We can design our client interactions for efficiency.

For the hotelier, create SOPs that seek to engineer every interaction into an analogue algorithm.

For the doctor, half-heartedly talk to the patient sitting to your left while you focus on feeding information into the chart on the computer.

For the business owner, purchase the automated telephone menu service that serves up a half dozen prompts before connecting clients with a living being.

The problem with designing for efficiency is that often we are not designing for our clients’ efficiency, we are designing for our own. This is a problem now and it will become an even larger problem in the future.

As competition for our attention and our dollars continues its upward trajectory, winning will not be a matter of ever more efficiency at the expense of the client. Rather, it will be ever more efficiency in service of the client. T

his is a fundamental difference that technology can solve, but we have to think about its implementation much differently.