Kind Support — Issue #3
What a Supermarket in the Philippine Taught Me About AI, Empathy and Great Customer Support
Welcome Note 📝
Welcome to the third issue of Kind Support! I'm thrilled you're here. Every week, we’ll explore how empathy, AI, and kindness in customer support can transform experiences—keeping things human even in a world filled with automation.
This week, we’ll explore the Supermarket Staffing Dilemma, a personal dilemma I encountered while spending time in the Philippines.
🛒 The Supermarket Staffing Dilemma
Over the years, I have had the opportunity to live for several months in the Philippines (my spouse is from the Philippines, and I fell in love with the country), and I often found myself in a familiar but curious situation: a long queue at a supermarket checkout. What stood out wasn’t the line itself, I mean, we’ve all been there, but the setup. Each checkout lane had two staff members: one scanning and charging, the other bagging your groceries with care. It was warm, attentive, and oddly rare in today’s world. It’s like trying lounge access—once you do, going back feels a bit sad.
But sometimes the line would grow, and then you start wondering: Would this feel as good if I’d been waiting 15 minutes longer? What if the store had cut that staff-to-lane ratio in half and opened double the lanes? Or gone fully self-checkout, with a single person watching over several stations, like they do in many parts of Europe?
And this isn’t about supermarkets. It is about how we design support experiences.
Because the same questions (should) echo loudly in how companies are implementing AI in customer support.
Many think that AI will handle 90% of basic support inquiries and that we’ll have agents “overseeing” (or better, taking the escalations from) these AI bots.
Or will people still prefer that quiet human presence, the kind that bags your groceries carefully, even if it means waiting a little longer? Or lets you “keep on line” while the agent searches for information, but at least it's a human being on the other side looking to make your day feel better?
In a time when AI is growing more capable by the day, these choices matter more than ever. Speed and scale are tempting. But what we often forget is how deeply people remember feeling cared for, even in small, fleeting moments.
Having worked in retail, I remember how people came to ask a question or for a recommendation, even if they could have done everything online, and that was because they wanted that human experience. They remembered me by name; they wanted a sense of community, of belonging, not just some answers.
The checkout dilemma becomes a chatbot dilemma: Do we design support for efficiency, or do we design it for empathy? (And I’m not saying we can’t do both, but the solution isn’t as simple as firing an entire CS department or avoiding AI altogether.)
Sometimes, it’s true, kindness doesn’t scale. But maybe it doesn’t have to, maybe it just needs to be present when it matters most.
🙏 Thank you for reading Kind Support
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