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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The Logic of the Game

To the hotel Manager, the Boss’s game was a good one, so he learned how to play it. It was a simple game, but effective. It was built on the following logic:

Most people today are not getting what they want. Not from their jobs, not from their families, not from their religion, not from their government, and, most important, not from themselves.

Something is missing in most of our lives.

Part of what’s missing is purpose. Values. Worthwhile standards against which our lives can be measured. Part of what’s missing is a Game Worth Playing. What’s also missing is a sense of relationship. People suffer in isolation from one another.

In a world without purpose, without meaningful values, what have we to share but our emptiness, the needy fragments of our superficial selves? Continue Reading »

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According to research company Forrester (www.forrester.com), two-thirds of e-Shopping transactions are aborted after the shopper has already placed goods in the shopping basket, and nine out of ten buyers do not make a repeat purchase. e-Retailers need to make the purchasing process reliable, easy to use and efficient, removing the reasons for abandoning purchases. Human contact needs to be available to sort out problems — at least by email, but preferably also with a phone option. A software device such as HyPhone from Byzantium allows ‘phone- through’ without dropping the Internet connection (www.byzantium.com during office hours for a live demonstration). Continue Reading »

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