Thursday, July 17, 2008

Take a fresh look at your 'resources' (read human beings)

Dave Armano has another corking post at Logic + Emotion
He describes the growing impact of quality real-live human interactions as effective marketing in mediums such as twitter.
One line really rang my bells:
"We’ve become so starved for authentic live human contact that when it’s offered up to us we are all too happy to rejoice and tell the world."
I commented on Dave's blog, but I wanted to expland a little here.

Real live human one-to-one (or many-to-many in a community setting) interaction has a really positive impact on us. And then we take that and have really positive impacts on each other (we do the marketing). Just look at my experience with Qik for example.

This need for the human voice and human interaction is often kind of understood by senior company types. But the response I most often hear is:
"But how can we afford to have all the people this would take?"
That kind of misses the point. It assumes you have to have specialised team who 'do' customer service.

But human interaction is much more than customer service. Human interaction should be what we all do. Hell, it IS what we all do.

So instead of thinking about the cost of additional people in additional new silos, think about unleashing the staff - the humans - you already have.

Marketing, advertising, customer service, promotions, new product development, M&A etc etc it can all come spilling out of its silos and beyond the company firewall where people can interact with people. And as Dave points out digital stuff helps make this more effective than ever.

Too often we make helping customers some 'ones' responsibility, or some department's, - By sealing that responsibility into a specialised department we sign it off as 'job done'. The impact is to either explictly or implicitly make everyone else ignore and 'get on with their day jobs'.

It's a side effect of the specialisation mass production forced on us - together with an unhealthy dose of scientific management techniques.

But as we rediscover that humans aren't made more efficient by being made more machine-like, the silo walls will dissolve and we'll be allowed to get on with being human. More forward thinking management techniques and companies are already applying them.

And, as Dave points out, being human makes an awful lot of sense when you want to sell to other humans.


5 comments:

  1. Great thoughts. Of course that will be a HUGE culture shift for most people in most companies and make take 10-20 years to clean out all the people who will feel like talking to the customers on a daily basis is beneath them. But the winners will be the companies that can make that shift.

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  2. (link is broken on darmano, an extra .com)

    in the mystic world it is said that energy follows intention ... this has got to be a truth applicable to business, especially in this time arriving now where "all are one" is a pragmatic statement, not just the observation of a mystic ...

    here is an example from common knowledge ... we all know when someone is being greedy, or selling us, or conning us, we feel the energy of it, no other way to say it!

    corporate motivation, why we are in business and what are we really trying to do has never been so apparent to customers ...

    if it is to make money by screwing people, people feel that, and it opens a door for a competitor

    we are entering a time where your motivation really has to be to help people, and if it is anything else, social media transparency is gonna get you

    to them that hath (customers in mind, all will be given, to them that hath not, all will be taken away.

    that aint religion, that is business 101 in this century

    is that what you are saying?

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  3. i should ad another mystical principle tailored for business ..

    selflessness

    and if you pursue selfishenss all the way to the end, you arrive at selflessness (can explain but am sure you get it, in the end it simply feels best)

    and so one way to talk to businesses is to have them do what they are already doing but MORE OF IT!

    you probably get this too ....

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  4. just noticed I made up a new word in the post: expland
    I quite like it...

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  5. There's just one small problem: some people are jerks. Not to hold it against them, or to even consider it a categorical character failure. It's just more of a personality trait, that isn't always bad thing to have. Jerks usually get the job done. That said, I don't want the grating and obnoxious person I love to work with to scare all the customers away because he just called them "whiny babies who need to get with the program." Just saying, it could happen. And that guy or gal thinks ze's helping—from the bottom of their frigid hearts. So customer service "specialists" in my book, still hold salt. Thank you.

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