Olson’s Observations

As long time readers of this site know, I am a very big fan of person to person interaction in business. It worries me that it is so hard to talk to a person these days as a customer. I feel as if that can’t be good for the world. Humans generally like to be able to interact with other humans so why have we gone and stripped out this communication from business (i.e. customer service, customer relations and even sales to a certain extent)?

One word: scalability.

We did it to make companies more scalable. People don’t scale. The more customers you have the more you need to spend on people to manage and help those customers. At least that was the case until you could automate customer service with computers, FAQs and a host of other things. Yay! No more scaling issues. Or so we thought.

Now, after years and years of this scalable method of working with people (i.e. not having people work with other people), people are fed up. They want to talk to humans again (hell, someone even felt compelled to start a website that tells you how to get to a human the fastest on a number of corporate phone trees) but corporations are resisting because, you got it, it doesn’t scale.

I have to wonder if this is a bit off the mark. If you look at the problem head on you can see that people don’t necessarily scale but what about the after effects of providing scalable (read: very poor) customer service and sales?  Yup, you guessed right, poor word-of-mouth which could be one of the biggest business killers.

Word-of-mouth drives a lot of business and yet businesses haven’t taken a lot of time to look at and understand it. If they did they would want to provide better customer service and by better I mean get good people to actually be there for the customers and empower those people to help customers.

Better customer service and support will bring along with it positive word-of-mouth which could actually make having people around to talk to customers a scalable proposition.

Think of it this way: if a customer gets to talk to a great human being who helps them through an issue or to find the right product they will feel loyalty toward the company providing such great service. This loyalty will not only translate in more revenue coming in from the person who was positively effected it will also translate into that person telling their friends about the company and then those friends telling their friends and so on. Now that’s scalable.

I need to see if I can get more data to back this up but I will say this: there are companies that have realized this idea already and it is a big differentiator for those companies.

One of the companies who figured this out early on was FeedBurner. OK, I may be a bit biased but hear me out. At FeedBurner we worked really hard to provide a great experience for our users. Everything from our interface down to the fact that, if you needed to, you could talk to a human being - a real live FeedBurner employee - whenever you needed to.

The fact that humans were available to talk to and help users showed users that we were really there for them and that we really cared about their experience. This in turn generated a lot of great blog posts and other word-of-mouth for FeedBurner which drew in more users (without us having to reach out) and contributed a lot to the success the company ultimately realized.

That is how you leverage human to human interaction to generate word-of-mouth which makes human to human interaction scalable.

Other companies can, and are, doing this as well and I think that it’ll change business for the better. At the end of the day it’s all about people and we shouldn’t ever forget that. It’s always about people.