Do Business Well

Demand high standards from your service representatives

Make people smarter! The abilities of real people delivering service to the e-customer services person will need to increase so they can add value to what the system already provides. If service representatives are left innumerate and illiterate, unable to organize, disaffected and reluctant, they will probably not add anything positive to the service experience. The bar is raised for those able to justify their involvement in the process. It has already started to happen.

Is there a future where we will go to one man to buy everything? A man who is wired into the complete network and is fantastically adept at manipulating the available tools to get us what we need. He may be able to serve and support thousands of e-customers because each needs personal involvement so seldom. Continue Reading »

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The human touch is going to come back into fashion. It will (yet again) become the differentiating factor between services. Computers can deliver lousy service pretty much on their own. The very best of humankind needs to be coaxed and coached out into the open. People need to be showcased and supported.

On the way to the virtual world some businesses have a lapse of memory — it’s a kind of ‘Honey, I forgot the people‘ approach. Others adopt an Animal Farm like ‘machine is good, people are bad’ approach. If they adopt the attitude of pigs they should expect to end up as bacon.

Every business should understand that at heart the internet is not a machine, it’s the interaction of millions of people. In the end someone still says ‘I have something for you to buy’ and someone still replies ‘I would like to buy it’. The technology simply represents one set of people trying to sell to another group of people. Continue Reading »

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Service organizations will grow up that will enable demand for ordering and delivery to be met continually. Production will be the only variable. Let me explain. There is a relatively finite amount of purchasing power in the world at any one time. There is also a finite amount of time to view and order products. This means that if there was only one shop to order from it would be relatively easy to build a process and an infrastructure that could cope with the total demand for dealing with orders, complaints, payments, deliveries and returns.

This is how postal delivery services work. They know how many homes there are and organize delivery men to deliver each day to a certain percentage based on the general level of demand. Most of the time there is sufficient slack built into the system to cope with demand blips. This may just mean the delivery people working a little faster or longer occasionally. Continue Reading »

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