Sometimes I wonder what is best: whether to continue experiencing cumbersome processes and face tired and often hostile staff to receive a service, or be irritated by incessant irrelevant messages from organisations that took the trouble to digitise their operations, but are now abusing my trust and disclosure of my private information by send me spam messages? By Nimroth Gwetsa, 30 December 2018.

Perhaps there are stages to digitisation grief with notable ones being:

• Grief from long queues owing to manual processes in companies, and
• Grief from underdeveloped digitisation where the primary concern within the company is more about large-scale introduction of technology to enforce internal rules (bureaucracy). Such companies fail to take advantage of the wealth of information in their possession, but choose, instead, to use that information to irritate and frustrate customers. Such companies are more interested in changing customer’s behaviour to conform to their internal rules than finding common ground for their internal and customer needs.

Take, for example, a dealership that has just sold you a vehicle that came with a comprehensive five-year maintenance and service motorplan. Yet, soon after taking delivery, you start noticing and receiving messages from the dealership, of cash discounts they are offering you, to service your new vehicle. Unless, they expect you to promote those special deals on their behalf to people known to you, I don’t understand where else and when do they think those deals will become applicable to your situation as your vehicle is comprehensively covered. Even if they hope you will pass on that information to someone else, why not ask customers what specific (marketing) information they wish to receive than making assumptions about your information needs?

In this example, instead of digitisation being used to enable companies improve on their offerings and their customer experience of their services, they have turned a potential revenue earning opportunity into a nuisance. What was meant to provide sales leads has now turned into spam, worthy of being blocked by customers.

Many organisations fail to effectively use technology. Perhaps their failure is owing to companies being led by strong personalities with a history of successes in the past, refusing to embrace change, but choosing to rely on their tried and tested methods.

Perhaps such leaders do not understand the power of digitisation and opportunities they can seize from it. Call centres and telesales agents are notorious for failing to use information intelligently. Many are a nuisance, only interested in doing the same old things regardless of the profile of potential customers contacted.

As a receiver of such unsolicited calls, it is, sometimes, not worth it fighting with those callers. Rather block their numbers or ignore calls from their hidden numbers if you can.

Information is power and knowing how best to use it is even more powerful.

We are deep into the season of receiving unprecedented irrelevant spam messages, with companies trying to lure us into buying from them. I do not think many salespeople in those companies care much about the damage they could be causing to our relationships with their companies. They care more about the short-term sales they believe they can make from us.

My other bugbear is receiving e-mails from companies requiring that I click on embedded links or download some obscure software before I could access important information I need and they want to share with me. