Automation and corporate responsibility

For over the past thirty years, the automation of a number of customer/consumer service functions has been a consistent and unrelenting trend. Services as varied as telephony, travel services (ticketing and check-in as illustrated), reservations, banking, and parking for motor vehicles have seen live human beings replaced by computerised equipment for automated service delivery. The basis for much of this automation has been to improve efficiency, timing, reduce costs and allow customers the flexibility to make their own arrangements at their own convenience. Indeed the corporate cost line has been seen as the primary beneficiary of this trend.

The media have often commented on these evolutionary trends but perhaps the fundamental change is not related to cost but rather corporate responsibility. By placing the emphasis on customers and the general public to make manage their own services, the responsibility and accountability of corporations to ensure that services are delivered efficiently has been reduced if not almost abrogated. A parrallel argument is that automation, while reducing cost of services to corporations has not necessarily translated into reducing overall costs to consumers. While some online services may have reduced the prices of some products, there are many others where the changes have been few and in fact a base price decrease has been more than matched by other related costs such as transport increasing.

In broad terms, this trend is one which had brought an unhealthy dislocation in human to human contact for a contestable concept of benefits.