Читать книгу Touch - Tod Maffin - Страница 5

A Letter to You from Us

Dear Leader:

First, the good news. The digital world has fundamentally changed how organizations hire staff, market their services, and connect with stakeholders and the public. It’s provided cost savings and greater efficiency. And it’s helped start-ups bootstrap themselves into NASDAQ-listed companies in a heartbeat.

Not without a cost.

The same technology that helped organizations overcome geographically dispersed workforces that crossed the International Date Line also drove a wedge in localized workforces. By trying to make life easier for young families and reduce facilities-costs through telecommuting, organizations instead discovered that team members being distant in the same city created a new series of complications.

Many organizations have embraced digital business tools at the expense of retaining humanity in all of their dealings. In an effort to use high tech to connect with people more effectively, we are losing the human “touch” — that critical person-to-person connection — which is still the engine of commerce.

 Hiring is done by automated keyword searches.

 Offices have regressed to sterile, highly controlled environments.

 Communications staff increasingly rely on scripted responses.

 Websites are designed for search engines, not people.

 Leaders focus on arbitrary “best practices” metrics.

This erosion of humanity in business isn’t a story that’s often picked up by the business media. After all, it’s not sexy and it doesn’t fit the narrative of advanced technology solving all business problems. It’s become clear that in a world filled with complicated web forms and digital marketing services, we have lost the human element in how we run our organizations.

Here is what we offer in terms of restoring the human touch:

 Leadership: defining your organization’s human values, speaking the business language of humanity, becoming a “Chief Humanizing Officer”;

 Customer service: combatting the death of loyalty, fostering a new ethic in your call centres, defining the role of the “brandividual”;

 Web/social: understanding the new human digital metrics, creating a people-based online experience, doing web workflow the right way;

 Marketing: identifying influencers and leading brand advocates, exploiting personal data pools, exploring next-generation human marketing;

 Crisis communications: responding to those with “digital personality disorder,” implementing the SWARM methodology, managing your brand reputation the human way; and

 Legal: approaching necessary legal communications more humanely.

We believe the same telecommuting technology that had its origins in time- and place-shifting our interactions has evolved into “telecommuniting” technology that allows us to have meaningful real-time, and even time-shifted, interactions within an organization as well as with stakeholders, the media, and the public.

Our book will help you discover why and how.

Thank you for picking up a copy and reading this far. Your journey is just beginning.

Sincerely,

Tod and Mark

@todmaffin

@markblevis