Evil Bot or Personal Shopper? Consumer eCommerce is Broken

Chief Pixie

The idea that you must prove you are an individual human before entering an online store is a ludicrous relic of the past. Bots have become synonymous with evil when they should be seen as enablers that aren’t going away – for better or worse. Time for them to work for us, not against us.

On the one hand, consider a recent article in the Wall Street Journal:

Nike to Crack Down on Sneaker-Buying Bots, Dealing a Blow to Resale Market

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nike-moves-to-crimp-resellers-and-might-cancel-orders-made-using-bots-11665506775?st=wv2y4g08jyn7iqn&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Wall Street Journal

On the other hand, every week, a new consumer business data breach brings about new knee-jerk reactions and pushes us further into a more frustrating online customer experience.

These are two symptoms of an increasingly broken digital engagement model for consumers.

B2B vs B2C

Business-to-business digital engagement practices evolved from a long history of distant geographic relationships. Delegations, contracts and financial intermediaries grew to scale business to incredible volumes and geographic breadth. This scale would never have been possible if the CEO had to personally sign into every supplier website, place every order and make every payment from their personal wallet.

During this time, business-to-consumer digital engagement practices have not evolved at all. An online store still assumes that a person ‘walks’ into that store as they’ve done for thousands of years. If the consumer isn’t using cash (difficult in an online store), they have to provide some ID – not to prove who they are – but to prove that they have access to the non-cash finance in their name – i.e. know your customer has the money.

Early in my lifetime, you needed to show a driver’s licence to pay with a cheque to see if the names were the same. Now you have to use an email/password/MFA combination to authenticate via a payment provider’s interface and return a token to the merchant to prove you have access to the non-cash finance.

Somewhere along the way, the need to prove that the non-cash finance is available became a ‘need’ to capture as much data as possible. This ‘allowed’ the business to ‘serve you better’ and market to you independent of any financial requirement – sometimes that includes the store keeping your driver’s license details too.

The idea that you must prove you are an individual human before entering an online store is a ludicrous relic of the past. 

Untapped Digital Consumer Opportunities

Digitisation should offer amazing opportunities for consumers to discover and acquire amazing products from anywhere in the world, whenever they want them.

The global digital marketplace is too large for any individual consumer ever to know and offers an extraordinary opportunity for intelligent search, ‘AI’ machine learning services etc. Your current Google search result is more like an old local phone book when compared to the vast size of today’s global digital marketplace.

While Amazon markets itself as the ‘everything store’ – it only covers the merest fraction of the online consumer market. Even then, I defy anyone to stroll through the Amazon aisles confident that they found the best supplier, product and price to meet their requirements in the marketplace.

To tap into the potential value of global digital commerce, consumers must delegate their shopping to ‘digital buyers’ – authorised agents that are always scanning the market for buried treasure and buying it ‘on the spot’.

Unfortunately, today, consumer-facing search APIs are restricted to discourage high-volume scanning. eCommerce website and app interfaces do their best to get you to prove that you are indeed the unique individual who has entered the store.

There’s an ongoing battle between the eCommerce developers, search platforms and the ‘bot’ developers to be able to discover and interact with services programmatically. To a large extent, this battle is being fought by businesses that still try to be your only store in the area (or at least in your attention span).

Bots have become synonymous with evil when they should be seen as enablers that aren’t going away – for better or worse.

I’m confident that this engagement model will evolve, but I hope it won’t take thousands of years.

What to do?

Developers should redirect some of the time fighting the bots to making it easier for customers to delegate to their authorised buying bot – leading to more sales for the retailer and better consumer experiences for the customer.

In the short term, you can help by lobbying your service providers to offer an option for you to formally delegate some of your account access to approved and secure programmatic buying services.

Identity Compromise as a Service

Chief Pixie

Yet another report of a massive leak of personal data by a large service provider in the news. No longer surprising and no sign of legitimate mitigations on offer – other than ‘be vigilant – keep on the lookout for unexpected uses of your personal information’.

