SERVICES MARKETING

ASSIGNMENT
CRITICAL ANALYSIS 1

GROUP- 2
Roll No Name Email id
2021071 Anurag Kumar anurag.kumar21@gim.ac.in
2021074 Arnav Arora arnav.arora21@gim.ac.in
2021145 Drashtee Mistry drashtee.mistry21@gim.ac.in
2021171 Sai Dhiraj Bosetty sai.bosetty21@gim.ac.in
2021186 Vrunda Jajoo vrunda.jajoo21@gim.ac.in
2021202 Arnab Dey arnab.dey21@gim.ac.in
2021225 Subham Banerjee subham.banerjee21@gim.ac.in
 What is the future of High Touch Services?

Technology is crucial to every industry, including telecommunications, information technology,

and e-commerce, just as customer service is essential to any organisation, whether it operates
online or off. When popular technologies like customer care via mobile phones, internet chat,
chatbots, etc., were not in use, face-to-face customer service was in vogue. Therefore,
technological advances will occur over time to make human existence simple and quick. Thanks
to technology, providing clients with immediate solutions is incredibly simple and fast.
Technology plays a different role in delivering customers excellent service for e-commerce
enterprises, from placing orders to providing products to clients.

Technology is undoubtedly advancing rapidly, and in today's click-driven media environment,

sensational sells, but just because tech can replace a human worker doesn't mean we're always
going to want that. Sometimes, even when tech can do an adequate job, we still want to deal with
a person. While a machine can perform a given task, often more efficiently than we can, what it
lacks is the artistry in the activity, that uniquely human ability to cater to the needs of the
individual. The protocol may suggest one approach, but a person who is good at their job
understands when to adjust and the essential subtleties.

However, consumer expectations have evolved as our culture has gotten more technology aware.
More than ever, retailers rely on technology to enhance the shopping experience. In recent years,
businesses have used technology to enhance the consumer experience. Every technology
contains features that cater to users. AI has fostered new learning and interaction avenues,
chatbots have enhanced business responses, IoT facilitates numerous connections, and
programmatic advertising has improved targeting. Virtual reality offers new ways to immerse
and engage. The performance of an organisation in a cutthroat industry has been altered by
digital transformation.

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Even though robots are helping our doctors make the correct diagnosis and treatment decisions,
we will still prefer to work with highly educated individuals in medicine. We still like to work
with a doctor who has been trained to explain our options and carry out the recommended course
of action because they are trained to do so and are aware of the art in the science of medicine,
even if a machine could determine an appropriate plan (and as we all know, there are few
absolutes in medicine). People still matter. And it's crucial to keep it in mind. Humans still prefer
to deal with other people rather than technology, even in situations involving professionals
without considerable schooling, such as doctors.

Technology will make it necessary for agents to be highly trained and knowledgeable to identify
solutions more quickly, keep clients satisfied, and provide value to every interaction.
Convenience and cost will determine the contact centre's success in the long run. Customers
choose a simple, hassle-free choice that gives them answers more quickly and with less
resistance. By handling routine enquiries and leaving the most crucial encounters to agents, AI
and automation can help alleviate those worries. With this fusion of high-tech and high-touch,
the contact centre might transform from a low-value cost centre to one that effectively handles
both forms of communication.

In a hi-tech world, people are longing for balance. The answer to high tech is high touch - that is
emotions. The age of intelligent interaction between humans and machines started due to
technology. This convergence is also known as the "second economy" or "third wave". It is
expected that high tech will take control over the next 20 years to come.

Here are some key High-Tech rationales:

• The "second economy", which is based on the Internet of Things (IoT), is the key
element to enable the digitalisation of the overall economy
• A higher vertical and horizontal integration of the supply chain will be possible as a
result of the "second economy"
• IoT will create physical devices, sensors and processors "intelligent", which will be based
on CIBPs - Customer Integrated Business Processes

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It is a fact that technology is taking a big part in our lives, but customers still search for
authenticity and human interaction. High Tech might not fully satisfy customers without a touch
of emotions.

Here are some key High Touch rationales:

• The way people act, live, and behave is significantly influenced by their emotions
• Humans are not rational decision-makers, but are instead influenced by their emotions,
which can constantly change

Here’s how touchless planning works: Cognitive automation starts with thousands of daily
Google-like data-crawls across applications to create a single top-level layer of virtualized data.
The data is indexed, cleansed, normalized and enriched to provide planners across all
interdependent functions with real-time, end-to-end visibility not otherwise possible. Then,
powerful artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms are applied to analyse the
information and deliver recommendations that could range from inventory reallocations to
increasing production capacity, reducing prices and switching suppliers or logistics providers.

