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What's Not Best: When Customer Service Makes You Provide Your Info Twice

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We’ve all experienced it: you call your credit card company or some other such company, and are prompted to enter your account number into the keypad. Then, when a real person comes on, they ask you for your account number again.

This is a poor customer experience. Why ask the first time if they are simply going to ask again? I can understand that, for security reasons, they might want the live person to get the number from you. But what possible benefit can it be to them to have you key it into the pad initially if they are only going to ask for it again later?

That’s a rhetorical question. I’m sure the companies have lots of good reasons. But, there are good reasons behind every poor customer experience. We need to get beyond allowing “good reasons” to complicate the customer’s life. And if we say “what’s the big deal with requiring the customer to do another 30 second action,” we aren’t truly thinking of the customer first.

What's Not Best: Fake Real Handwriting

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I received a mailing from a fundraising consulting company today advertising a new “cutting edge technology” that they can offer to their non–profit clients: a font that looks like real handwriting but in fact is not. In other words, fake real handwriting.

This is appalling. Why would a non-profit want to use this service? Plain and simple, the thinking behind this seems to be: “We can make your donors think that they are reading real handwriting so that they will feel that the message is more personal. Then, they might give more.”

If you could read the fake-real handwriting in the image above, you’d see this perspective come out as well. But you don’t have to read that to see it. What can the value be in fake-genuine handwriting (they are calling it “genuinely penned handwriting”) if the person knows that it was created by a machine?

If you know that a machine created it, then it no longer seems personal. So the purpose of this “genuinely penned” stuff seems to depend upon the person thinking it is real. But if you think that it is real, then your assessment of the “personal nature” of the writing is not based on reality. In which case, in a very real sense, you’ve been tricked.

Why do certain direct marketing companies — and, in turn, the non-profits who use and follow their consulting services — reduce themselves to such tactics?

This company is being added to my list of things that should not exist.

One of the Least Known, But Most Helpful, Books on Productivity

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Along with Getting Things Done, one of the most helpful books I’ve read on productivity is a book called To Do, Doing, Done: A Creative Approach to Managing Projects and Effectively Finishing What Matters Most. I actually read both of them at about the same time back when I was first getting into GTD, and To Do, Doing, Done helped created a more complete picture for me.

The book was written in 1997 and, when it gets into the logistics of things, reflects paper-based practices. However, the principles behind those practices are easily transferable to electronic systems, so it remains insightful.

The most helpful take away for me from the book was how to tie your project plans to your day-to-day actions. Getting Things Done also talks about this, of course, but didn’t go into as much detail. This book provided a complementary perspective that yielded some additional useful insights.

The authors of the book are also coming from the 7 Habits perspective which emphasizes keeping our projects tied to higher level goals and values. This emphasis on the higher levels, along with discussion of how to use your priorities at those levels to choose the right projects, helped to provide an integrated picture.

Last of all, the book simply has some good advice on managing projects in general — something that is relevant to most of us, no matter what we are doing. What they wrote in the introduction is still true today:

In our increasingly demanding world, the people who succeed will be the ones who can initiate, manage, and complete challenging projects. They will be the ones who know how to create a vision that engages everyone involved in the project. They will be able to define expected results; delegate responsibility; break the project down into bite-sized tasks; develop achievable schedules; communicate concisely, clearly, and rapidly; adjust quickly to changes; monitor progress; and accept nothing short of project success.

While I’m not recommending adoption of their approach wholesale, it is a very helpful read for those who are looking for additional insight and tools to pick up and then integrate into their own approach.

A Simple Way to Keep Updated With This Blog (And Others)

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Many people subscribe to blogs in feed readers, where they can stay up to date with everything in one place. But there are also many people who don’t do that.

For those who use a reader, you can easily subscribe by clicking on the RSS icon up in your address bar or on this link.

If you don’t use a reader, there is still a very easy way for you to keep up with this blog. You can subscribe by email. Just click that link to sign up. Then, each morning the posts from the previous day will be delivered right to your inbox.

And if you don’t use an RSS reader but want to get started with one, Abraham Piper has a very helpful post on how to do that called What is RSS? A Step-by-Step Guide to Google Reader. He writes: “If you follow these instructions, you will be subscribed to your favorite sites and already saving time by the end of this article.”

Merry Christmas

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Probably not many people are reading today, but I didn’t want the day to go by without jotting a quick note to say: Hope you’re having a good Christmas. And thanks again for reading.

Have a Great Thanksgiving

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I hope that everyone reading this blog has a great Thanksgiving.

I think the blog is off to a great start, and I really appreciate your readership. Incredibly, we’re already at 1,000 subscribers!

If I get the chance, I’ll still do a few posts over the long weekend. Mostly we’ve been focusing on getting unpacked, arranging furniture, and things like that since we just moved a little over a week ago. I hope to get most of that behind us over the weekend.

However you’ll be spending the holiday weekend, I hope you enjoy it and have a meaningful Thanksgiving. And thank you for reading this blog!

What's Not Best: Trying to Sleep on Airplanes

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Normally when I’m on a plane I read the whole time. But today I had to get up at 4:30 to catch an early flight out and decided to sleep.

This was not the best decision I could have made. The space is already pretty small, obviously. Then my seat wouldn’t go back for some reason, though of course the person in front of me was able to put their seat back.

I found it impossible to figure out a decent position to rest my head, and wavered in and out of sleep for pretty much the entire flight.

I think there were a couple of other times when I tried to sleep on a plane, never with much success. Has anyone ever been succesful at getting decent sleep on an airplane? Alternatively, how do you make the most of the time when you fly?