Many of the posts in this series have focused on the evolution of digital service models in which consumers pay the price of attention, management oversight, and data entry effort on behalf of service providers. In addition, consumers also agree to provide personal information as a prerequisite to accessing a service to ‘authenticate’ the consumer and make it easier for the supplier to provide services through digital interfaces.

Historically we have encouraged diverse ecosystems of suppliers to ensure competition and incentivise innovation. An owner’s experience can be enhanced with a greater choice of service providers and product suppliers – particularly if our ‘relationship’ begins and ends when we enter or walk out the door. In this early digital era, we enter into a ‘relationship’ with every supplier through consensual access to our personal information as a prerequisite to receiving the product or service.

My personal information is held by thousands of suppliers who have no incentive to care for that information in the way I would. Redundant and outdated copies of my data are spread across countless data stores – I’ll never know where and most of my ‘trusted’ service providers don’t know where it is either.

In the Business to Business space, it would be ludicrous for a company to keep the corporate information of every one of their customers. A tax file number, maybe bank account or payment intermediary details – that’s all. In the Business to Consumer space, gathering as much data as possible about customers has become the norm and exploiting that data to push more sales the goal.

The much vaunted 2-factor authentication does nothing to limit the policy of consumer data scraping. It does, however, move us to the point where we’ll need to use a combination of user, password and mobile phone code every time we want to access a service – more work for the consumer and no responsibility being taken by the service provider. Passive data harvesting and analysis is still a very rewarding activity and does not require 1 or n factor user authentication.

The only way this situation will improve is for providers to accept and consumers to adopt a personal authentication agent that provides approved interface keys and negotiates and records all data exchanged with each provider. While an individual’s data can still be hacked, the damage is limited to one individual. The same hack on today’s providers damages millions of consumers.

Owner Experience vs Customer Experience

Chief Pixie

Customer Experience is the current tagline for everything a customer experiences when interacting with a supplier’s brand, products, and interfaces (human and digital). The actual customer experience is trying to manage a portfolio of disconnected services delivered by many suppliers, each focused on one narrow aspect of the overall need and all competing for attention. No one supports the owner’s primary goal – to easily acquire, use and look after an asset throughout its life.

Omni-channel is the current big thing in customer contact technologies that drive much of this experience. Offer customers many different channels to engage with the supplier. Synthesise all of the interactions in real time to maintain a ‘single view of the customer’ across the different customer touch-points and contact types through all stages of the customer journey.

Single View of Customer

To achieve this goal, a supplier needs a continuous stream of data; therefore, customer engagement must be as digital as possible. Digital agents are employed to manage the digital channels and as a bonus lower costs through automation and data processing efficiencies (for the supplier – not necessarily for the customer).

In most scenarios, the customer journey is that of a human, and often the goal of the human is to find and buy something and then ideally enjoy the use of that thing. Suppliers go to great lengths to make the customer’s journey with them as painless as possible; however, never question the assumption that the customer experience has to occur through their digital interfaces.

Customer interfaces are designed with humans in mind; however, they are tested in artificial conditions, assuming they have the user’s undivided attention. The interfaces are also judged on their ability to enable the customer to be served by the supplier – which is never the customer’s real goal.

The actual ‘customer experience’ is someone having to deal with many different suppliers employed to fulfil a narrow role, each pushing many different channels. The end goal of the customer is to enjoy something that depends on an ecosystem of suppliers to ensure that it continues to function and remains healthy. It isn’t to enjoy going through yet another registration process with yet another supplier that I will never have a ‘relationship’ with.

Owner and Item View

For each thing I own, I am subject to an array of omnivorous suppliers, all of whom are ‘offering’ me the opportunity to engage with them through one of many digital interfaces. Human-to-human interfaces are a last resort or costly luxury if they exist.

