Clay Shirky spoke about weirdness of humanity transitioning from scarcity of time to it’s abundance, implications and symptoms of this process. Also of predictions to where this process is taking us.
I would like to extend his hypothesis to scarcity and abundance of material prosperity and whether there are parallels can be drawn with their own implications.
As with a time, suddenly becoming available to people who did not have a concept of leisure, the abandon prosperity of food and consumer goods, cause a lot of social upheaval and incongruity in behavior. My wife, who have never experienced hunger, cannot resist buying grocery until there is no longer space in refrigerator. People in developed countries, like Canada and Untied States, who never experienced any shortage of consumer goods in their lifetimes, addicted to shopping without regard to concepts of “need” and “enough”. Obesity became a subject of economic and political debate and well-healed residents of Long Island, NY stampede to death an employee of local Wall-Mart.
The economics of Enterprise forced us to re-think concepts of “need” and “enough” in the last two decades and optimized the supply chain with “just-in-time” inventory software implementation initiatives, just as operations research of manufacturing practices optimized use of time, decades before society at large started to catch on. I wonder if economics of environment preservation will eventually force more intelligence into our consumption behavior and if so, how it will re-shape marketplace. Will we see massive demand for the software to optimize personal consumption for lasting quality and environmental sustainability, and based on true economic value rather then guilt and fear?
Customer Satisfaction is usually considered to fall into a domain of Market Research, to me however it is one of the most critical traits of CRM universe. After all Customer Relationship Management systems suppose to help you to know how your customers feel about your company, your service and your product at any given time. Therefore it is critically important to enable and optimize two ways communication channels for capturing and analyzing the resulting information flow.
"Unless the source of the statement (or comments) has extremely high qualifications, the statement will be more revealing of the author than the information intended by him. This applies, of course to matters of judgment. A book review, good or bad, can be far more descriptive of the reviewer than informational about the book itself. This (probabilistic) mechanism I also call Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the rule."
The underscored words are mine.
"The information from an anonymous reader on Amazon.com is all about the person, while that of a qualified person, is going to be all about the book"
"Fooled by randomness – The hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets" – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
While completely agree with Mr. Taleb, I would like to pose that this is mostly accurate statement about general sentiment of liking or not liking a book or a product. The reference to disagreement of accuracy of specific fact stated in the book and questioned by the commenter, assumes certain expertise and therefore is about the book and not about the writer of the comment. The reference to specifics of the customer experience with a product also provides more practical information than reflection of commenter’s personality or expertise, and if it is consistent with experience of other customers , warrants further analysis, and perhaps corrective action.
Based on Wittgenstein’s ruler approach I would suggest that CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index) is a relatively low value instrument which is like a thermometer, can point to the fact that your body is not well, but to none of potential reasons for that condition.
Too many CRM initiatives end up focusing on saving cost of serving customers, and too many of them miss the mark. It should be focused on improving the customer experience at an optimal cost. Investing money into pissing off your customers by making them jump over endless call center selections or making them talk to people, who cannot help them, is a lose-lose proposition. It is a lot more economical not to invest into CRM technology at all. Seth Grodin drives this point home:
The only reason to answer the phone when a customer calls is to make the customer happy.
If you’re not doing this or you are unable to do this, do not answer the phone. There is no middle ground on this discussion. There are no half measures. Saving 50 cents a call with a complicated phone tree is a false savings. Think of all the money you’ll save if you just stop answering altogether. Think of all the money you’ll make if you just make people happy.
Your choice.
Sorry for recycling of this cartoon, but I just love it.
A blog about experiences, curiosity and the never-ending search for ways to do better things better