Contradictheory: Looking for some service with soul

Maybe the real benefit of increased automation isn’t how much faster we’ll be able to do our work but how much more time we’ll now have to be nicer to each other. Photo: 123rf.com

Ever stood in queue in a fast food restaurant and wonder why is it the one next to you always moves faster? That’s what happened to me the other day. Except I was sitting in a virtual queue, and the line next to me was cars outside ordering from the drive-through.

Welcome to the 21st century, where technology means you are getting better service even though there is no food in front of you. I had to wait more than 20 minutes to get my dinner, while the drive-through window ran through about a dozen cars in the same amount of time. I guess the “fast” in “fast food” here means abstaining from eating.

And this was not a one-off incident. Just the week before, I endured a similar wait, this time while waiting for a take-away at the same chain. Yes, the fact that it was the school holidays must have played a part. But I don’t remember it being this bad before they installed self-service kiosks.

For those who eat more healthy food (or don’t have young children), self-service kiosks in fast food restaurants started appearing in Malaysia about two years ago.

Instead of ordering at the counter from a human being, you now use a giant tablet to place your order. In principle, this is a great idea. In restaurants that don’t use this system, you not only have to wait for the people in front of you to order, you have to also have to wait for them to get their food prepared. With the new system, you just order, take your number, and then wait at a table.

But people don’t like kiosks. In a survey, 78% of respondents said they would be less inclined to go to a place that has them.

Meanwhile for me, the problem is longer waits. Or at least, what felt like it. Is it a psychological thing, that waiting at a table feels longer than shuffling along in a queue?

Well, in the conventional system, it takes about two minutes

to fulfil one order. (Did I sit watching people queue with a stopwatch running? Yes.) Thus, a 20-minute wait would be equivalent to a queue of 10 people ahead of me. And that is coincidentally how many people were waiting to be served, based on the “orders waiting” list on the monitor.

The thing is, I assume there is more that one order being prepared at a time, so the wait should have been shorter. So I really am waiting longer than expected.

Perhaps cars at the drive-through window are given priority service. A quick check on the Internet partially confirmed my suspicion. A former employee at a (different) fast food chain said that management used to measure how long it took to serve customers in cars, and would sometimes prefer them in order to meet targets.

Compounded with this now are the food delivery riders who, when they come in, barely have to wait before getting their food. I suppose they have targets to meet too.

Or maybe the restaurant just didn’t have enough staff in the kitchen. That was what one person behind the counter told me, that there weren’t enough people preparing the food. At least until they build machines to do that too.

Actually, I think that perhaps I was asking the wrong question. Maybe it shouldn’t be “why is my food so slow?” but rather, “why don’t they seem to care?”

The staff at the restaurant actually have all the numbers in front of them. They know exactly when I made the order and how long I’ve been waiting. They are in the perfect position to solve my problem before it becomes a problem.

There is an on-going conversation about how automation will change the nature of work. Relatively menial tasks (like taking orders) can now be automated, leaving staff to do other, more important, things. The question is, what exactly do you mean by “more important”?

Well-known futurists like Michio Kaku insist that machines cannot replace human-to-human interaction requiring empathy and sympathy. So, although a computer will be able to correctly diagnose what illness you have, it will still take a human doctor to discuss it with you and map out a way forward. The vision of the future is that machines will supplement human experts rather than supplant them.

So maybe what the fast food industry needs is a special member of staff whose sole job is to make sure that customers are happy. It could be done in that high-tech way I suggested (looking at the numbers on a monitor) or he/she could just walk around the restaurant looking for unhappy people.

The obvious question of course is, couldn’t machines be programmed to care? It seems it’s quite tricky. But what machines can do is share some of the data they have so that customers know what’s going on.

For example, it’s been proven that customers are willing to wait longer while a website processes an order if it explains what it’s doing as it’s happening (eg, “contacting restaurant... sending order... waiting for confirmation”, etc).

A pizza delivery company actually goes one step further by giving updates as your pizza is cooking. At the moment in Malaysia, they’re mostly just statements like “pizza is in the oven”, but in the United States some of the restaurants have CCTVs in the kitchen so customers can actually see the pizzas being made in real time.

But, ultimately, if you can manage it, human-to-human interaction is better. There are times when I’ve made an order online and when the restaurant calls me to confirm it in some way, I get the impression that they care about what they’re doing.

In the end, maybe the real benefit of increased automation isn’t how much faster we’ll be able to do our work but how much more time we’ll now have to be nicer to each other.

Or at least be more entertaining than watching a queue inch along.

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Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Write to Dzof at [e-mail]. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.