It's the answer.
What's the question?
(Credit Photo: Dossy Blumenthal)
It's the answer.
What's the question?
(Credit Photo: Dossy Blumenthal)
Luv Is The Answer
The head will make its plans, but the heart will choose its own path.
In other words, we are often driven by our hearts over our heads!
Passion is a powerful motivator, indeed.
When passion calls, do you go running too?
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Heart Over Head
The Best of Jewish Nigunim
"No Dumping"
3 Types of Dumping
Video Of Video
Stone Faces Hide The Heart
"No one [else] cares about how you feel."
'I want' and 'I don't want' aren't reasons, they can only be defined as self-indulgence.
No One Cares How You Feel
Persuasion x 3
Like Removing A Nail
"Don't push my buttons without reading the manual."
- Gadgetmobile, Inspector Gadget
"Remember, you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice, and motivated by pride and vanity."
- Dale Carnegie
Don't Push The Button
Content Filtering - Should We Restrain Ourselves?
Feeling It All
Listening Beyond The Superficial
Feeling Groovy
Let People Feel
Beating Social Media Isolation
Sharing Some Laughter and Happiness
Beyonce Moves Us
Organizations are all interested in what sells—what’s hot and what’s not!
Of course, as advertisers learned long ago, “sex sells.”
What else? Fear sells. All the basic emotions seem to sell—everything from affection and anger to wonder and worry.
When people experience an emotional drive, their internal (biochemical) and external (environmental) states elicit a psychophysiological response that drives mood and motivation.
The result is that when effectively selling to people’s emotions, we address or meet their explicit or implicit “pain points.”
Fast Company (November 2010) has an interesting article called “The Felt Need” that differentiates wants from genuine needs.
A want is one thing, but a genuine need or “pain point” is something entirely different. Getting something we want may be satisfying a nice to have on our wish list, but getting rid of a pain point is something that we literally crave to fulfill from physiological and/or psychological motivations.
A good analogy to satisfying people’s wants versus needs is that it’s better to be selling aspirins than vitamins, because “vitamins are nice; they’re healthy [and people want to live healthier]. But aspirin cures your pain…it’s a must-have.”
Similarly, the article tells us that just building a better mousetrap, doesn’t mean that customers will be beating down your door to do business, but rather as organizations we need to figure out not just how to build a better mousetrap, but rather how to get rid of that pesky mouse. The nuance is important!
In technology, there is a tendency to treat almost every new technology as a want and almost every new want as a need. The result is vast sums spent on IT purchases that are unopened or unused that perhaps looked good on paper (as a proposal), but never truly met the organizational threshold as a must-have with a commensurate commitment by it to succeed.
There are a number of implications for IT leaders:
1) As service providers, I think we need to differentiate with our internal customers what their genuine pain points are that must get prioritized from what their technology wish list items that can be addressed in the future, strategy alignment and resources permitting.
2) From a customer standpoint, I’d like to see our technology vendors trying to sell less new mousetraps and focusing more on what we really need in our organizations. The worst vendor calls/presentations are the ones that just try to tell you what they have to sell, rather than finding out what you need and how they can answer that call in a genuine way.
In looking at the emotion, the key to long-term sales success is not to take advantage of the customer in need, but rather to be their partner in meeting those needs and making the pain go away.
Pain Points, More Potent Than Wish Lists
I really liked the article in MIT Sloan Management Review (Fall 2010) called “Designing the Soft Side of Customer Service” by Dasu and Chase.
The authors write: “Even in the most mundane [customer] encounters, emotions are lurking under the surface. Your job is to make those feelings positive.”
Wow! That is a pretty powerful statement.
Think about it. How often do you genuinely deliver on that positive experience for your customers versus how often do they come away feeling slighted, taken advantage of, maybe even cheated of the service they know they deserve.
Sometimes of course, there are justifiable reasons why we can’t make a customer happy—maybe the customer is simply being unreasonable or is a knucklehead or maybe even some sort of nutcase. We have to use good judgment when it comes to this.
But often there are other problems that are getting in the way of us delivering on that positive customer experience:
Problem #1: We get caught up in the policies, processes, personalities, and politics of a situation, rather than focusing on the customer and their satisfaction. We forget who our real customers are.
Problem #2: We don’t think like the customer. We don’t genuinely listen to the customer or try to understand where they are coming from or what they even want. We are too busy talking the “company line,” playing defense, or taking an adversarial role. We don’t put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, not even for a minute.
Problem #3: We often don’t put the customer first; we put ourselves first. We are more concerned with not making a mistake, getting into trouble, or maybe don’t want to even work “that hard.” In general, we should, but don’t go the extra mile for the customer, let along deliver on first mile.
The MIT article tells us that we can improve customer experiences by designing-in how we manage the customer’s emotions, trust, and need for control (ETCs), as follows:
Designing for positive customer ETCs experiences will go a long way to resolving the problems of poor customer service, where we know and stay focused on who our customers are, can think as they do, and seriously deliver on their needs the way you would want your customer needs addressed.
I suppose if I have to sum it up in a couple of words, it’s about being professionally selfless and not selfish in all our customer interactions.
It takes some maturity to get there, but I think it’s why we are here to serve.
Customer Service Design