Tod Maffin

Decades and decades of these marketing optimization books, and still, the marketplace is filled with arrogant, obnoxious customer service, impenetrable access for customers, dense customer service policies, and less and less human intervention every day. Touch takes on that last factor as the lynchpin to fixing it all.

Along the way, we travel through the same old shopping list of do’s and don’ts that marketers and CEOs should be shot for not knowing:
-What’s the difference between good customer service and great customer service? Good service is wholly unacceptable.
-Don’t sell the product, sell the dream.
-Don’t push the features, display the benefits.
-Technology is only as good as the people deploying and operating it.
-Offer prospects the path of least resistance.
-Provide value, don’t just tout yourself.

The most useful chapter is on social media, in which the authors give concrete examples of dustups they have defused, and the tactics to do so yourself. Most of the book is a primer on handling issues by using your people in place of software, and how social media melts at the human touch (a real name, a face, conversational language).

There’s a chapter on HR where Maffin and Blevis offer advice in hiring. If the CEO and CMO are so out of touch to begin with, no amount of HR advice is going to change that firm. They give lots of examples of wonderful firms doing things so innovatively. Unfortunately most people are stuck in dead end jobs at dead end firms. But at least the examples are not the same old tired ones. They are new, and largely Canadian firms trying to do better.

Maffin and Blevis love acronyms. They glory in consultantspeak: ROWE (results only work environment) ATNA (all talk, no action) TOUCH (technology, outcomes, uniqueness, clarity, humanity). It cheapens the message. They try to sum up every chapter with five takeaways – the fingers of one hand, you see. Cheapens the message.

The basic thought is a good one – be human, use humans, and differentiate yourself as human. That’s an important message.

David Wineberg… (altro)