." -pangram themselves
This was the chaotic evil part.
Eg:
"Not dramatically. Just quietly. " -- This is filler words. Whether it's dramatic or quiet has no relevance to the point they're making.
It also loves threes: "Well-modelled, properly sourced, beautifully visualised to requirements" - again, all irrelevant. The point they're making is that it's measuring the wrong thing, not that "beautifully visual things can be incorrect".
"There’s a piece of this conversation that most leaders miss, and it’s the part I care about most" - this hook of "most people miss" it is very common in AI writing.
Also the "not this, but that" structure is overused here.
I am not sure if you posted a brilliant, subtle joke... or if you're demonstrating the exact behavior that you suggest is a flag of inauthenticity.
This is followed up by a sprinkling of every possible punctuative shakeup: bold, em-dash, semicolon, colon, quote, etc.
... the restaurant was fully booked. No warmth. No conversation. Just a long wait and a closed door. In trying to humanise the process, he’d made it worse.
I'm sure some people write this way, but most don't. And AI writes this way.
You cannot design an algorithm that eavesdrops on dinner conversation and dispatches someone to buy a street hot dog, because the person on the receiving end would immediately sense the machinery of it.
- Word count hovering between four and five thousand words - Dramatic/narrative section titles - "No X, no Y. Just Z"
Last but certainly not least, there's the Lists of Exactly Three Things. I counted literally thirty in this piece. Examples:
- "...the ritual of a human voice, the small exchange about an anniversary or a first date, the warmth of being recognised."
- "Who was celebrating a birthday? Who was on a first date? What had a regular not finished on their plate six months ago?"
- "You can’t purchase it, automate it, or accelerate it with a clever marketing campaign."
- "...forgive outages, laugh off a late delivery, stay through a price increase."
- "...the food arrives hot, the bill is accurate, the room is clean."
- "You notice, you adjust, you respond."I love that the staff at my little neighborhood bank remembers me, and was so warm and helpful when I had to open an estate account when my mom died, and sometimes I bring my favorite teller a latte on my way back from the coffee shop.
But I still switched my business account to Chase, because my little neighborhood bank’s website is stuck in about 2005, and I just couldn’t put up with it any longer!
I'm a regular at a few coffee shops near my home and I know the staff there "know" me - it's enough to have a pleasant conversation sometimes. But that works, because we have gotten to the "familiar face" part over a longer period and at the same time.
What the restaurant owner wants is that his staff somehow treat everyone like a regular and have spirited conversations about their life events, even if they just entered the restaurant for the first time.
The staff might even be able to pull that off, with a hefty dose of online profiling - but even then, I cannot see how anyone who isn't a completely detached business type wouldn't find this extremely creepy.
> In trying to humanise the process, he’d made it worse.
> Here’s where most stories would end with “so they moved everything online and fired the reservation staff.” That’s not what happened. They did move to online booking, but they kept the entire reservation team and repurposed them. These people now spent their days learning about the customers coming in that night. Who was celebrating a birthday? Who was on a first date? What had a regular not finished on their plate six months ago?
I have questions...
a) how does moving to online reservations help with "it's fully booked" if it's booked even before then?
b) what was "the entire reservation team" even doing that a phone call takes 30min to service and then just results in "nope we're full"?
In a lot of businesses, online reservations or tickets are scalper-prone, so I can absolutely see a desire to avoid that, and would be fully supportive of moving those things to phone or in-person. But that doesn't seem to be the case here, the story is just "He wanted the ritual of a human voice, the small exchange about an anniversary or a first date, the warmth of being recognised."
Which is plausible enough, but the details don't seem to add up. Is it even a true story? (Or is it the sort of plausible-but-internally-inconsistent thing you might get if you told an LLM to generate such a story about a restaurant?)
Also restaurants of all sorts seem to have no one dedicated to answering the phone any longer. It's really problematic when you are trying to set up larger parties (9 to 12 people for example) at the last minute, which many places can handle but the online system won't do any more than 8 and there is no way to reach them other than messaging that may take a day.
But what about a company which is more in B2B, and where procurement will be more rationalized (e.g RFP, which is often regulated)?
One thing as well: this is moat from an organization point of view, but unfortunately not for the individual: soft skills are often easier to get than hard skills, and there is so already a competition on the job market for the client-facing roles, even before AI arrival: like Sales / Business Developers / Account Managers (or more internal roles to try to build something that the client would need, like Product Managers)
1) Cut the bottom line
2) Grow the topline
Because it's not reliable enough to let it do anything which might cost the service provider. This is the cost of hallucinations. You can't let the customer service AI issue refunds, or upgrade someone to a better room. Not yet, anyway. Agentic AI systems with any real power generate minor disasters on a regular basis.
Yes, this is what every article proclaiming AI will be the end for human jobs completely misses. Ultimately businesses must compete and things that become scarce or harder to attain, such as human connection, will become their real differentiator. Businesses are still selling to humans at the end of the day.
This article was great and provides a lot of wonderful examples of how to build high touch businesses. It reminds me a lot of Delivering Happiness by the late Tony Hsieh and his experiences building a high touch culture for Zappos to differentiate with the ecommerce businesses he was up against who all resorted to bad customer support, poor return experiences. A famous example being Tony calling into Zappos' support line pretending to be a customer ordering a pizza as a joke, and his customer support actually caring enough to ensure a pizza was delivered to him. Probably a book more relevant than ever
...said every company that does creepy surveillance ever.
The staff at The French Laundry did this extremely well
They watched us before arrival and maybe stalked us online before that to have relevant things to talk about and ensure our experience was great
Now I can accept that from a 3 michelin star restuarant, but I dont want anybody else doing that
Ask yourself where you’re using technology to replace human moments rather than amplify them
Let me say it again because I'm really getting sick of recent blog word count inflation: if you publish four thousand words on some topic, you better be an expert, a strong writer, whatever. Find a better reason than SEO to go over 1500 words.