The American Management Association published John Goodman’s book, Strategic Customer Service, in May, 2009 and I think I have used it every week or at least every month since then. John is my guest tomorrow and next week on the podcast to discuss his new book, Customer Experience 3.0: High-Profit Strategies in the Age of Techno Service. John is the Vice Chairman of Customer Care Measurement and Consulting (CCMC) and has published scores of articles including “Using Service to Grow the Top Line” in the AMA Journal, 8 articles in Quality Progress as well as BrandWeek, the American Banker and Marketing News.
Below is part of our conversation before the podcast started.
Courtesy of http://www.interaction-design.org/
Joe Dager: Your first book was a I kept back on my bookshelf, dog eared, highlighted, tried different things out of it and used it as a reference material. This book, it makes me want to go back and re-read certain sections again. I certainly did not get everything out of it reading it cover to cover.
John Goodman: In fact in a number of areas, I sort of raised issues but for brevity don’t necessarily fully answer them or fully blow them out. I guess that’s one of the challenges is I was trying to cover so much, you know, all the new technology and everything like that, the evolution of the market and customers which are becoming more and more fragmented to the point where one, there was at least twice as much material that could’ve gotten in the book, had wanted to do a 700-page book which no one would want to read, but so that’s one of the challenges.
Joe: Every time you go deal with, I go deal with a client, they have a whole different software products that they use because it’s the best thing since, sliced bread. There’s just so many different things out there to be able to be used that it’s not uncommon anymore that you find people using 10% of 20 different products out there.
John: On top of that, even the broad technology areas, for instance, online communities or Gamification or video. There’re so many different ways each of those can be used. For instance, I just started advising a startup that streams video from your iPhone. If you’ve been in an auto accident, rather than them sending an adjuster out, they send you this App and then you walk around the car and show them all of the different views of the car and, you know, sort of exactly the same thing the adjuster would see with his eyes and they’re recording it. They basically can adjudicate 95% of claims without ever sending the adjuster out and I’m now doing the same thing with a construction company, where rather than send the estimator out to give you an idea of what the job would cost to redo your kitchen, this can now be done using this mobile app. So, that’s one example of video, but on the other end videos used for educating people and setting proper expectations and everything else, so each of those technologies has 20 possible applications and what I did was I sort of hit, “Here are the 3 big ones and here are the 3 big mistakes,” but literally writing some new articles on online communities and on Gamification. We’re now sort of expanding on that stuff.
Joe: Like, it’s never ending, what you can do right now. I always go back and I always reference Apple and remember that every person in the world can practically name all of Apple’s products and they all can sit on the kitchen table and everybody’s defined at what they do and they’re one of the most profitable companies in the world.
John: That goes back to simplification which another interesting thing we may want to just talk about very briefly is Siegel and Gale just came out with a study. They’ve now created what they call the Simplification Index. I heard about it because Toyota was the simplest car and it goes back to the Steve Jobs thing of ‘don’t add functionality, take away functionality so that only the key functions are there.’
Transcription and Podcast with Siegel and Gale author: 3 Steps of Simplification
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