I am not that old, my hair is going a bit thin but I am certainly not a dinosaur (apart from when I am running round the house chasing my toddler pretending to be a t-rex!). I am 33 but yet I feel by writing this blog I am in some way presenting myself as some kind of ‘dinosaur’. A type of person in my teenage school years I recalling thinking to myself ‘yeah whatever’. But over the last 10 years I feel like the way humans communicate has now changed so much that companies believe that people almost prefer to liaise with machines rather than their fellow human beings.
My uneducated brief review of this is that it’s started with Bebo, Facebook, Twitter, Blackberry’s and smartphones etc. Then we started having lots of supermarkets with self-service tills, then a range of other shops including fast food restaurants etc. started doing it.
I actually really like the self-service tills in supermarkets but I also like having the option of talking to someone at the till should I wish to do so.
I stopped off for a rare MacDonald’s last week and went in to order and was told that I couldn’t order at the desk. I had to do it on the rectangular self-service screens that you need to stand outside the door to read because they are so large. EH?! What’s happened to the personal touch and people wanting to talk to others. Surely in an unfortunate age where communities can find themselves divided we should all be physically talking to each other more not less.
Lots of people email you these days for the simplest of things when they could just pick up the phone and talk to you saving time and energy. It’s like we have become people whose least favorite means communication is talking.
Anyway back to MacDonald’s….This got me thinking (I am always trying to think of what could be the next major change/step forward in the non-native invasive weed market). We have had Japanese Knotweed apps, perhaps we could have a drive through Japanese Knotweed service in the future?
Client drives in, talks to someone on the monitor to either deliver their Japanese Knotweed waste down a shoot to an underground tank (NB: they drive a car where the boot opens a hatch below and it falls out so that they don’t need to get out!) or collect their ‘eradication kit’. *Eradication kit to include disposable gloves/mask/suit/boots, small disposable injection gun/s, sachet of herbicide for each application and instructions.
Mmm – nah that’s a bit far-fetched and I don’t think I will be buying any shares in it!
So, for now we will continue to do what we do best via our friendly team. Communicate clearly with our clients via a range of means to suit all. Offer a high-quality site service which is sustainable for us but also competitively priced. Offer clients a range of the industry’s best insurance backed guarantees and we will also kill it, which after all is the main reason we are employed in the first place…
Alexander Dayes, Managing Director
Invasive Weed Solutions Ltd / Japanese Knotweed Solutions Ltd