On Customers & Politics
It’s less than a week before the US election, so here are some thoughts on customers and politics.
Here’s a thought that has gone through my head perhaps a dozen times over the past few months: I know how I’m going to spend my Saturday. I’m going to put together a 5000 word missive about who I’m voting for in the upcoming presidential election. It will have all my thoughts clearly spelled out and any rational person will see clearly why I’m voting the way I am, and if they don’t agree with me, they’ll at least see the points I’m making. I’m going to email it to family, post it on Twitter, and maybe even post it on Facebook (I never post on Facebook). It’s going to be really great and the world will be better for it.
I have not dedicated any Saturdays to explaining to the world how I’m voting and I’m pretty sure the trend will continue through the weekend. It’s not that I don’t want to put my thoughts in writing—I’ve never felt more compelled to opine on a subject a length—it’s that I don’t think it will be effective. Most importantly, I don’t think it’s going to change a single person’s mind.
But with the election only 4 days away, I do want to write about politics, because I think politics is important, so I decided to pick a handful of loosely connected topics that connects thoughts on politics with thoughts on customers.
Photo by Ronan Furuta on Unsplash
So many text messages
I was listening to the radio on my commute home from the office the other day¹ and the host was talking about how he’s not donating money to any political candidates this year. He usually sets aside a bit of money to donate to candidates during election years, but this year he didn’t donate anything.
Why? Text messages.
He was getting so many text messages from candidates asking for donations, practically non-stop all day every day, that he just opted not to donate to anyone.
You can sort of imagine how this plays out. The campaign has a list of donors. Someone at campaign headquarters has a button on their desk called “make money”. When they press the button, it sends emails and text messages to every person on the donor list. A small percentage of the people on the list will donate money, but since the list is huge, it’s a meaningful amount of money. You want to strike the right balance and not spam your donor list too much. However, when you’re coming down to the finish line and your boss is hovering over your shoulder asking you to make more money, you keep mashing the “make money” button over and over, hoping for the best. So people get a lot of text messages because someone pressed the button a lot because their campaign needed money.
This tactic works until donors wise up and decide they’re not going to put themselves on your donor list. Usually the way they get on your donor list is by, you know, donating money, so this doesn’t seem like the greatest strategy long term. Maybe that will be a problem for the next candidate. Who knows.
There’s of course an obvious connection to customer experience here, namely, the more a company communicates with its customers and prospective customers, the higher the chance that one of them is going to make a purchase, leading to higher revenue. But if you overdo it—or worse, if you spam people’s cell phones—they might unsubscribe or completely write you off. There’s a real brand cost to be paid and you have to decide strategically how much risk you’re going to take in potential damage to your brand in your attempts to grab someone’s attention².
Don't make fun of your competitors
There’s a thing that happens when you work for a company where you sort of naturally cheer for your team and root against your competitors. If you’re going head to head to win a deal, you want your company to win. You want your competitors to lose.
A natural extension of this win-lose mentality is the development of locker room talk whereby you start making fun of your competitors. I’ve been guilty of this, for sure, but it’s something I generally try to avoid.
The reason is that when you make fun of your competitors, you’re not just making fun of them, you’re also making fun of their customers, and if you want their customers to be your customers (you do), this isn’t a great brain space to put yourself in. “They’re a bunch of clowns”, you might think, referring to a competitor, but what you’re really saying is, “what person would be so stupid as to do business with those clowns?”, referring to your potential customer. Nobody likes to be called stupid, but this is what you’re calling your potential customers when you make fun of your competitors.
Also, it blinds you to benefits in your competitor’s products & services and the weaknesses in your own. If you’re really “better” than your competitor, how come they have customers that you don’t have? Treating them with the appropriate level of respect shows respect for your potential customers.
Flipping to politics, it absolutely boggles my mind how much politicians don’t understand (or don’t seem to care about) this concept. “How could he be so stupid?”, you could say about a candidate, but what you’re also saying is, “How could someone vote for someone so stupid?”, and if that someone is a voter, they’re not going to feel so great when you call their favorite candidate stupid. They’re going to feel like you’re calling them stupid (and the candidate might reinforce this by saying, “Can you believe those guys? They think you’re stupid!”).
I suppose the “make fun of your opponent” tactic is effective for riling up your base, and if you have a strategy that’s predominantly focused on getting your supporters to turn out and vote, it could be effective at trying to win the election. But if you eventually have to lead the entire electorate, that sounds like a recipe for ongoing division.
With a different strategy, where you presumably try to win the vote of every single voter, you have to be careful about how you go about making fun of your opponent. You could be making fun of the person whose vote you’re trying to get, pushing them toward your opponent.
It's not my job to convince you...
At the beginning of this newsletter, I shared about how I had planned to write a long think piece about how I’m going to vote, ultimately deciding against it. The truth is, I’m not sure another essay is exactly what’s needed right now. Essays are great (that’s effectively what this newsletter is), but they’re heavily grounded in rationality, and—bear with me here—I’m not entirely sure that rationality is the most urgent need in our country right now. No, that’s not quite right. We’re in desperate need of more rationality. It’s just that when it comes to convincing someone you disagree with to look at things from your (rational) point of view, you’re not going to get anywhere if you first don’t start from a place of empathy.
When I work with customers, one of my aphorisms (1, 2) is “It’s not my job to convince you that you’re being unreasonable.” I haven’t written about this aphorism yet, but I discuss it in my talk, “Killing the Myth of Soft Skills”. It’s probably one of my favorite and most effective techniques for deescalating a tough customer support conversation and getting to a resolution more quickly.
The gist of this technique is that if the customer is being irrational—e.g. maybe they’re asking for a refund for something that isn’t the company’s fault—it’s usually not effective to try to explain to the customer how wrong they are. My personal tell is that if I find myself writing a really long email to explain why we’re right and they’re wrong, that’s a sign that I’m trying to convince them they’re being unreasonable. But then I remember that’s not my job. It’s literally not my job to tell them they’re not being reasonable, so I need to figure out another way to tackle the problem. Usually that means starting with a heavy dose of empathy and getting permission to re-approach the problem from a shared perspective. Another way to put it: both sides have to be emotionally grounded before the conversation can continue based on reason.
Sometimes I have this image in my mind where the two opposing sides in this country are two people in a relationship. If they were to have a conversation over dinner, how would it go? In our current moment, both people would be so convinced of their own sense of being right—you know, righteousness—that the conversation would break down into violent anger. Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling—these tactics would form the basis of the conversation, threatening to destroy the relationship.
In a conventional relationship between two people, it takes a lot of hard work to get past these obstacles and get grounded again. I’m not entirely sure how we get grounded again as a nation. We’re in a pretty rough place right now. What I do know is that for us to get to a better place, our leaders are going to need to set an example of what it means to lead with a heavy dose of empathy.
Etc.
Yes, I’m working from an office! FullStory’s office is a bit of a ghost town and feels more like a large co-working space, but it’s nice to get away from the house and let my family have a break from me.
There’s concept in clinical medicine called “Number Needed to Treat” (NNT) that I’ve wanted to explore as it relates to customer experience and pre-sales marketing tactics. There’s almost certainly a newsletter to be written about it.