It can take employees and supply chain planners weeks to get to a decision point, after spending
50%-70% of their time on data aggregation and analysis. With cognitive automation, decision
time is reduced to minutes. Moreover, decisions can be based on exceptional granularity down to
the SKU and location level, a degree of detail that can’t be achieved with conventional methods.
The final mile is to close the decision loop by taking automatic actions to orchestrate the
decisions in various transactional systems.

By leveraging the touchless planning model, teams are able to devote that newfound time to
more strategic and creative initiatives. They can focus on exception management, collaborate
with internal and external stakeholders, experiment with what-if analytics and “think outside the
box” to devise innovations that improve service levels and reduce working capital. That higher-
value work is far more rewarding than the repetitive data work that prevails in status quo
planning processes.

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 Evolution trajectory of 3 High Touch Services for next 10 Years

1. Caregiving Service

The vocation of caregiving is frequently referred to as being invisible. This is mostly a result of
the public's ignorance of the profession and its intensely private nature. Despite being among the
most necessary and socially useful tasks one can have, providing care is still frequently not seen
as a "genuine" profession.

Usually, they travel to the patient's house to assist with daily duties including housekeeping,
bathing, and companionship as well as emotional support. Additionally, caregivers may be in
charge of driving and accompanying other caregivers to appointments, shopping trips, and other
crucial errands.

The Future of Caregiving in the next 10 years is as follows:

1. Next-generation sensors will assist caretakers and senior citizens who desire to stay in their
homes. In addition to very thorough thinking as to what is the information they are collecting
and why are they collecting it, there will be improved privacy checks to limit who gets the
information. Sensors will employ logic checks integrated into their running software to
collect and store only the movements that seem to be red flags rather than continuously
collecting huge amounts of data about every person's movements throughout the house, for
example.

2. It will be feasible to map out highly customised care pathways. Three factors will be
combined: 1) a person's genetic makeup and the tendencies that go along with it, such as
being a good or bad metabolizer of a particular drug; 2) metadata analyses of entire
populations and the ways that particular health interventions tend to lead to certain kinds of
outcomes; and 3) a person's preferences and goals for their life and health.

As a result, it will be possible to forecast a patient's response to a particular treatment and

create a care plan that they are likely to follow and find beneficial.

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3. Robots will assist in caregiving. Not the high-touch and highly personal components, but for
some of the physically challenging aspects of care. For instance, home health care caregivers
spraining their backs turning individuals over won't be necessary.

4. Family caregiver apps and internet resources would be frequently used. Tech tools have
already flooded the field of caregiving. What's been lacking is a solid base of research and
evidence to separate the junk from what older adults and their families can actually use and
will result in good caregiving or positive health outcomes.

2. Bartending

Bartending is one job that is already seeing huge leaps in its evolution, but at its core, it’s still
that same place for drinkers to drink away in their thoughts or while chatting with the bartender.
The automated robotic, AI-driven bartenders are a staple of most the dystopian future Sci-fi
movies like ‘Passengers’ and ‘Altered Carbon. They all show the precise and stylistic
movements, and the perfect blends that It creates, but most significantly, what all of these movies
never fail to reveal is the bartender’s near human-like look, human-like cognition, and human-
like communication abilities. They are almost indistinguishable from humans and the protagonist
even talks with it like it were human and even gains some plot-boosting insights. It seems as if
the higher tech we go, the more we desire for that human connection, the human touch.

Present scenario

The last few years saw a rise in interest in bartending robots, and during Covid 19 Pandemic,
saw a huge boost in adoption. The Makr Shakr bar in Milan for example employs a Kuka double-
handed bartender robot that can create cocktails four times faster than any human bartender. It’s
also a piece of attraction for the curious customers who go there to film the robot and prepare
their cocktails.

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Then there are bartending robots like Cecilia that can serve drinks with a twist. Cecilia is driven
by an AI that can not only create drinks and cocktails but also maintain a conversation with its
customers. In days of the Covid 19 pandemic, Cecilia, and other bots like her eliminate the risk
of workers contracting the virus and spreading it further — plus, they don’t need a lunch break or
overpour, ultimately benefiting the establishment’s bottom line. It also reduces training time and
cost.

