Tag: customer service

Mindless

FabrizioLeave a comment

A father buys a package of snacks and sees a funny promotion printed on the cardboard.

“Give your child a superhero adventure!”

What they want:

  • Spend a few carefree minutes bonding with their child.

What they don’t want:

  • Fill in a form asking for their gender, email address, telephone number, home address, and a few other personal information.
  • Give consent for sharing data with third-parties and receive further marketing material.
  • Be pressured into a meaningless deadline (two months from the current time) by which they need to submit their child picture. Or else … ?
  • Realize that “giving their child a superhero adventure” actually means having their child’s picture mindlessly inserted into a soulless cartoon frame.
  • Be informed that the final deliverable (the soulless cartoon frame) will be available within 15 working days.
  • Get to know that they can check the status of the deliverable by logging into their personal area (what personal area?).
  • Be given a 8-digit code that identifies the deliverable.
  • Get all the information from a very sketchy sender (fornimascheremarvel23.kinder.com).
  • Receive a link to download the deliverable from their personal area (?) 24 hours later, when they (and their children) have already moved on to other things.

Guess what they get?

Human matter

FabrizioLeave a comment

We have made marketing a commodity. We have made it about scale, repetition, numbers, algorithms. We have made it a matter of point-to-point measurement and one-way funnel.

And now we worry that a machine can take our job?

AI will replace you if you think that marketing is a “if this then that” statement, if you look at a blog post only in terms of keyword density, if you consider an ICP something to bend at your own need.

For all the others, we still very much need you.

It’s not the rise of the robots that frightens me.

It’s the rise of all those corporatists who have forgotten that humans matter.

George Tannenbaum, Rising. Falling. Choosing.

Care

FabrizioLeave a comment

“Press 1 for contracts, invoices, and any other issue” is not a very useful step in the journey of your customer.

“I am experiencing a small technical issue, let me fix that, and I will call you back in five minutes” is a great step in the journey of your customer.

It sounds silly to still be talking about this in 2023, yet so many company fail at the “care” part in customer care.

What does that mean

FabrizioLeave a comment

If you are looking for a way to align across teams, start with definitions. Particularly, definition of metrics and KPIs.

A meeting is a meeting, right? Think again.

A signup is a signup, right? Think again.

A sequence enrolment is a sequence enrolment, right? Think again.

Going through what things mean, exactly, can be a painful, unnerving, boring process. And nobody ever wants to actually ask the question.

But when it’s done and documented, there’s immediate alignment and clarity.

Choose carefully

FabrizioLeave a comment

Hubspot and Intercom are very successful companies. And on the exact same type of communication to their customer, they choose two completely different approaches.

One is before, the other is after.

One raises awareness, the other raises alarm.

One gives you agency, the other takes it away.

One is about hope (“Your contacts database is growing”), the other is about failure (“You’ve exceeded the usage”).

Also (you can’t say that from the message alone, but I’ll ask you to trust me), one is true, the other is not.

There is no right or wrong way to do stuff.

But the choices you make say a lot about who you are and what you stand for.