Analog

Brands have failed to fulfill the promise of automation and digital marketing. Genuine is gone. Authentic is gone. Brands have gone "Digital First" but simplified nothing. They've made it very difficult to do business with us from a customer perspective. It's downright disproportionate. You can't you can't really you know work your way through the jungle of service in an elegant way.

 Let's consider, the tactic we know as call deflection. You may save some pennies on the transaction when you avoid that call coming in to a call center. But you probably have an unhappy customer on the other end of the keyboard or telephone line. What that means is people hate your virtual agents and chat bots, as much as they have learned to hate your offshore live agents in Bangalore or Manila. Take Financial Services, In a twenty-year relationship with my bank, they've probably given me fifteen reasons to not want to be their customer. Nowadays, the only reason I'm their customer is because I have all of my banking crap set up online and it seems like a giant hassle to move everything. My bank loyalty might change once someone figures out portability, like they did with cell phone carriers. In Healthcare, you might get four different pieces of e-mail or physical mail communication. Why? I believe healthcare organizations want to create this absolute confusion for us as consumers so that we don't have the energy to fight with them. It causes absolute customer confusion and dissatisfaction; the costs go up service levels go down and it's so disproportionate. There's a great deal of frustration around the investment in digital versus the actual value and what was created from digital. Brands do not seem to understand that the consumer knows everything about your company before any contact with the people responsible for selling or servicing your brand actually occurs. We are empowered with information and insight before we step through the door of your store or your e-commerce site. Brands like Apple and Zappos and Chase Bank have given us this high bar. They've taught us an evolved consumer behavior that balks at any whiff of lesser delivery, whether that's in marketing, point-of-sale or after-purchase support.. So, how does a brand create an analog experience that resonates with consumers and seems genuine truthful and attentive and connected appropriate? The term analog means proportionate, or "correct or appropriate in size, amount or degree, when considered in relation to something else." How do we know this is right? The synonyms for "proportionate" are harmonious and balanced. Exactly what consumers crave in their interaction with brands. This book is about building that Analog Movement, where brands, both large and small, both Ginormous and Long Tail, go further. Go further in how they build a business model that lets them communicate with customers and employees in the way that they want to reached, in a channel they want to that lets them switch easily from one channel to the next easily.