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The Ratio café, featuring a robot bartender and barista, just opened in Shanghai. After customers pre-order and pay via an app they can take a seat while a robotic arm makes their drink. Ratio’s robot can grind coffee beans, pour shots, and ensure that each drink has the perfect ratio (hence the cafe’s name) of ingredients. Founder Gavin Pathross says Ratio solves a key flaw in the typical coffee shop experience: the need to queue just to place an order. Once drinks are ready, human waiters deliver them to tables. Five more outposts will open in Shanghai during 2018.

Milk/water to coffee isn’t the only ratio that Ratio is getting right ;). Note how the café has automated the part of the process most customers just want done fast and effectively: ordering, and getting the perfect drink. Meanwhile, it’s kept the human touch – via flesh and blood waiters – when it comes to the experiential, at-table part of their offering. The broader takeaway here? Ratio is striking an intriguing balance when it comes to the fundamental customer experience dichotomy facing any business today: are you saving the customer’s attention or seizing it?

Attention is your customer’s most precious resource. So are you saving them from the need to spend it on you? Or are you seizing it with an amazing experience? Some questions to take to your team...

• Look at your brand through the lens of the saving/seizing dichotomy. What is the fundamental promise you make? Ultra-convenience and time saving? Or an amazing, immersive, human experience?

• As Ratio highlights, few businesses will fall on the same side of the line all the time. More likely, you should be saving attention during some customer touchpoints, and seizing it at others. Can you plot your entire customer journey according to the saving/seizing dichotomy?