Talking to 100 People, friendly and efficiently

I recently reread the cluetrain manifesto, about real conversations with “markets”, and it made me think about a couple of things.

I remembered a recent experience talking on the phone with a government agency. To say the least, the experience was disappointing,  it felt as if nobody in there knew what anyone else was doing.

However, the cluetrain manifesto does not have a real solution for this, because even if everybody was talking straight, mixups would happen, because a person only has a limited mental capacity to keep up with personal relationships.

And especially with phone calls I find it difficult to have “real” conversions, because you never know in what situation you might reach someone, the person called might be angry, tired or just not in the mood for talking a call.

Having read the about the E-Myth recently, I kind of made a connection, and realized, why even when you are trying to do “real” conversions, you will need to have phone scripts that people can use when a customer or contact calls.

A scripted friendly greeting at the beginning of every call can channel a conversation into a friendly mood, that makes communication and understanding possible.

And this is really where technology comes. Nobody can really have authentic conversions with 1000 people, so one needs to rely on an extension of the brain, and that is the computer.

Digital Adressbooks, Call Logs, Email-Archives, Facebook, etc. help to recall a conversion into the short term memory of a person to continue where it was left of. Also CRM Systems and call transcripts are necessery when organisations are talking, because it enables different people to continue conversations without awkwardly having to reintroduce all facts from previous phone-calls.

Cheers

-Richard