Should every member of staff do a stint in customer service?

customer-serviceI’m loving Scott Berkun‘s The Year Without Pants – an account of the time he spent in startup land working with Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.

I’m going to do a full write up at some point, but some bits of the book are so good I can’t wait to share them.

Here’s one. Every new hire at Automattic spends time working in customer service, answering user questions and queries and solving their problems. No matter what their position in the company – everyone has to do it.

The reasons are clear. It helps that new starter understand the customer’s needs above everything else – what their pain points are, what they are trying to achieve and so on.

It is also the best way to learn about how any kind of system or process works, by hearing from those who are using it every day, and running into problems. Fixing those problems is a fantastic way to learn how something works.

So perhaps this is something other organisations could take up? Perhaps when a new chief executive takes over at a local authority, they should spend a week or two on the phones at the customer contact centre, learning directly from the people who depend on the services provided by the organisation.

What do you think?

Why email often sucks

inboxOf all the systems we use at work, we probably spend more time in our email than anything else. I’d honestly say that at least 50% of my work is spent reading and responding to email. I’d wager that for some of you that percentage is even higher.

So, we spend a lot of time emailing, and this depresses people. Reading and writing email doesn’t feel like proper work – it ought to be a tool to let us do our work!

So why does email suck so much?

1) There is too much of it

This can’t be put down to just filter failure. There is too much email. The curse of the carbon copy is part of the issue here – for a number of reasons many people feel the need to copy all and sundry in on emails – often as a way to cover their own backs.

At the same time, most people working in big organisations have tiny mailboxes available to them. Regular users of services like Google Apps, with its vast 40GB mailbox size might be surprised to learn that some people in big organisations are only able to store 10MB of email at any one time.

The constant mithering about deleting email and reducing inbox size doesn’t help and only adds to the frustration.

2) People use it to do the wrong things

Here are a few examples:

  • Sending a short note to just one person? Maybe it would be better to send an instant message.
  • Can you see the person you’re emailing? If so, why not go and talk to them instead?
  • Sending a file round to lots of people to have a look at? Maybe it would be better to use a file sharing service like Dropbox.
  • Emailing a bunch of people to arrange a meeting? Maybe a scheduler like Doodle would be more effective.
  • Keeping an email because it has an important file attached to it? Save that file somewhere accessible where you can easily find it again
  • Emailing a group to have a discussion about a topic? Why not use a system that properly threads a conversation, so it’s much easier to see who is saying what to whom?
  • Hanging onto an email to remind you to do something? Use a task manager instead

…etc

3) Email software is often a bit rubbish

Big corporate email systems often don’t work terribly well, and sometimes encourage bad email behaviour.

One of the major problems is with search – hunting down a particular email is often very difficult. How many times have you seen an email covering previously agreed ground, because the email in which the original decision chain appeared in can’t be found?

A lot of modern email applications are seriously complicated too. Outlook for example has its fans as well as detractors, but nobody could suggest it features an uncluttered interface.

Given how much time we spend in these applications, it’s a real problem that they aren’t that bit more intuitive to use.

4) Lack of context

Once you get past one or two replies to a conversation, email conversations lose their thread pretty quickly, especially when different people get added halfway through.

One of the innovations in the last few years to help tackle this problem is conversation threading, where all the messages relating to a specific thread are kept together. However this is usually implemented – as far as I can see – using the subject line as the key for the thread, which means that unrelated emails that use the same subject line get caught up in the net.

Also – how many people do you know who just hit reply to an irrelevant email to send one on another topic, without bothering to edit the subject line?

5) Vague etiquette

While nobody would ever admit to not knowing how to use email, there are some vague areas where it’s pretty hard to be sure what you should do.

How about:

  • if you are cc’d (or even bcc’d) on an email, does that mean you should reply, or are you included just for info?
  • Is top posting allowed these days, or ought every reply be inline?
  • Is it acceptable for someone replying to an email to add people to the distribution, or even take them off?
  • When should you reply all, and when not?

Fundamentally…

…there’s nothing wrong with email itself. It remains a tremendously helpful way of sending information from one place to another in a speedy way, where an instant response isn’t required.

Often it is just poorly used, and that’s probably because the right tools for the job just aren’t available. More on that in another post.

Congratulations to Sarah Hammond!

shammondWell done to Sarah Hammond, the WorkSmart member who has won our draw. Her prize, if you remember, is a copy of Scott Berkun‘s The Myths of Innovation.

Sarah works at the British Library and you can find her on Twitter as @schammond.

I will be doing my best to pester her for a review of the book once she has finished reading it!

Remember – you can still sign up for membership for the site, which gets you our email newsletter, other member only content and discounts on our upcoming events and services. More on that soon.

Congratulations again to Sarah!

Business reimagined

business-reimaginedI was chatting the other day to my pal Dave Coplin from Microsoft who told me he was deep into writing a new book. Awesome!

It made me go and look back at his previous one, Business Reimagined (free on Kindle!), that was published last year. A delightfully short read at just under a hundred pages*, it’s pretty much the WorkSmart bible, what with its subtitle of Why work isn’t working, and what you can do about it.

Dave describes  the book as

…simply a view of the potential that technology could bring the modern work environment and some recognition of the barriers that will prevent us from being successful.

It’s made up of five sections. The first explores what the problem is, and why business might be broken. Then we move into potential fixes. In chapter two, flexible working; in chapter three it’s social under the microscope; chapter four covers changes to organisation structures and culture that are needed to succeed. Then in the fifth and final chapter, Dave looks at bringing it all together and what individuals need to do to ensure their organisations adapt to the future of work.

For a fantastic summary of the arguments Dave makes, check out this RSA Animate video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G11t6XAIce0&w=560&h=315]

Here are some slides from a talk Dave gave around the themes of the book. They are rather good, even without the talk itself.

[slideshare id=18422332&style=border: 1px solid #CCC; border-width: 1px 1px 0; margin-bottom: 5px; max-width: 100%;&sc=no]

* don’t you find that a lot of these business books could usually be an awful lot shorter than they are? Most are just the same point being made over and over again. I commend Dave for his brevity.

Five for Friday – 21 March 2014

linksFive for Friday is WorkSmart’s weekly roundup of interesting stuff from the week’s reading.

  1. Can People Collaborate Effectively While Working Remotely?
  2. 7 Predications for the Future of Work
  3. Startup culture hacks
  4. The power of technology for learning and why creating together is better
  5. Are we finally seeing the death of “social”?
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