The Office of Something
Last time I wrote about a phenomenon whereby, when an organization stands up an Office of [Your Favorite Thing That’s Oh, So Important!], other parts of the company will have a tendency, instead of embracing the spirit of whatever you’ve decided is so vital to your business, of feeling relieved of having to ever again bother with whatever it is. After all, the thinking may go, now that we’ve got a dedicated department for that, we won’t have to worry about it as it’s now their job.
I’ve seen this happen on many occasions, with many different initiatives. Rather than sparking an enterprise-wide interest and investment in this area of work, somehow putting someone ‘in charge’ of it seems to let everybody else off the hook, not only of doing it, but in some senses, even having to think about it. […]
Has CX made us worse at CX?
I began my corporate career years ago at a brand that briefly became famous (infamous, for sure…so much so that I could probably name names without repercussion…they’ve long since learned the lesson anyway) for hiding the phone number for their Customer Service department. Way back in those pre-Google days, it became almost a cultish rite of passage to find the number if you needed to reach them for help.
At the time, this was a scandal (again, they’ve recovered from that and of course, after thirty-odd years, have had plenty of other things to deal with and worry about CX-wise). Everybody acknowledged how poor form it was to make yourself hard to reach and/or difficult to work with. Their recovery from this was pretty dramatic and itself became a victorious tale of Customer centricity and learning from mistakes. […]
Getting CX Right: 1-800 Contacts
My eye doctor recently prescribed contact lenses for my presbyopia. When I say “lenses”, I mean lens because… well, if you’ve not heard of monovision, that’s an article for another time. Suffice it to say, it’s a pretty interesting way for a gentleman of a particular age to avoid reading glasses.
Anyway, when I went to fill the Rx, I learned that basically nobody has contact lenses on-hand in the way that your local pharmacy has other prescriptions in the form of pills, for example. So really the best bet is to order them online or directly from your eye doctor, and usually have them delivered right to your home.
Sure, okay. But when a large (you’ve definitely heard of them) membership club completely let me down, taking well over a week and a half to deliver them and failing miserably not only in setting expectations, but also in keeping me updated on the status, in a bit of a panic (I was running out of free samples my optometrist had given me, and having been to that well many times over the course of my introduction to lenses, I was determined not to beg for more), I went online searching for another provider.
And, boy, did I find it: 1-800 Contacts. […]
It’s how you say it
A few years ago, I ran into the following sign posted on the glass door of the steam room at my former gym (I’m no longer a member there, but I made a note of it at the time): “No Shoes. No Paddle Boards. No Gym Equipment. DO NOT pour water on the thermostat!!” Yes, capital letters and two exclamation points on that last one.
That got me thinking […]
Problem-solvers, or Taskmasters?
I recently pulled some Reserve duty (yes, after all these years, I still do that), and one of the things that always seems to strike me (yes, after all these years, it still strikes me) is what often comes off as a complete lack of CX focus among military folks whose job is literally “support” for troops. Now, that’s not everybody, and in fact, it’s not the case with my current duty station; there, the support folks are top-notch and very helpful. But I’ve been in a long time, and I’ve had very different experiences in different units over my years.
What I mean (at least, as I was reflecting on some previous units to which I’d been assigned), is the spirit in which some of these support organizations go about their job when it comes to keeping us all ‘in the green.’ By green, I mean that we have obligations to stay current in a lot of different areas: health, fitness, ancillary training, and the like. Readiness is the key to the realm in the military as we have to be ready-to-go at a moment’s notice. Maintaining that readiness entails periodic training, demonstrations of efficiency and health, and many other aspects of what makes us impactful in such an instance. So, there are entire offices within each organization (these Command Support Staff) who are responsible primarily for keeping not only records of each members’ currency but also to make sure we each get those tasks completed.
And therein lies the rub: Far too few members of some Command Support Staff teams (with fabulous and remarkable exceptions, to be sure!) see their job as much more than taskmasters…keep on top of everybody in the unit to ensure they’ve gotten their [ahem, stuff] done on time. […]
You don’t actually want feedback
Am I an old man yelling at clouds? Hear me out:
I was doing some cleaning the other day and had occasion to need a moist towelette. We keep some from a big brand you’ve heard of for cleaning tasks like the one I had at hand, and I opened a new package.
Now, they’re designed to come out of the pouch much like a tissue out of a box whereby the next one will ‘pop-up’ after you pull one out. Then there’s a lid that clips down on that opening to keep them all from drying out. Now, by virtue of them being damp (they are, after all, moist towelettes) and crammed so tightly into the packaging, any time I tried to pull one out, it would tear so that all I ended up with was handful after handful of useless shreds of wet clumps. I finally gave up and cut the package open at one end with scissors and put what was left of the stack into a Ziplock bag, sealed it and put it back under the counter when I was finished.
Anyway.
All that to say that, I had some feedback for this brand. […]
