There were two well dressed doormen at the entrance of the Stephen’s Green Hotel in Dublin. Top hats and long coats, the whole thing. This is one of Dublin’s most iconic hotels situated close to the main city thoroughfare. They greeted everyone coming into the hotel. One of the doormen made small talk with a guy wearing a Welsh rugby jersey who’d clearly stayed there before. The lobby behind them was buzzing.
Most hotels removed their doormen years ago as the math to replace them always made sense. You get to save around $50k a year per door, give or take. An automated sensor never calls in sick and works 24/7. But nobody wrote a memo about what was being lost, because on paper nothing was being lost. A salary line went to zero and the spreadsheet looked great. But the spreadsheet has no clue of the value the doorman brings to the hotel. The doorman reads situations, brings a warmth and humour no automated system could dream of but who cares if you ca save some money right? This is why the quality of service in many industries has dropped significantly. It’s because unless you can attach a number to it in a spreadsheet, it’s very difficult to defend in boardrooms or company meetings when accountants and CFOs are challenging it.
Rory Sutherland wrote about this years ago. He called it the Doorman Fallacy And it’s all about how many organisations measure and over optimise the wrong items, leading to an inferior experience or a loss of trust.
The first time I watched it happen, I was working on Ireland’s first digital bank. Two-factor authentication then meant a small device that looked like a pocket calculator. From a product point of view it was friction. I hated it. It was a horrible experience and added cost. I wanted it gone. Then we asked customers what they thought, and they told us, clearly and repeatedly, that they liked it being annoying. This was their savings account. Most of them put money in at the start of the month and pulled it out by the end. The device gave them a few seconds to think. Many even lost it and never looked for a replacement because it meant they could never access their savings, so their savings kept accumulating. The device was making it harder for people to spend their savings. We ended up running marketing campaigns that made this annoying calculator device a feature, as it placed money at arm’s length.
Events play a big role in fintech and B2B. The attribution is tricky and never straightforward to measure especially for products with long buying cycles. Almost no deal could be tracked back to a stand without some serious pseudoscience. This made it easy for finance teams to always question the value of events. But what we kept finding was that businesses we’d met at events came back 6-12 months later, after a number of conversations that started because they’d seen us there. The act of investing to be present was in itself a trust signal that built credibility.
I also experienced this when I worked in real estate in Dubai. We tried to build a platform to sell property online. The goal was to speed up the buying lifecycle. It sounded amazing on paper and it also looked good on a slide. But it was dumb and it didn’t work at full ticket sizes. People didn’t click buy on a house. No one was willing to potentially spend their life savings or a large chunk of their savings on a property that they hadn’t visited or spoken to someone knowledgeable about. The version that did work was a hybrid, a deposit online, with a window to come and see the place in person before committing. We had to put some friction back in.
You’re probably in meetings this week getting a demo of a new voice AI bot with a generic voice that will replace the friendly human onboarding call or the generic writing automation that will take care of new marketing blog posts. I’ve even sat in a meeting where someone proposed AI to interview all new candidates. Some of those teams are going to find out, in 18 months, what was actually keeping the customer there or what was attracting top talent.
P.S. My writing soundtrack The Doors - Break On Through
I think many people have mistaken dashboard-led for data-led business, dislocating their orientation around customers. And it shows.
All I had to read “Doorman…reads the room” and yes, a machine cannot read intentions of a human being- yet.