There is a phrase we hear everywhere these days: “the customer is at the center.” Restaurants, hotels, big brands, tech companies, even banks say it. But scratch the surface, and it’s often just marketing. In reality, customers remain just numbers, managed through rigid procedures and automation that feel anything but personal.
The same thing happens in online writing. We’re told that content is king, that quality matters, but in the end, everything revolves around SEO, keywords, and Google’s algorithms. The value of an article is no longer measured by how interesting or useful it is but by how well it ranks in search results. The result? Countless pages filled with repetitive, algorithm-friendly text, stripped of real substance.
This is not an isolated issue. This mentality dominates every industry: companies say one thing and do another, dressing up old models with new buzzwords to make them more palatable. But can we really call it innovation when we’re just repackaging the same product without changing its essence?
The Illusion of Innovation: Optimization Without Substance
SEO and customer experience have a lot in common—both promise to improve user (or rather, paying customer) experience, but they often boil down to numbers and metrics rather than actual quality.
In web writing, the obsession with optimization has led to articles that feel more like strings of code than meaningful content. Sentences are carefully structured to contain exact keywords, headlines are engineered to attract clicks, and text is designed to keep users engaged just long enough to improve rankings. But at the end of the day, what does the reader actually gain? More often than not, nothing truly valuable, because the content was written for the algorithm, not for them.
In hospitality and dining, the same pattern emerges. We hear about “tailored experiences” and “total personalization”, but the service remains standardized. The only difference? Hotels now send automated emails with your name, and chatbots ask, “How can we make your stay special?”—but without any real listening or genuine interest, except for immediate profit.
In the end, it’s always the same trick: take a pre-packaged model, add a touch of technology, and sell it as a revolution.
Technology Is Not Neutral: The System Imposes Its Own Logic
There’s a common belief that technology is just a tool, neutral, something we can choose to use well or badly. The reality is different. Technology imposes its way of operating, shapes our thinking, and often forces us to adapt to its logic, rather than the other way around.
In web writing, this means we cannot ignore SEO, because without optimization, an article is invisible. In hospitality, it means we cannot ignore automation and CRM systems, because anyone who doesn’t use them is seen as outdated.
But when everything is reduced to data, metrics, and KPIs, something crucial is lost: the human element. We end up working to satisfy algorithms and dashboards, rather than creating a meaningful experience.
Empathy and Professionalism: The Only Leverage We Have
Since this is the system we live in, the only thing we can control is how we operate within it. There’s no point in thinking we can overturn the rules, but we can at least try to balance optimization with real quality.
- In web writing, this means using SEO without becoming its slave: writing genuinely useful content, using natural language, and avoiding forced keyword stuffing.
- In hospitality, this means not confusing automation with personalization. A truly high-quality service is not the one that repeats the customer’s name every three sentences—it’s the one that reads between the lines and understands what the customer actually needs.
The key is not in “building authentic relationships”—a phrase so overused it has lost all meaning. The real key is in balancing empathy and professionalism. It means being able to see beyond the data and metrics and understand what truly matters to the person on the other side.
But the truth is, the individual can do very little if decision-makers continue to prioritize metrics over substance. Without a real shift in mindset at the top, those who try to work with true quality risk fighting windmills like a modern Don Quixote. Worse still, they may even be used as a façade, like those “testimonials” that give a false sense of legitimacy to a system that, deep down, has no intention of changing.
This is not an equal fight, because the system is designed to favor those who align with its mechanisms. But at the very least, we can choose not to become just another cog in the machine, and carve out small spaces where our work still has meaning.