How Poor Customer Technical Communication Hurts Business

How Poor Technical Communication Hurts Business reveals that firms regularly increase their customer service and marketing costs by sending inept letters, emails, technical instructions, and other communications to their customers and employees. It shows how they can increase profit by making these communications more user-centric.

Poor Technical Communication Hurts BusinessBanks, physicians, retailers, and many others routinely send poor instructional technical communications to their customers, resulting in high customer service costs, high return costs, high customer churn, and many related costs. These letters, emails, web pages, and other communications are produced by writers who show little insight into customers’ journeys that include the product or service.

The same problem occurs when firms communicate to their employees, and this results in employees’ anxiety and lost productivity (think about choosing your “benefits”) as well as HR staff time, IT staff time, management time, and employee dissatisfaction. It hurts the relationship that most employers try to develop with their employees.

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Why Design Will Eat User Documentation

Design Will Eat User Documentation and technical writingAs Marc Andreessen once quipped, software is “eating the world,” embedding itself in all material and digital products. The basis of his remark was that digital interaction was an order of magnitude faster and more efficient than analog.

Design will eat user documentation explains that now a much more profound change is afoot because design is permeating everything that humans make. People are more likely to use things that have been explicitly designed for them because products’ ease of use and relevance are greater.

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Agile Digital Ethnography: Secondary Market Research That’s Quantitative and Qualitative

#agile #digital #ethnography: dynamic new secondary market research: mainAgile Digital Ethnography uses an ethnographic research approach to analyze people’s online interactions. It creates a dynamic new market research capability that’s useful by itself and even more when used with surveys, focus groups, field work, and other primary research.

I have learned that Agile Digital Ethnography provides a unique combination of research results. I have used it on client engagements since 2006. Like primary research, it reveals people’s behavior, thoughts, emotions, and motivations in rich detail; however, because it’s secondary research, it’s faster and less costly than most other methods. It’s very useful when it’s conducted before primary research since its results can inform the design of primary research instruments.

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Article Review: Triune Ethics Theory Reveals Roots of Trust and Relationship

Trust Triune Ethics Theory: Mechanisms of #Trust

Trust and the Triune Ethics Theory reviews Darcia Narvaez’s breakthrough Triune Ethics Theory paper and draws new insights into how trust and relationship building work, based on the human brain’s evolutionary development, structure, and functions. And it sheds light on how experiential social media increases intimacy.

Triune Ethics Theory, Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D.

Trust and the Triune Ethics Theory: Article ReviewTriune Ethics is an enthralling, exceedingly useful approach to understanding human behavior because it explains the context of trust and relationship building at a profound level that is actionable for anyone who wants deeper, richer, more flexible connections and collaboration with people. Triune Ethics Theory will help me to educate my clients and teams at a deep level, and it can give you a rare understanding of your own behavior—and that of people around you.

As with all my reviews, I will attempt to summarize this paper’s salient points before adding some reflections and conclusions about how I’m using its assertions in my work. As I have no formal training in neuroscience, I am drawing on lay study as well as psychology and my […]

Book Review: Intriguing Insights into the Potential of Female Leadership

Potential of Female LeadershipThe Potential of Female Leadership explores what lessons we may learn from bonobos’ matriarchal social structure, so we can build stronger, more collaborative human communities and groups. Bonobo Handshake is an enthralling insightful book, which I review here. A tremendous bonus is its similarities to and significant differences from Chimpanzee Politics (reviewed yesterday).

Bonobo Handshake was on the same library shelf as Chimpanzee Politics, but it is a very different book, and in delightful ways. At the same time, it offers intriguing insight into bonobos’ behavior, which differs significantly from chimpanzees’ and holds interesting lessons for human societies and groups. Although Woods is not a primatologist per se, she has conducted extensive research with her husband, who is, so explaining scientific experiments forms a key part of this book.

Bonobo Handshake is rare in a surprising way. Deftly and subtly, it contrasts the joy, harmony and matriarchal structure of the bonobos with chimpanzees’ and humans’ patriarchal societies and violence: the wars in and around the two Congos result in the […]

True Love for Customers [Love in Business Series]

True Love for CustomersTrue love for customers reveals how nonprofit, commercial and government organizations of all sizes can create much stronger relationships and business by transforming how they relate to customers.

Philosophers, clergy and psychologists have long acknowledged love as the most powerful force between humans. Love connects people like nothing else can, I think because love touches and binds together so many parts of the brain simultaneously: Love stimulates the reptilian brain because it’s related to survival. It is central to the limbic brain, which is grounded in emotion and memory. And love throughly engages the neocortex in art, ideals, and many other forms.

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Elevator Pitches are Dead: Use Scenarios to Network into Jobs

Use Scenarios to Network into Jobs and ContractsUse Scenarios to Network into Jobs and Contracts reveals a new way to break through when you’re looking for new consulting work or employment for yourself, or you’re fundraising for your startup or nonprofit. As these pages detail, I’ve learned that “breaking through the noise” is easy when you play music. You’ll learn how to do it here.

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[Updated] Why T-Mobile Needs a Chief Customer Officer

T-Mobile Chief Customer Officer NeededWhy T-Mobile Needs a Chief Customer Officer shows how customers’ omni-channel interactions with enterprises demand profound integration of business processes, and how firms’ failure to “go all the way” in breaking down silos ultimately threatens business. Most firms don’t go far enough, including T-Mobile, and their silo-centric efforts fail to get the job done. To illustrate the point, I’ll share how T-Mobile alienates fans like me by not delivering what they promise.

This story also shows that the need for a CCO is particularly acute in mature economies like the U.S.A. and Europe because their silos were built decades ago, and their legacy processes often adversely affect customer experience.

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Ethnographic Research for Cross-Border Business

Ethnographic Research Cross Border BusinessEthnographic research for cross border business shows how to apply ethnographic research of social media to reducing the risks and costs of doing cross border business and deals. Ethnographic research can transform the value proposition of international business because it’s a very efficient way to conduct due diligence, to study the behavior and motivations of the people that the deal proposes to serve. Unlike traditional research methods, which are relatively slow, costly and qualitative, ethnographic research of social media combines qualitative richness with quantitative analysis. It’s faster and less costly, too.

Ethnographic research for cross border business can dramatically improve the depth and breadth of research for business and corporate strategy, market entry strategy, customer development, human capital strategy, product management, and others since it allows teams to consider more users and to assess their behavior and motivations, which can improve the value of more costly research.

Imagine that you can get deep qualitative and quantitative data on what your proposed clients, customers, employees and partners are discussing among themselves, specifically about the business scenario you propose to address. Ethnographic allows you to validate, with real people, […]

Customer Experience: An Experiential Business Application

Customer experience and experiential social mediaCustomer experience and experiential social media shows how you can succeed in transforming your customers’ experiences with your firm by adopting a refreshing and effective human approach. Transforming customer experience enables most firms to become more resilient and profitable.

If you’d like to watch this post instead of reading it, click the thumbnail button.

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