When you want to own your audience, build relationships, and connect with people, nothing beats an email newsletter. Here’s my talk from Web Directions Summit, 2023, exploring some great examples of email newsletters and what we can learn from them.
OK, sure. But sometimes a band-aid solution is exactly what is needed. For grazes, scrapes, or things which are not even really a problem at all but where a gesture of assistance feels good. Plenty of customer support questions fall into this category - maybe some part of the app was down for …
Doris Lessing was famously sick of winning by the time she won the Nobel Prize.
An effective customer-facing team is one that is: empowered: they have the authority and the access to take the required steps, based on their good judgment. well trained: they have the opportunity to continually update their skills, learn from feedback, and share ideas with their colleagues …
The older I get, the more I am accepting of the way my brain seems to prefer to work. I try to look at the shiny tools and appreciate them as nice design artifacts, not magic fixes. The trick is in creating the interface between myself and other people I work with (who quite reasonably need certain …
I would not want the job of CEO (rest easy Nick Francis). So much pressure to hit the numbers and “move the needle” in the short term. Even when you know in your heart and your mind that what might work in the short term may be ruining the product in the long term. How hard it must be to …
I need to say sorry. Sorry to the people I hired when they didn’t have the right skills to thrive in the role. And the people who had the skills but with a mindset that didn’t mesh with the rest of the team. Interviewing is hard work on both sides, and getting it wrong is painful for the …
Artifical intelligence is not actually intelligent, and OpenAI is not particularly open about how they operate.
The first known library in the world was Ashurbanipal’s. It was in Nineveh (near modern day Mosul, in Iraq) in the 7th century BC. Ashurbanipal was a King of Assyria, and he collected thousands of clay tablets, as well as writing on wood, papyrus, and wax. What made a king spend time tracking …
Some days, you wake up feeling great and genuinely wanting to help people. Other days, in customer service you have to go full Eleanor Rigby, wearing a face you keep in a jar by the door. If you’re lucky, you work somewhere that lets you show your real face to your colleagues. It’s where …
A typical customer service interaction, as written by song titles.
Is this how your CEO treats customer service? If so, it’s going to be hard to really deliver a great customer experience
Content Marketing: Creating and sharing helpful information through various forms of media. Discontent Marketing: Convincing people they have a problem that you’ve created and, in an incredible coincidence, sell a solution for.
I chatted with a fellow Australian, James Nathan, for his podcast recently. Talking points: online service, what people ask for vs what they really need, and why I gave up being a web designer. You can listen to the episode or read the transcript on his website.
AI chat bots are good enough if you’re already accepting pretty crappy support as your standard. If you want to deliver excellent service consistently, and you’re not a gigantic company, AI-only chat experiences are not the answer.
I was doing some chatbot reseearch when I came across a patent for chatbots in prison.
I have received the secret leaked code that supports every early stage SaaS application on earth.
I’ve spent a lot of my working life working daily with some wonderful, funny, supportive colleagues all over North America. And some of my working life saying things like these…
If we must Slack, then we should Slack harder than anyone has ever Slacked before.
Running a company “full of A-Players!” is a bad idea, even if you could do it. You can’t.
In defence of the long tech tenure.
I write articles at Help Scout and in this video I share my whole process from idea to published piece. I also reveal my most common mistakes so you can laugh at them. You can read the full article on the Help Scout blog.
The folk at Klaus sent me some free swag, which included a tuna-can like container of socks. Who could resist making an unboxing video for socks in a can? Not me, clearly.
In which I strive to deprive my algorithmic media masters.
Few things irritate me more than companies that let you sign up instantly on their website, but ensure unsubscribing takes an epic quest. The next Mission:Impossible movie is actually based on Tom Cruise’s attempt to cancel a subscription to a newspaper.