Pretty much every business falls somewhere on the spectrum of personal service and product scale. On one end, you have highly personalized products or services: First class air travel, hair stylists, management consultants. On the other end, you have product scale: Toilet paper, cereal, gasoline, etc. There is a pattern here, for sure, in that on the personal service end of things, you tend to have non-commodity products or services and at the product scale end of things, you have commodity products and services.

What about the hair stylist, though, you might ask? Everyone needs a haircut! And indeed, this is true, everyone pretty much does need a haircut, styling, or a trim here and there. The majority of people get some form of a haircut with regularity. Does that, then, make it a commodity in which personal service is no longer valued or necessary? No, in fact, it doesn't. But why? Well, the same reasons pretty much apply to hair stylists as they do to first class air travel or management consultants; they can't easily be replaced, in general, with totally automated services or be fully supplanted by technology.

On the one hand, a hair stylist can use more advanced tools or techniques which make her job easier. First class air travel could also use the latest in entertainment systems and electronic reclining seats or suites to enhance the traveler's experience by relying on self-service but not sacrifice the overall full quality of the whole experience. In the end, though, these types of services still have functions that necessitate a human being. Although we want to believe that we could automate the first class cabin of an airplane with robots, and quite frankly with today's technology, we could get pretty close, we still can't completely replace humans with technology and automation and end up with the same result. So of course humans and their pesky, picky ways persist. ; )

Over time, though, and continued improvement of technology may lend itself to even more automation of traditionally human-powered service functions, it will take some time, especially with more of the higher-order functions such as natural language and input, as well cognition and artificial intelligence; not to mention the simple act of recognizing a customer by face or name and relying on a previous rapport with that person. It's hard to get machines to have the same impact. After all, am I talking to a machine or a human? Then again, that's the basis for the Turing test.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have product scale. You don't need to speak with someone when you buy and then later eat cereal from a box. It's common shared knowledge that you can eat the cereal however you want or add it to a bowl with some milk. Same for toilet paper; there's no need to contact the company on how to wipe your ass! It's already pretty well known. Even the "features" of toilet paper such as how many sheets are in a roll, how many rolls are in a package/box, to how soft or double-ply it is, are all fairly well understood things about toilet paper. No need to call an 800 number and ask questions about, "How does this work? Can you walk me through how your product works?" It's just understood. Naturally, the fact that you don't need to talk to someone means that time and cost required to buy the product is a lot less than one that is highly personalized. After all, a 30 minute session with your hair stylist will range anywhere from $12-$15 on the low end up to $50+ on the high-end. Both of those numbers would buy you a lot of toilet paper.

What does this mean for businesses? My hunch is that it's best to be on the forefront of moving a product or service *down the curve* meaning you make a product or service more accessible to more people by making it less reliant on human interaction and thus, hopefully, also more affordable and easy to use. Not everything, as I said, can easily be migrated in this fashion. However, this is the basis for many products and services such as my own company, Poll Everywhere (polleverywhere.com). We felt, deep down, that live audience interaction shouldn't require any more know-how or hand-holding than, perhaps, using Microsoft PowerPoint itself might require. As much as using slides in one's presentation has become the norm, we feel interacting with the people you're speaking to should also become the norm. The path to doing that means that you have to make using the tool as easy as something people already expect, even if it isn't the same thing that they already know.

However, between personal service and product scale exists a massive chasm of business that fall somewhere within. Some businesses do rely on partly personal service aspect in addition to a product scale aspect. Take many enterprise-software packages out there; many of them offer lots of consulting and up-start services initially, which help the client along in the early stages learn the ropes and modify their business processes appropriately. In the later stage, there's a lot less reliance on the personal service aspects and instead a reliance on a regular stream of maintenance needs, which are far less demanding than the initial startup costs. Many businesses follow this mode, in fact.

So where does your business fall on the spectrum? It's good to know this and, if you agree with me, perhaps the next innovation in your space is taking what you do to the next level by removing some of the personal service aspects. And remember, it isn't because you don't care or don't feel people deserve to interact with other people in your business but instead it is because making a useful product/service more accessible can make it more valuable to more people, with less time wasted, and at lower costs. And as well all know, automation is a key ingredient behind progress which can be measured by the number of things one can accomplish without thinking.