The supply of consumer goods and services has reached incredible levels of efficiency, offering an astounding abundance and variety of increasing specialisation and tremendous economies of scale. We’ve had fifty years of progress digitising old customer service models and transforming the customer experience of each supplier.

As responsible owners, it’s time we transform our experience. We cannot continue to take on more and more work, install more apps, to spend our time managing the supporting ecosystems for each of the things we care about. I’m looking for a supplier who cares about the owner experience – not one collecting more customer experiences.

Digital Twins – Separated at Birth

Chief Pixie

Imagine a digital representation of an object that includes every bit of data ever associated with it or related to it. I think this gets closer to a real digital twin than today’s pretenders. The emergence of these twins will give rise to unimaginable opportunities for the blended digital and material world in a true internet of and by things.

Today’s digital twins’ are like long-lost siblings, separated at birth, popping up in our network with chat messages and occasional photos. Our familiarity is less than superficial, and in the absence of a genuine relationship, we invent one. We don’t know where they’re from, what kind of life they’ve led, or whether they are actually related to their physical doppelgängers.

The typical twin family portrait is that of a big screen or AR goggles with a ‘live’ 3D view of a factory and machines that mirror the workplace outside the control room. In reality, the twins depicted on the dashboard could just as well be on Mars and are as ‘live’ as a thermostat. Our conception of a digital twin today is 90% imagination and 10% digital perspiration.

Sense, communicate, respond, analyse & visualise computing has been around for more than 50 years. The graphics, processing speed and volume of data has improved, our imagination enriched through glimpses of what’s possible, but the paradigm remains largely unchanged.

All manufactured objects (and many animals) are associated with a constant and growing stream of bits of recorded data from the moment of conception to disposal. By the time a product reaches the hands of a consumer, terabytes of data will have been collected, analysed and stored by thousands of stakeholders in millions of systems.

At the end of that journey, the consumer gets a nice origami cardboard box and a paper booklet in 30 languages explaining how to plug it in and switch it on. Enthusiastic owners can go fossicking for digital dust sprinkled across the internet in the wake of an item’s existence while the vast golden seems of valuable data remain sealed in their caves.

The scale of our digital waste and selfishness is mind-boggling. It may be cheap to store those zeros and ones, but the cost to society of keeping all those bits and pieces of information locked away in individual vaults is that we are doing less and less with more and more stuff.

If we’re going to keep this ‘digital twin’ terminology then let’s not sell ourselves short – let go all in!

Knock knock…

Chief Pixie

Most consumer digital service providers assume that if someone interacts with them using a particular digital key, they must be who they say they are. In the purist view of crypto, this artifice has been dropped, and interactions occur between keys – regardless of who or what is holding the key. Neither approach affords a natural bridge for people living at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds.

This week I signed up for a new digital service and at the end of the registration, the provider sent an SMS with a code to the phone number I’d provided. I entered the code on the provider’s website and got the message – “that’s great, now we know it’s you, we can get started”. They “know it’s me” because the inputs and outputs on the other side of their digital interface satisfied their software rules. All they know is that there’s another piece of software that has responded to their interface – and this sets the scene for the way they think of their customers.

Physical key technology has served us pretty well for a few thousand years but does have some well-known drawbacks – they are easily copied or stolen. You might not know which of your friends (or friends friend’s) have been lent keys. You have to change the locks and keys when a lock is compromised. Over time you end up with quite a collection of keys on your key ring – sometimes forgetting what they were for etc.

In most situations, we don’t think of a physical key as a way to authenticate who we are. Just because someone opens my front door with a key doesn’t mean that I trust them without question to have open access to the house. Imagine being blindfolded with earplugs in and assuming that anyone with your front door key must be trustworthy. Yet that is precisely what many digital service providers are doing – not because they think you’ll ransack their website – but because they don’t put a value on the real human being that holds the key.

We have willingly entered into a dysfunctional arrangement whereby we do all the work to manage an ever-increasing number of unique digital keys and door addresses in order to access services where the provider doesn’t value our individuality.

