Mass Personalisation

Dear Ravi,

Today, on 23^rd January, on behalf of Tesco India, I have great pleasure in wishing you a very happy birthday!  You have been one of our most valuable customers since 2010 when you shopped at Tesco, Parel for the first time. As a token of our appreciation, I am attaching a free coupon for three tickets at PVR for Raees, a film with your favorite star Shahrukh Khan. A free bottle of Chianti, the red wine that you so often buy, is also waiting for you. You can pick it up at any of our three shops; Parel, Kemp’s Corner or Church gate, by using your club card.

Our travel counter informs me that you have booked a trip to Hong Kong in March. I take this opportunity to wish you a wonderful vacation.

Please pass on my regards to Mena and Devyani.

Best Regards

John Smith

Customer relations, Tesco India

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This week, on 23 January, my birthday, the first few emails and messages I received were from CITIBANK, ICICI Lombard, Birla Insurance, Toyota, Amazon, Lufthansa Miles and More, Vodafone and for an unknown reason Asian paints. All of them addressed me as Dear Ravi or Dear Mr Ravi Abhyankar.

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In 1995, TESCO, the giant British retailer, launched a Club card Loyalty Scheme. Customers joined by providing their name, address, date of birth, email, family details, dietary requirements and product preferences. A customer’s shopping at Tesco was recorded via his/her Club card. Attractive discounts were given and promotions run for loyal customers. TESCO also did a clever thing. By using this detailed data, its computers began generating “personalized” letters. Each letter was carefully tailored taking into account the recipient’s preferences and shopping history. In 2004, TESCO sent an estimated 4 million variations, none of them identical to any other.

The letter at the beginning of this article is fictional. TESCO doesn’t yet exist in Mumbai. However, Tesco club card members in the UK get similar letters on their birthdays. John Smith who signs at the bottom of the letter as Customer relations manager, TESCO, has never in his life met the person to whom he writes the letter. For all we know, John Smith himself may be fictional.

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On the same day, I actually received dozens of messages that simply said ‘happy birthday.’ Short and crisp. Each message at the top told me the name of the sender- a human being I knew from some walk of my life.

Earlier, you needed to actually type this message. Type ‘happy birthday’ letter by letter, don’t forget the space between the two words. Facebook has now come up with a beautiful feature to make your life more comfortable. On 23^rd morning it tells you It’s Ravi Abhyankar’s birthday today, wish him well! When you see that, you simply press 1 on your Smartphone - that’s it. Ravi Abhyankar has instantly received your ‘happy birthday’ message. You have performed your duty without wasting time. The box is ticked with supreme efficiency. You’ve let Ravi know how valuable your friendship is. He now knows you remember his birthday, and have taken special efforts to wish him on this special day in his life. Simply press 1, and ensure a life-long friendship.

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In our Bombay flat, we got our first landline, the immobile phone, in 1980. Which meant I received birthday wishes during my first eighteen years exclusively face-to-face, with people hugging me or shaking my hand. It couldn’t be more personal.

After that, until 1996, I think, those of my friends and relatives who couldn’t meet and wish, did so over the phone. Our voice, like our fingerprints, is unique and a live phone call is a very personal interaction.

Not everyone could call. Phone calls were expensive then, and my friends were spread across the world. We sent handwritten birthday letters. You had to remember the person’s birthday, estimate the efficiency of your country’s postal service, calculate back, handwrite a nice letter and send it. The lazy ones sent a pre-printed greeting card and signed at the bottom. They still needed to remember the birthday on their own, write the address and take the trouble of posting it beforehand. Handwritten letters were a personal communication, the result of an action far more laborious than simply pressing 1.

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And now, in 2017, machines send personalized messages and humans send impersonal messages.

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The decline in personal communication started with automated answering machines, I think. Press this, press that, listen to Tchaikovsky music while you wait, and keep reminding yourself that the sweet voice at the other end is a taped voice, she is talking to you but she’s not actually there. Even today, in Bombay, I book my kitchen gas cylinders exclusively by talking to taped voices and instructions.

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Every time we interact with a gadget connected to the internet, we are telling the machine something about ourselves. The ads we see on our laptop are specific to us, a result of the websites we have browsed recently. Amazon and Netflix recommend to us books and films to suit our individual taste, based on the history we have created in collusion with them. The ads we see on the right hand side of our Gmail are a product of the contents of our personal emails, that are no longer as personal or private as we imagine. European Union will soon require all cars (eCall initiative) to be equipped with wireless transmitters ostensibly to track accidents. However, it also means a man can’t drive to his lover’s house without leaving a trace.

Your I-phone is a spy, a stalker that records almost everything in your life. And you pay a high price for something that can spy over you. It’s like Trump building a wall to stop Mexicans entering the USA and asking them to pay for it. In order to connect to people, we are getting connected more with machines; perhaps machines already influence our lives more than people. We can stay away from people, sometimes happily, but to be away from gadgets produces immediate withdrawal symptoms.

Ericsson, the leading maker of wireless network equipment, has forecast as many as 50 billion machines connected by 2020. This figures includes 10 billion cell phones and tablet computers. Contrast the 50 billion machines with the 8 billion population then. Most machines will talk to other machines and not to us. Your house windows will open or shut, your air-conditioners or heaters will go on or off automatically, by some censor measuring temperature and humidity telling them to do so.

Robotic chatter is already a major problem for mobile networks. They were initially set for human communication, not for machines. My friends in the age group 18-40 prefer to send a text rather than talk. Though induced by a human, texting is also a communication between two machines. Mobile networks are planning a whole revamp of the system to recognize that machines will talk far more than humans. Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and France Telecom have established separate business entities to develop products catering to machines.

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I don’t understand why a facebook birthday greeting app requires the user to press 1. It should automatically send ‘happy birthday’ to the friend without human interference, just like the Tesco letters. The recipient could also install an app that automatically thanks the sender.

In future, the machine-to-machine talk will ensure that birthdays are remembered, birthday wishes are sent, acknowledged and thanked for, without either the sender or the receiver knowing about it.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm ends with these words: Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.

I am afraid in the not so distant future, you can look from man to machine, and machine to man, and it may be impossible to tell which is which.

Ravi