Customers,
computers and companies
How companies are missing out on the benefits of customer storytelling and personal interaction.
Tony Gorry & Bob Westbrook
In our title, computers stand between customers and companies as they so commonly do in today’s world of commerce. In digital technology, businesses have found new ways to relate to their customers and to gain more knowledge about them. And even beyond the rush of holiday shopping, the Internet offers customers quick and easy access to a greater array of goods and services than can be found in local venues, at lower prices as well. Despite the convenience of point and click shopping, however, many of us find pleasure in patronizing small shops, which recall the general store of an earlier time. There the proprietor knew his customers well. He wisely attended closely to their opinions, suggestions, and complaints, and developed his business in light of what he learned. In today’s small stores, the possibility of such interchanges remains, interactions that benefit customer and owner alike. Less happily, the technology that increasingly mediates relations between large companies and their customers prevents such conversations, to the detriment of both.
A story comes to us as a new sense So says the poet W. S. Merwin. At the counter, conversation with a customer may bring the owner a new perspective on the business. The interplay of empathy and imagination makes storytelling so potent. Emotional centers deep in our brains engender empathy, which two hundred years ago, Adam Smith characterized as “pity for the sorrowful, anguish for the miserable, joy for the successful.” Our highly developed imagination, as J. K. Rowling recently said, “is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.” Storytelling entwines empathy and imagination to put the shop owner into the customer’s shoes, giving her a vantage point on her business not to be found in the pale abstractions of market research reports and sales analyses so favored by large companies today. FALL 2013 JONES JOURNAL // 29