Digital keys come in many different forms; passwords, SMS message codes, codes generated by apps authenticated by other keys and more recently cryptographically verifiable codes.

We all knew that the password key approach became a mistake as soon as we needed to open more than seven plus or minus three digital doors. For many of us, our digital “key ring” has hundreds of keys, most of which look the same and we spend a lot of time fumbling in the dark, trying to find the key that fits the lock to access a digital service. If you try the wrong key too many times, you have to change your own lock and cut yourself a new key – remembering to remove the old key from the key ring.

Authentication that uses a phone number like SMS codes assumes that it must be you if a digital response is received from a digital request. This is just lazy. The much-vaunted ‘two factor authentication’ approach is only useful if the two factors use different contexts, including, ideally, something that is directly connected to a human experience.

Biometric device-based digital key mechanisms offer some improvement by assuming that if you can access your device, then the device maker can be trusted to know it must be you – or at least someone who has your finger or face. None the less, until we get the implants, it’s impractical to require you to have your phone or watch at all times to access a digital service.

Cryptographic keys cut the human out entirely and simply trust the computation of the input and output. Being “digitally native”, they also have the additional functionality of being a piece of software that can be used in association with other algorithm software to encode and decode digital content. Kind of like a physical key that changes a door into a window when turned in a lock.

The “beauty” of cryptographic keys and associated safes is that, for all practical purposes, they resist all currently known safe cracking techniques and don’t require any other human intervention – the pieces of software are either compatible or they aren’t. If they are, then the key opens the lock. This is great for all of you algos out there – not so compatible with a society predicated on exchanges between humans.

So how do you keep your digital keys safe? You put them in another software or even a physical box with a different key. You might make this box hard to find or access. Maybe put it in a bank vault where you will need many more forms of identity than just holding a key.

Like a physical key, anyone with a copy of a digital key can open the lock. Unlike a physical key, if you lose a digital key (and all copies) the lock will never open again.

Does this really sound like a huge leap forward for civilisation?

Like the other themes in these posts, digital authentication approaches are failing because they expect people to operate interfaces designed for digital things. And like other themes, new digital approaches tend to carry forward design concepts from the physical world without appreciating the unique aspects of a blended digital and physical environment.

To live happily and securely in a blended physical and digital world, we must adopt new attitudes and blended approaches for authentication and trust. These new approaches won’t succeed by requiring service consumers to become cryptographic locksmiths. The only choice is for us to foster a deeper and more secure relationship with a trusted digital gatekeeper designed to serve human consumers and participate in digital-to-digital interactions on our behalf.

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.

Things are getting real

Chief Pixie

It’s said that fish don’t know what water is. Our own sense of reality is changing as we immerse ourselves more deeply in a world that blends the physical and digital worlds. Some of us are happy to dive deeper while others are struggling like a fish out of water. Are you sinking or swimming?

The digital production era has delivered high (extraordinarily high) volumes of uniform, interchangeable ‘things’ with identical quality and appearance. Your digital representation of the Mona Lisa is indistinguishable from mine.

The first generation of digital things lacked irrefutable identity and existence. They were merely easily copied and modified (ie fungible) representations of things defined by zeros and ones instead of pen and ink. Although you could detect different underlying zero and one formats of the same representation (e.g. jpg, png, mov, mp4…), there was no digital equivalent of a unique configuration of atoms existing physically at a place in time.

New methods like block chains have arisen to support verifiably unique, non-fungible instances of digital things. However, rather than each instance being in a unique place in time, the tokens on these chains are in everyplace on the network at the same time. If you accept the environmental ‘physics’ behind this it’s possible to make a credible claim that digital things can now ‘exist’ uniquely in a universe that observes those laws.

People tend to firstly apply new technologies as updated tools for old work. It takes time for the transformative impacts to emerge as society internalises the opportunities afforded in unforeseen ways (adoption, exaptation and evolution).

