Human connection matters more than performance in service

For many people, everyday services used to feel more personal.

That sense of human connection in service shaped how people experienced delays, mistakes, and limitations long before performance metrics became the dominant measure.

Whether it was postal delivery, local utilities, or customer support, there was often a familiar face involved. You recognised who was responsible. Over time, a quiet sense of trust built up, not because everything worked perfectly, but because there was a feeling that someone was paying attention and would take ownership if things went wrong.

Only later did it become clear how much that human connection shaped the experience.

That is why stories like Royal Mail in the UK are so interesting. Looking back, customer satisfaction was often higher at a time when deliveries were slower, tracking was limited, and automation played a much smaller role than it does today. On paper, the service was worse. In practice, many people felt more looked after.

The reason was not the service design. It was the relationship.

People did not experience Royal Mail as an organisation. They experienced it through their postman. They knew who was on their route. They recognised them. Over time, that familiarity softened the rough edges of the service. If a parcel was awkward, it might be left with a neighbour both sides trusted. If something went missing, there was a sense that someone would help sort it out, not just pass it into a system and move on.

The experience was imperfect, but it felt human. That human connection did a huge amount of work in the background, even if no one ever talked about it explicitly.

As delivery models evolved, routes were optimised, workloads increased, and efficiency became the main focus, that connection slowly faded. From a performance perspective, things improved. Tracking became richer. Processes became tighter. Metrics moved in the right direction.

But for the customer, something important was lost.

They stopped dealing with a person and started dealing with a system.

This is where many organisations get caught out. The numbers look better, yet satisfaction does not follow. What disappears is not capability or speed, but emotional safety. When there is no longer a sense of personal ownership, every interaction becomes more fragile.

This is not just intuition. Research in user experience consistently shows that when trust is present, people are far more forgiving of friction. Nielsen Norman Group has shown that users tolerate delays, errors, and imperfect experiences far more readily when they trust the people behind the service, because trust changes how outcomes are interpreted.

People are far more tolerant of friction when they feel understood. When there is a sense that someone sees them and cares about the outcome, delays feel manageable, mistakes feel forgivable, and limitations feel reasonable. What people struggle with is indifference.

When the human layer existed, it acted as a safety net. There was a feeling of personal ownership, even if it was informal. Once that layer disappeared, every issue became sharper. A late delivery was no longer just late. A missing parcel was no longer just unfortunate. The tolerance that once existed quietly drained away.

This is why satisfaction dropped even as performance metrics improved. The emotional buffer vanished, and without it, the experience became brittle. Small failures suddenly carried more weight because there was no longer a relationship to absorb them.

Behavioural research backs this up. Studies into customer experience psychology consistently show that people judge services as much on perceived intent and care as on outcomes. Farnsworth Group describes how emotion and trust shape how customers remember and evaluate experiences, even when the functional result is identical.

This is not about rejecting progress or efficiency. It is about understanding how people experience services in the real world.

People do not judge services purely on outcomes. They judge them on intent, care, and connection. When customers believe there is a real person behind the service, they interpret events differently. They are calmer, more patient, and more forgiving.

Remove that human presence, and everything becomes transactional. Every delay feels bigger. Every mistake feels louder. The margin for error collapses.

The lesson is simple, even if it is uncomfortable. Attitude will always outperform pure performance in the long run, because attitude is what keeps people with you when things do not go to plan.