The Human Standard
Most businesses that describe themselves as customer-focused are, if they’re being honest with themselves, process-focused. The customer sits at the end of the process, but it’s the process that gets managed, refined, and invested in. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. A rigorous process is how you scale, maintain consistency, and build something that functions without the founder or leadership team in the room. But somewhere in the optimisation of all of that, something tends to leave the building, without anyone noticing until the relationships have already started to cool.
I spent seventeen years working in hospitality before moving into the work I do today. It’s an industry that, at its worst, is indifferent and transactional, and at its best, gave me a distinction I’ve never been able to stop applying, regardless of the sector I’m working in. Service is what you do. Hospitality is how you make someone feel.
Those two things are not the same. And assuming that delivering one naturally produces the other is one of the more quietly costly mistakes a growing business makes.
Service is the mechanics. The proposal delivered on time. The call returned before the end of the day. The order that matches the specification. The invoice that doesn’t require three rounds of correction. These things matter enormously. They are the baseline. Necessary. Non-negotiable. But not sufficient.
Hospitality, and I’m using the word deliberately, regardless of whether your business has anything to do with hotels, pubs or restaurants, is what happens in the space between the transaction and the memory. It’s the moment a person feels genuinely noticed rather than efficiently processed. When something happens that they didn’t ask for, didn’t anticipate, and couldn’t have scripted. The difference between a client who was satisfied and one who, six months later, tells someone else about you because the interaction left something with them they can’t quite account for.
There’s a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly, in both hospitality and in the work I’ve done since. The businesses most confident in their customer relationships are often the ones most at risk of quietly losing them. Not to a competitor with better capability or lower prices, but to the slow accumulation of small decisions that remove the human element from the experience. The service standards hold. The scores are acceptable. When asked, the client will say they’re happy. Right up until they aren’t.
The reason most businesses don’t reach hospitality consistently has less to do with intent and more to do with what their systems are actually built to reward.
Consider how customer-facing performance is typically measured in a well-run business. Response times. Error rates. Volume handled. Net Promoter Score. These are, fundamentally, measures of service. They tell you whether the mechanics are working. They tell you almost nothing about whether the person on the other side of the transaction felt anything beyond adequately handled. Nobody builds a dashboard for a genuine human connection. It doesn’t aggregate neatly, it can’t be included in a weekly report, and so it doesn’t get managed with the same rigour. This produces a slow and consistent bias: what gets measured gets protected, and what doesn’t tends to erode because the system can only optimise for what it can actually see.
Think about what hospitality looks like outside the obvious sectors. A professional services firm whose partner picks up the phone not to discuss the work, but because they noticed something difficult was going on and felt it mattered to check in. A logistics company whose driver remembers that the site manager prefers morning deliveries and adjusts without being reminded. A supplier who responds to a short-notice problem without needing to be asked twice or escalated past. None of these things cost very much. Some cost nothing beyond the attention and intention that produce them. But they are hospitality, and they are exactly why some businesses get recommended while others are simply used and eventually replaced.
There’s a particular dynamic for owner-led businesses that doesn’t get examined often enough. In the early years, the founder is typically present in most customer interactions, and the quality of attention that exists flows directly from the owner’s personal investment in each relationship. It’s intuitive. Unscripted. Essentially inseparable from who the founder is as a person. As the business grows, the owner steps back, systems are built to provide consistency at scale, and what was once an instinct needs to be transferred to a team. This is considerably harder than it sounds. Processes can be documented. The thing that tells a person when to do something unexpected and genuinely human, that doesn’t reduce to a training manual, and it rarely survives being squeezed into one.
This is how many businesses drift, without a conscious decision, without anyone choosing it, from hospitality back to service. The processes improve. Consistency holds. The human element retreats. And nobody planned it.
Now add margin pressure to that picture.
When businesses come under financial strain, and most owner-led businesses are under some form of it most of the time, the human elements of the customer experience tend to be where the changes land. The additional team member who gave people breathing room disappears. Small gestures that made clients feel genuinely considered get quietly discontinued. Training budgets contract. The time people once had to actually notice the customer in front of them, to see them as a person rather than a transaction, gets absorbed by volume and the general weight of keeping the operation moving.
These decisions are almost always presented as commercial necessities. In my experience, they are more often leadership choices.
I’m not suggesting that margin pressure isn’t real. It is, and it can be serious. But the decision about where that pressure lands is a leadership decision. When a business reduces investment in the human elements of the customer experience, that is a choice about priorities, and framing it as a financial inevitability is a more comfortable position than owning it. The problem with that framing is that it prevents the most important question from being asked at all.
Is customer experience a cost or an investment?
Most businesses treat it as the former, something to be managed carefully, minimised where possible, and justified whenever budgets are under scrutiny. The case for treating it as the latter is that its return doesn’t appear on a monthly P&L. It accumulates over time, in retention rates, in referrals that arrive without a programme to prompt them, in the kind of reputation that no marketing spend reliably produces.
Pret a Manger built a practice around giving free product to customers, not loyalty programme members, not high spenders. People in the queue. The cost of a coffee or a pastry at their operating scale is genuinely small. But what the practice communicates to the person who receives it and to every member of staff who witnesses it is that this is a business where generosity is an operating principle. The perceived value to the customer is disproportionate to the actual cost. That ratio is worth understanding because it reveals something true about how human moments unfold in business relationships.
The principle behind it travels well. It doesn’t require a hospitality context or a consumer-facing product. What it requires is the recognition that some of the most commercially significant moments in a business relationship cost almost nothing to create and are remembered long after the quality of the deliverable has faded.
The businesses that hold clients for decades, generate referrals without a formal structure, and have customers who feel genuine loyalty rather than a comfortable habit, have almost always made a deliberate decision at the leadership level that the human element of the business is non-negotiable, even when conditions are difficult. Especially then. Because the conditions in which it’s most tempting to cut the human element are exactly the conditions in which its value to the customer is highest.
Efficiency will always be easier to defend in a room full of numbers. The human element requires someone to stand up for it before the numbers arrive.
The question worth sitting with is this: in the last twelve months, where has the human element of your business been reduced, and was that genuinely a financial constraint, or was it a decision about priorities?
Have a brilliant week!
Dave Rogers – The Business Explorer
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