We replaced movies with streaming from home, bank tellers with ATMs, cashiers with self-checkout lanes, diners with DoorDash, and everything else with Amazon Prime.
Everyone of those efficiency improvements removed a human interaction. We’re suffering from “Device-olation”, a term coined by Forbes Magazine back in 2015.
Along came the pandemic and social distancing actually became the objective. The result? An Epidemic of Loneliness in America with 36% Americans feeling “serious loneliness.”
So, one out of every three of your clients – 1 in 3 of the people who darken the doors of your business – will be seriously lonely.
If all you do is sell them a product or deliver your service, you will only be solving their surface need and ignoring their real need for human connection.
Another word for human connection? Experience.
Customer experience has gone from “nice-to-have” to a modern business imperative. Not because it made some trend list somewhere. But because today’s customer is crying out for experiences that treat them like the individual, living, breathing humans they are.
The only question for you and your business is:
Will you give them what they really need?