Redefining Retail

8High Tech + High Touch

I'm a frequent flier [Giuseppe Stigliano speaking here]. One of those individuals who spends approximately 400 hours a year on an airplane. I interact the most with the flight attendants, who, despite their best efforts, invariably mispronounce my surname, which is quite hard to pronounce for non‐Italians. But one day something remarkable happened. A gentle flight attendant, who was not Italian, greeted me by saying my name with an almost perfect pronunciation—“stee‐lee‐YA‐no”—smiling as if she'd known me from our infancy. That incredibly simple, warm moment made my day; it also made the seven‐hour flight more agreeable, and strongly influenced my attitude toward not just the entire crew, but also the airline brand. So, how did she do that? She heavily relied on technology in advance, finding my name in the computer‐generated passenger list, and perhaps consulting the Internet to learn the correct pronunciation. She then heavily relied on her human skills: perhaps spending a few seconds practicing pronouncing my name, she put her tablet away before approaching me, looked into my eyes, greeted me, and smiled while offering me a glass of champagne—and my most memorable experience as a customer. To quote a chapter title from Marketing 5.0: machines are cool, but humans are warm.¹

We ended the previous chapter noting the significance of determining the ideal optimization of the customer journey. As Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen puts it in the Harvard Business ...