I think people have forgotten what good service is like. When you walk into a hotel and the doorman greets you by name and asks you how your wife and daughter are doing, that feels special. When a 12 year old, anxious about the giant gap between her front teeth, is pulled aside by a teacher and shown photos of an astronaut, a president, and a politician who all share giant gaps between their teeth, she feels special… because she feels seen. When you walk up to me in December and wish me happy Hanukkah, I feel just a little dose of warm and special. Whoever you are, you remembered I’m Jewish, that it’s that time of year again, and you went to the effort of walking up and saying so. And so I feel recognized, I feel seen, and I feel remembered.

You know what doesn’t make me feel special? When you say happy holidays, because happy holidays is what you say when you want to put as little effort as possible into not offending anybody. What waiters, doormen, secretaries, and concierge staff have known for centuries, maybe longer, is that effort is obvious, and there’s a difference between recognition and fear.

There are three ways to address someone in the service industry. You can say, “Hey there, Merry Christmas! What would you like?” This places no effort into remembering who someone is or what they care about. And while it’s not going to earn anyone a big tip, at least it’s honest, and it probably won’t offend anyone.

Second, at the other end of the scale, is going out of your way to remember someone’s name, the college their son attends, how they like their coffee, and that they like to get out fast in the evenings so they can go to bed early. This level of effort is obvious. And even if you end up getting a detail or two wrong, it usually won’t offend anyone; it might actually impress them, as you clearly tried.

But the worst of both worlds is the third option. Going out of your way to be as generic as possible so as not to offend anyone. Don’t say anything that could possibly be wrong. Don’t say Merry Christmas, say Happy Holidays. Give generic cookie cutter advice to that 12 year old student that could have been given to anyone. This doesn’t feel like being seen. It just feels like you’re being spoken to out of fear, or that the desire not to offend you is so strong that the person speaking to you inconveniences themselves, but that they don’t care about you enough to learn anything about who you are.

There’s a reason why this third approach is so common. It requires almost no effort. It scales very well. If you want your product to wish a happy Hanukkah to your Jewish customers, and a Merry Christmas to your Christian ones, and a Happy Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, or Feast Day of our Lady Guadalupe to each of the appropriate recipients, you need to build a database to keep track of which religions each user belongs to and what holidays they celebrate, which besides being a lot of engineering effort may actually be illegal.

Recognizing someone for who they are and what sets them apart is dramatically harder than only acknowledging the things we all share. It requires a more human experience than most businesses are able to provide, and more attention to detail than most individuals care to endure. But when you’re not willing to say anything specific, you’re never going to make anyone feel special.