Rather than personalising the experience, the automatic, field-filling salutation can underline a company's detachment from its customers.
Sign up for an email account with Yahoo, and you'll discover technology is forcing one of the most popular search directories to factor human interaction into its negotiations. Due to the high number of robots signing up for Yahoo accounts, which are later used as spam tools, Yahoo has been obliged to adopt a trick to filter the real customers from the robots.
The sign-up process now includes the appearance of an automatically generated word that only a human recipient can identify and key in the correct word.
This ensures that machines can no longer sign up automatically and use Yahoo for future spamming.
Finally, we have reached a level of technological advancement that, ironically, cannot escape its own limitations or its need to commission a human agent for its processes to be completed. When I receive spam (and, believe me, I receive hundreds of messages a day), I almost never open the ones from a company name, but I almost always open the ones supposedly sent by a "real" person. The corporate veneer is, I think, becoming increasingly detestable. People hate the anonymity it reflects and are cynical about the apparently unbreakable wall of company insensibility that it communicates.
People need to perceive feelings, and the corporate image has largely absented itself from the human arena. Websites are adding distance between brands and customers, using language that excludes the visitor.
I don't know about you, but I prefer to deal with companies that seem to have real people around. I want to feel a personal spirit in emails and copy. I don't want to be patronised by letters that adopt legally scrutinised, research-tested patter that lacks individualism and are signed by some corporate entity rather than a real person. In fact, I don't deal with companies any more. I deal with people who happen to represent brands.
As technology continues along its developmental trajectory, the corporations that supposedly control it need to get hold of the steering wheel and start insinuating the human touch into every piece of communication they transmit. Opinions, moods, and mistakes are all part of the human condition.
Yes, mistakes. Brands need to show they're created and maintained by human beings to connect and do business with human beings.
So, before you think "perfect" and "sleek", consider your company's relationship with its customers. Perhaps they're jaded by the unblemished corporate-speak they've been putting up with. Perhaps they need more human and less corporate dialogue.
- Martin Lindstrom has co-authored books on branding, including Clicks, Bricks & Brands with Don Peppers and Martha Rogers.