Technology and good customer service don’t have to be polar opposites. In these times, when we’ve had a little bit of time to adjust to the radical changes that computers and the internet have brought to the way we do things in the world, business sensibility has had time to catch up to the way things work these days. There is a certain anonymity about doing business online, surely, but in the hands of truly skilled salespeople, and businesses that truly do care about the well-being of their customers, the human element has had time to creep back in. It’s a very good thing, too, because it gives people like Steven Barbarich the opportunity to really put his customer service skills to good use.
It wasn’t very long ago that computers tended to put a lot of people off, where the complaints about entering into another machine age, devoid of a human face, were everywhere, and no one really knew what we were in for. But we live with a whole generation now who has grown up knowing the internet as a fact of life since their birth, and it’s a very technologically savvy generation, ironically teaching their parents how things work. While this has been going on, we’ve all become more and more accustomed to the presence of the virtual in the physical world, and we’ve had time to do some thinking about what this means about how we see the world, and how we live our lives.
It’s enormously fascinating research, and one thing that does seem to be apparent: we have become savvy about how we shop on the internet. Generally, people are starting to understand the ease and convenience of shopping online, and also understand that they don’t have to sacrifice human exchange for this convenience. This means that somewhere there are salespeople who understand that we have become hybrids in many ways. We expect technology to work and to serve us, but we’re not willing to move completely toward a virtual existence. We can shop on a website that doesn’t have emotions, but we also know we’ll be dealing with real human beings at some point during the transaction, and the salespeople with the edge are the ones who, like Barbarich, make sure that there is always another human voice at the other end of the phone, and the best parts of the business happen when human beings are speaking directly to one another.
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