The first era of Web 3.0 has been a pretty clumsy crawl out of the primordial digital swamp toward the real benefits and long term impacts of accepting the existence of digital ‘things’. It’s been laughable to watch the move from one extreme where people thought of digital things being free and infinitely reproducible to thinking that they could be ‘scarce’ and highly valuable like rare gems.

Software as we (as I) know it has been evolving slowly for more than 75 years. Web 3.0 introduced ‘smart contracts’ which are essentially pieces of code that should (environment permitting) execute reliably, can be viewed by many, but cannot be changed (but can be replaced). Nothing there is that ‘smart’. Parties who enter these contracts are kind of anonymous and agree to be bound by the performance of the software with no court of appeal. Is that smart? I don’t know, some people think so.

In theory, you don’t have to trust the other parties to a smart contract because they cannot influence the performance, you just have to trust the software and the execution environment. In practice, real people have in fact gone to real courts to overrule these contracts because the ‘real world’ of people and contracts has yet to evolve into a blended digital and physical context.

Beyond smart contracts, we already trust software in more tangible things like ‘smart’ cars and doorbells which extend functionality and extend the trust we place in their manufacturers. This trust is personal and even though the software may be the same, we rely on that software working with our specific personal instance of a physical thing.

Specific physical things need specific unique identifiers. Cars have VIN plates and electronic keys and doorbells have unique identifiers held in the chips inside. The digital and physical context is getting closer, but until material science evolves much further, there will continue to be an ‘air gap’ between the physical and digital.

On the physical side, sensors, communication and augmented visualisations can give things new capabilities and characteristics that redefine the scope of our experience and change our sense of what something is and can be.

Over time, the genuine practical benefits (and risks) of non-fungible digital things will emerge more fully as we start to delegate responsibility and trust those digital things to perform functions we depend upon in our ‘real’ world. The gap between the digital and physical will close in our minds through changes in our sense of what’s real long before the real air-gap closes.

Not So Smart Devices

Chief Pixie

Smart devices are maturing and provide useful, reliable remote sensing and control services. Devices extend the reach of their owners but remain ignorant of their own existence and add to our digital noise. Unless we adopt them wisely, these products may not be so smart after all.

The Internet of Things, Smart Devices, Connected Home etc. classes of consumer technologies are reaching the ‘plateau of productivity. Today’s so-called ‘smart’ devices offer convenient sense and control functionality. However, they lack any product lifecycle awareness and aren’t smart enough to ‘look after’ themselves. Like other digital interfaces, smart devices can be very helpful in isolation but they also add to the noise and distractions in our increasingly congested personal digital environment.

My home security camera does a great job identifying and alerting me about pets and humans (and leaves, possums, birds, spiders, rain…) but can’t recharge itself, arrange a repair if broken or replacement if stolen. It doesn’t have a record of where it’s been since it was made, it doesn’t know if it’s under warranty, or insured, it doesn’t know how much it’s worth, and it doesn’t know if it’s been hacked. Despite being ‘smart’ it remains a fungible mass-produced commodity product – easily substituted with another camera from the same product category.

Early versions of these consumer devices were unreliable and required the technical support of enthusiastic home hobbyists. Quality and reliability have improved and costs have reduced to the point where many reasonably tech-savvy users are adopting ‘smart’ security and pet monitoring, audio, power management and connected appliance systems.

These systems are affordable but not exactly cheap. By adding more personal assets, we take on more ownership responsibility. On top of that, all of these systems provide new digital interfaces for us to manage through new dedicated apps or added complexity to existing apps. If they were truly ‘smart’, these devices wouldn’t demand our attention like the guests at a 5 year old’s birthday party.

