So I’m reading this book entitled Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe.

Its not a bad book, seems to be catered more towards people that are relatively new to the world of email. Not sure if I would buy it for any of my friends or clients but everything in this book is spot on. I feel a deja vu when I read this book, like I already know all this stuff, and assumed everybody else did also… I forget not that many people have been using email since 1993 :-)

I remember when we started putting together our Internet company in 1994 how nobody knew what we were talking about… its a wonder we ever convinced the bank to lend us some money to purchase the servers!

But I digress… the point I am trying to make here is that early in the book, the authors talk about how email can be counter productive for many people. If you get a few hundred emails a day (like me), or thousands even if you are the likes of Bill Gates, you probably need to figure out an efficient way to handle them. If you were like Bill Gates, you could hire email assistants that do nothing but read and respond to or delete your emails all day.

Another way, as the authors suggest, is to “think twice before giving out your address”. I couldn’t agree more. We don’t tell everybody exactly where we live and generally don’t give out our home number any more (we use our cell phones now for people to reach us) but when it comes to our email addresses, we give it out like a loose date looking to get some action.

Then we get email overload, coupled with the fact that more than 60% of emails today are SPAM, without SPAM filters we would be stuck under a mountain of email. Have you ever given out your email address to a friend only to find that s/he is sending out jokes to the rest of the world and putting everybody’s email address in the ‘TO:’ field? No wonder we have such a big problem with SPAM… our friends are the culprits!

Another solution, one that I utilize, is to give out a unique disposable email address to people and for web sites when you register on line, etc. For example, I subscribe to some news alerts from Google and each news alert has a unique disposable email address. This way, I know exactly who I have given that email address to, and if it ever gets compromised, I can simply delete or inactivate it and voila, probem solved! This system works so well for me that I have decided to make a service available for others.

We’re currently developing it so that it is user-friendly and we hope to have it launched in the next few weeks, maybe month. It will of course be free (ad sponsored) and my hope is that people will be able to reduce their inbox clutter and live their lives more fuller. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

I remember reading a book some time back called Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff by Richard Carlson. In fact, they have a series of Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff books now, almost like the ‘For Dummies’ series of books.

The book was very insightful but I have been thinking lately of its applicability to us in the Customer service world. Maybe this book is more geared towards those that are customers and not those that serve customers?

The more I thought about it, the more I relazed that what the title of the book says is the opposite of what I preach… to some degree. In fact, I think we that serve our customers need to sweat the small stuff!

Of course I’m not advocating that we need to stress about everything. Or for that matter, stress at all. What I am talking about though is the idea of taking care of the small details. It’s the details that shape the customer experience and its the details that we have ultimate control over.

If I were to write a second edition to Mr. Carlson’s book, I would call it something like “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff but Sweat the Details Before your Customer Does”. ;-)

Fred Reichheld has authored a book called “The Ultimate Question” in which he basically argues that customer satisfaction surveys are a waste of time. Well done Fred, I couldn’t agree more.

So many companies spend thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars (depending on the size of the company) surveying their customers. A recent company I was with probably asked its customers 30+ questions!

But Reichheld suggests that there is only one ultimate question that should be asked:

“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”

Anyone who gives you an answer 9 or 10 is a Promoter. Those
answering 7 or 8 are Passively satisfied. A customer that answer 6 or
less is designated a Detractor.

All you have to do is subtract the percentage of Detractors from the
Percentage of Promoters and you come up with a Net Promoter Score (NPS)
which correlates highly with growth and profits.

Pretty simple isn’t it?

The average NPS of corporation in the USA is less than 10%… what is your company’s NPS?

• Harley-Davidson is 81%
• Amazon.com is 73%
• Apple Computers is 66%
• Cisco is 57%
• Fed Ex is 56%
• Southwest Airlines is 51%

For more info on Fred, you can read his blog here.