Signals Business Leaders Must Pay Attention To

One of the biggest signals businesses are not paying attention to is that services delivered by humans are now a premium offering.

It’s already happening in big tech.

The first time I spotted this shift was back in 2020, during the pandemic. When filters became the makeup artist and product.

Even Zoom released a retouch filter because we were all working and connecting virtually.

Makeup artists and businesses started complaining that bookings were dropping.

I gathered the signals, put on my foresight strategy hat, and went digging.

Based on my findings, we were experiencing a redistribution of the makeup service and product.

Beauty products and services had been digitized through filters, but it wasn’t an everyday choice for upwardly mobile people until the pandemic.

The mass market will likely adopt the more affordable digital path. And premium markets will also embrace it for digital experiences.

But the human experience, the physical glam and artistry, will become premium, available to those who can afford it.

I shared my findings with my colleagues and even wrote on my WhatsApp status that services delivered by humans are going to become premium.

Services delivered by humans are custom-made, tailored to one user at a time. Making it difficult to sell en masse and to scale.

Digital and automated services are one-to-many. Making it more affordable, accessible, and easy to scale.

Human services are going to become premium (products, services, operations) where digitization and automation can be applied. In any sector. Including the ones you’re used to having humans deliver, and you can’t think of it being automated.

It’s already happening. You just might not have noticed or experienced it.

Slowly, we are paying a premium to be attended to by human experts, starting with customer service in big tech.

The first time it really hit me as a customer was in 2023 with AWS. We use AWS for cloud services for our clients. I needed to reach customer care, and suddenly, I realized I now had to pay to chat or speak to a human being.

At one point, I thought I was getting a complementary credit for the human customer service support. So I signed up. Only for billings to drop in email afterwards. I reached out to a few people in my circle, and they confirmed they had to pay for customer service support, too.

Shopify also adopted this model. If you want free customer service, what you get is automated replies, AI responses. Or go read a blog article.

The third experience was on Meta. I needed to reach the Meta team. The only way in was through the paid package. So I signed up. It’s the same pattern. If you want a human being to attend to you via chat, call, or email, you will pay.

Some platforms still give you free access, for now, but eventually they will switch.

Like I always say, everything is not being replaced. Everyone is also not being displaced. Most sectors are being reinvented. Customer service is just one of them.

Anything that requires human touch is still going to be in demand. The more automation we experience, the more people will crave real human connection, physical experiences, voice, empathy, and presence.

Especially as AI keeps crowding the pipeline.

After you’ve been bounced around with automated answers, you start longing for a human.

Human support is now a premium.

For businesses generally, this is a new revenue model. AWS has scaled it. Shopify is in it. Meta is in it. And so many more.

It won’t work immediately for everyone; some customers will revolt in the early stage. But it will normalize.

It will be sold as an add-on to paid packages, VIP package, lifestyle support tier, and premium helpdesk. It will have a value-based name, but it’s coming.

Airlines, banks, telcos, and heavy-demand service providers will adopt this model publicly. Some are already building it quietly.

If you’re an enterprise or growth-stage business leader ready to automate your customer service, optimize your human support team and systems, and reinvent your distribution strategy to match how the market is shifting, send me an email at office@mydbhq.com.

In my next post, I’ll share how you can reinvent your distribution strategy as a startup or small business.

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I’m rooting for you!

— Ebere Lisa