While digital noise can be distracting, smart devices also introduce a much more serious risk – personal security. Cyber security vulnerabilities can allow some very unwelcome uninvited guests to your party. Several countries have introduced legislation that requires manufacturers of consumer devices to provide ongoing security software upgrades and keep a record of devices that are no longer supported. This is a good start but will also create a new trail of digital breadcrumbs for each device and a new set of records and responsibilities for owners to manage.

Of course the vast majority of physical things today do not have ‘smart’ connected technology and it will be a long time before most things are part of a universal internet of everything.

In the meantime, physical items will continue to depend upon human providers for physical services and through-life care. In the case of consumer products, each owner serves as a responsible custodian who supports the product through their share of its life, managing the administration and record keeping, finding and employing the service providers as required.

In this respect, smart devices are just as dumb as the rest of the physical things that don’t have the technology. They do however offer new capabilities and additional demands on our time and attention. Time will tell how wise the current smart path is.

Are You a Responsible Owner?

Chief Pixie

A transition has begun in many parts of the world from mass production and consumption to responsible ownership. Interest in sustainability is raising awareness of the life story of individual products from sourcing to disposal. In this story, ours is just one of the hundreds of chapters throughout the life of the things we own.

(This is one of a series of Why Pixies, Why Now posts)

Mass production and distribution have enabled generations of consumers to experience an ever wider choice of higher quality less expensive products. Economies of scale across globally extended and integrated supply chains have dramatically lowered individual unit production and transportation costs.

In this environment, little attention is given to individual product units – we focus on categories and models because each individual unit within these sets is the same. It’s hard to feel attached to something that lacks identity and so we don’t care as much about throwing it away; particularly if you can replace it with a new model which does a better job and costs less.

Products in this category are ‘fungible’ – they can be substituted with a similar product without impacting the utility for the owner. I don’t care if you replace my can of beans with another of the same type and brand.

Recently, people have become increasingly concerned about the social and environmental impact of their mass consumption. More people care about their role as responsible consumers in areas such as ethical & geographical sourcing and production, the provenance of their food, brand (and in theory quality) authenticity, product safety, support for circular supply chains, and a product’s net cost to the environment – not just the cost of buying it.

The good news is that because mass production and distribution utilise digital channels, and the cost of data processing is close to zero, individual product item data is now being generated as a by-product of integrated supply and service chains without compromising economies of scale. The more people care about their responsibility, the more this data will be sought as an assurance of the history and qualities of the goods and services they consume. Brands that serve this need will benefit through greater loyalty and trust.

Of course, there are some kinds of products that people have always cared about. Art, antiques, collectables and bespoke hand-crafted items are examples of things with unique qualities that make them ‘non-fungible’ – i.e. difficult or impossible to substitute or exchange with something equivalent or identical.

Today, like mass-produced products, even these unique items have acquired a digital footprint as a byproduct of the digital communication and documentation generated by the people who care about them.

Uniqueness arises through a combination of identifying features, characteristics and history. As it becomes easier to establish context through a blend of physical and digital evidence, it will be more common to think about all the ‘things’ we care about as having unique ‘non-fungible’ identities. The more we see something as unique, the more likely we are to look after it.

To blend physical and digital evidence, there needs to be a common point of reference. Being self-centred consumers, we like to think that the common reference is us. But in fact, the life of a product extends over hundreds of stakeholders and our relationship with that product is just one of many in a product’s lifetime. To see the whole story, we need a through-life view with the product – not the consumer – at the centre.

The data for mass-produced items are scattered across supply, distribution, retail and service chains. Non-mass-produced item data is scattered across retail records, current and past owners, historical studies and informal interest groups. The common thread in both cases is the custody-oriented view of the data – who owns & services the item rather than the unique journey of the item through the hands of many interested stakeholders across many events.

As we gain a better appreciation of our role as responsible consumers, service providers, distributors and manufacturers, we’ll see the emergence of a new, product-centric perspective. That is, from the product’s point of view – events and contexts through its life, recorded in a verifiable, authoritative digital trail of history and stakeholder interactions.

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?