I have written before about “customers as workers”. In their 2007 book, Revolutionary Wealth, the Tofflers called it our “Third Jobs” - “the unnoticed work we do without pay for some of the biggest corporations”.
Back then, they may have been overreaching, but today when you look at all the self-service, it really hits home. Here is a quick list of some of the tasks we do that an employee used to do:
- airline reservations and check-in
- ATM and mobile banking
- self check-out at grocery stores
- web payments to various suppliers
- IVR based routing when phoning call centers
- self-help using website FAQs
- scan QR codes on real estate for sale signs and self-tour through videos
- rental car check-out and check-in and driving directions
- hotel check-in/check-out and touchpad control of many room functions
- voice mails
- tax calculations and returns
- personal health care monitoring
- basic auto maintenance
- dining buffets and vending machines
- hr/benefits enrolments and other tasks
The problem is very few HR execs (or unions or government agencies) view this as their responsibility. Worse, many corporations are opportunistic about how they deal with such self-service
- many banks, airlines and telcos expect us to pay for the “convenience”
- web based self-service and our smart devices are exposing us to a new set of privacy breaches and security challenges
- many of the self-service kiosks, UIs, IVR paths are poorly designed
- there is very little human back up for consumers who do not want to self-service or seek an option when the self-service path is not satisfactory
- many corporations trust their customers even less than their employees (I asked the manager of a large retail chain why the checkout kiosk insisted I put items in the bagging area. He sheepishly told me there was a scale under the bagging area which double checked the weight of the scanned item was actually the one being taken out. Some rental car companies assume you did not refuel your car and automatically add a fuel charge)
In a broader “social design” context in my next book, Sukumar Rajgopal, CIO at Cognizant says “It would be nice to move to a “productivity income statement” where we charge the IT department $1 for each data item users enter and in return we charge users $1 for each data item that the system prefills for them. Think how differently we would think about enterprise
systems if we did that.”
Indeed, think of that as applied to our Third Jobs!
