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In some ways, my blog posts track what’s been going on in my life over the past ten years.
When I moved house, I wrote a lot about kitchen and roofing disasters. When I had kids, about inadequate cutlery usage and urgent uniform purchases. When I spent a lot of time on trains… ok, I still spend a lot of time on trains.
At the moment, I’m writing a lot about hospital visits. And it’s making me think about how much trust you put in the person stood in front of you, and how AI might change the balance of a customer relationship.
I’d been having a pain just to the side of my stomach, nothing too severe, but enough to be annoying. We’re lucky to have health insurance through work, so I logged the problem online, and was given a choice of doctors to see.
It was pretty overwhelming. Fifty faces staring back at me, all with a string of upper- and lower-case letters after their names, and a suspiciously long list of ailments they treat.
There was one helpful search filter offered, by distance from your house – although it seemed like the choice was between ‘lives in your house’ or ‘lives quite a long way away’.
This is how I found myself in a clinic, somewhere between 0.1 miles and 8 miles from my house, with a doctor and his very deep Eastern European accent.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘I have a pain on my side, here.’
He looks, but doesn’t touch.
‘It’s probably a hernia. I can sort that for you with a small operation, under general anaesthe…’
‘Sorry, how do you know?’
‘I’ve been doing this a long time. The other side will probably need doing, too. My secretary will book you in for the operation.’
Something slightly surreal happens when you’re sat with someone ‘in authority’. I didn’t challenge him, didn’t ask more questions, just nodded and left (not that he saw, as he’d already turned his back on me).
By the time I got home, I’d regained a bit of self-worth and decided not to follow his advice, instead going for a second opinion (also from someone between 0.1 and 8 miles from my house).
That opinion – from someone who asked quite a few questions and examined me properly – was that it was probably a muscle strain, and would go in a few weeks. Which it did.
A few weeks later, I remembered to phone the original doctor to confirm I wouldn’t be going ahead with the wholly unnecessary operation.
His secretary answered.
‘I’m afraid Dr xyz is no longer practising here, he had to leave the country urgently. He probably won’t be coming back.’
When you think about it, half of all doctors are below average at their jobs. There’s also a load of below average financial advisors, below average teachers, and below average lawyers (as this brilliant new book on the Post Office scandal shows). There’s even below average politicians!
The obvious answer is to replace inconsistent humans with ruthlessly consistent robots. But I wouldn’t want doctors to be replaced by AI, however good the AI is at reading scans. Healthcare is about more than just getting the answer; it’s about the emotional care that goes with it.
I was fortunate. Through my work-paid insurance, I could quickly get a second opinion. But not everyone will have access to that.
With AI, though, we can close the gap between the novices and the know-it-alls, between the haves and the have-nots, between those with and without access to expert advice when they need it.
Of course, a little knowledge can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and I know of a few financial advisors already getting frustrated when their clients turn up clutching a ChatGPT print-out and insist they already know the answer. But when used well, it can help customers to know what questions to ask, to stay focussed in overwhelming situations and to get a second opinion, a dispassionate sounding board to analyse the information at hand.
So the challenge for organisations is this: what does a relationship look like with customers who have an all-knowing assistant in their pocket, an instant fact-checker that won’t let them be ripped off, a chaperone to look out for them – but one that might also give them a false sense of confidence?
Just chucking some Trustpilot reviews or FAQs on the website isn’t going to cut it anymore. Experiences need to be designed presuming the customer is always bringing has a +1: there are three of us in this marriage, so to speak.
Embrace it, and it’ll be more efficient and effective for everyone. Fight it, and you might find yourself flying in a different direction to your customers, to a place you might not come back from.
Thanks for reading this article, I really hope you enjoyed it. You can subscribe to my monthly newsletter below, find me in picture form on Instagram @johnjsills, or in work mode at The Foundation and LinkedIn.
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