But some find the idea absurd and even horrible. Rob Bookman for example, who is a counsel
for New York Nightlife Association says, “We're in the hospitality business — we do more than
just serve drinks.” And while Makr Shakr can be an object of intrigue, customers say they still
prefer human bartenders. For many customers as well as bartenders, bartending goes beyond
simply making and serving drinks. Robot bartenders can’t listen to your troubles and respond
sympathetically or have an enriching conversation with their customers. They just can’t form
connections with their customers.

While robot bartenders appear to be a natural step in the service business, they are still a long
way from replacing human bartenders. Robots, on the other hand, will find their own time and
place. While they would not be able to replace a human bartender at a high-end or hipster bar,
they might be useful in places where producing cocktails rapidly is required.

Future of the Bartending Industry

As we saw earlier, innovations in automation and ML have enabled engineers to build robots that
can make cocktails four times faster than bartenders and with a more consistent taste. Ten years
from now, as the robotic bartenders would be a staple at events where one needs to serve a large
crowd at the quickest possible times. Events like concerts, commercial sports, casinos and parties
will see widespread use of these robots.

Robots will also see use in regular hipster bars as a helping hand for human bartenders where
robots can be tasked to create the regular cocktails while human bartenders can make customised
drinks and engage customers

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While robots will inevitably take away a lot of bartending positions, bartending jobs and
mixology will become better, requiring more technical skills, more social skills, and more
creative skills.

The conversational abilities of AI will improve during the next few years. Current artificial
intelligence (AI), such as LaMDA from Google and GPT from Tesla, will develop to the point
where they can converse as fluently as people. Although they will be constrained by hardware,
this might allow AI to take over consumer conversations. They won't be able to mimic human
actions or physical characteristics. A restriction will be the absence of authentic expression of
emotion.

3. Tattoo Industry

The tattoo industry is a 1.4-billion-dollar industry worldwide and has an estimated revenue of
Rs.20,000 Cr in India. The tattoo industry is a high-touch service that involves high
customization by the customer. This industry is one of the services we believe will shift from
high-touch to high-tech and low-touch.

As robotics and automation are employed more in various industries, it's only a matter of time,
the same will likely happen to the tattoo industry as well. French designers Pierre Emm and
Johan da Silveira have already made the first robot tattooist. This robot, for the most part, does a
great job, although it is in a very early stage of development. Even though they face a few issues
like having an extensive 3d scan of the target area before the tattooist can use the machine and
the recipient should be very still during the process, Emm and da Silveira are confident and plan
to bring the robot to the market.

So, in the coming ten years, we can expect robots like these to take over traditional tattooists
making the industry low-contact and high-tech. Every tattoo studio will have a robot where
customers bring their designs that will be fed into the robot. The main tattooist can still assist the
customers in formulating the tattoo design (A premium service). Therefore, the tattoo industry,
for the most part, is likely to be automated in the coming years. However, these robots most

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likely not be able to replicate the raw artistry of a tattoo artist. Therefore, many tattoo enthusiasts
will still prefer a human tattooist over a robot one. The robots will succeed for customers looking
to get simple generic tattoos like names, captions and dates, thus making simple tattoos low-cost,
quick and efficient.

Future of the tattoo industry:

The tattoo industry will be split into two smaller industries in the coming ten years.

1) Generic tattoos: this part of the industry will be automized with Robots. The robots will do a
great job creating tattoos like Text or simple designs.
2) Tattoo Enthusiasts: tattoo geeks, getting extensive and intricate tattoos like realistic tattoos,
old school tattoos, etc will still require human tattooists. Robots cannot replicate the artistry and
imagination a human can bring into his design.

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 References

1. https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/15/technology-cant-replace-the-human-touch
2. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/high-
tech-tools-high-touch-recruiting.aspx
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2017/05/30/what-the-future-of-
caregiving-looks-like/?sh=11dd49f7398f
4. https://caregiversamerica.com/future-caregiving-invisible-profession/
5. https://www.indeed.com/hire/job-
description/caregiver#:~:text=They%20typically%20travel%20to%20a,trips%20a
nd%20other%20important%20errands.
6. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/robot-bartenders-
and-future-work
7. https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/shaking-up-the-service-industry-with-robot-
bartenders/
8. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/bartending-to-go-
obsolete-in-post-covid-world-robots-replace-humans-will-serve-cocktails-carve-
ice-for-whisky/articleshow/76193354.cms
9. https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/8/4/12376760/industrial-robot-
tattoo
10. https://www.futureguidebook.com/will-tattoo-artists-be-replaced-by-robots/