If a customer leaves negative feedback, files a complaint, gets mad for something, writes a bad review, speaks ill of your product or service, stops paying you, one of two things is true.
Trying to explain they are wrong, and behaving as if 1 or 2 (or both) are not possible is simply a worthless, damaging exercise.
If even Google forgets this, it’s probably a good idea to keep it in mind in our daily marketing practices.
Not being an asshole is a daily choice.
Not letting your mood affect the way you treat others. Not setting the agenda of a company, of a department, of a team on the base of your current focus. Not having the stress derived from your position permeate every interaction, every decision, every exchange. Not allowing busyness to become the answer to all requests of help or information or attention or care. Not giving a bad day, an unsatisfactory job, a regretful life the power to determine the days, jobs and lives of those around you.
It’s not an If-This-Then-That type of situation. We have an active role in deciding how we follow up with actions and words to the circumstances of the world.
There might be mitigating circumstances, and yet we own this.
I have a tendency to get tired of things quickly.
Not that it’s always been my own choice to leave a job, yet this tendency has reflected on my professional experience so far.
For a while, I have thought that the next role, the next company, the next boss, the next team would be the “breakthrough”, the one that would stick with me and keep me motivated for long. Of course, it never was.
And so, I had to start asking some difficult questions.
What do I want? What is important to me? What would make me stick around? Why is it so that I get tired of jobs so quickly? Is there a problem with commitment? Is there a problem with purpose? Is there a problem with focus? If the choice would completely be in my power, what things would I make happen to call it a success?
When you identify a pattern and you have troubles understanding it, the absolute best thing you can do is to turn within and ask yourself some questions. It’s never the job, the people, the colleague, the managers, the roles, the tasks, the offices. Almost never, at least, and it’s a much safer bet to look at yourself in the mirror to see what you can do about it.
It’s not for us to judge what others do.
There are systems in place for that, and as individuals and human beings, we should not feel entitled to decide if other people’s behaviour is right or wrong.
Today we are given the illusion that we have this right, that it is necessary for us to let everybody know what we think about this or that event.
We have lost the capability to use others’ actions for self-reflection (and betterment), and we just cherry pick facts and happenings that confirm to ourselves and the world we are already better, smarter, braver, fairer.
We have lost the empathy to understand others behave like they do not because they are mean, devious, malicious, but just because they are facing our very same challenges, trying to make sense of a life that does not help them in the effort.
We have lost the courage necessary to look within ourselves first, to sit in front of a mirror and think about who we are and who we are not, the things we like and we want more of, the things we dislike and we want less of, and we drown in a continuous flow of superficial interactions that end up being shouts in the dark.
We have lost, and we are losing every day the sense of perspective, of what is important, of why should I care, or what is my role in all this.
We have lost, but we can take all of this back. It’s a choice we make every day.
Some problems would greatly benefit from a more customer centric approach.
One of them is cybersecurity. We all laugh at how silly it is to use “1234” or “p4ssw0rd” as credentials to access any type of service, and we all know we should not use the same password on different websites, or stick the password on our computers. And yet, most people do just that. Because keeping in mind more than a bunch of easy-to-remember passwords is taxing, because not all are aware of password managers softwares (they don’t come preinstalled in your devices), and because even when you install one you realize that the experience is not exactly easy – between syncing across devices, two-factors authentication, master password recovery, and whatnot.
If change in the world is what we seek to achieve, we need to be brutally focused on how the people we want to change go about their routines, what they care about, why they should even bother, and what we can do to actually enhance their lives while change makes it course. Resistance and indifference is the other side of the coin, and in some cases it might mean a whole lot worse consequences than the failure of a business.
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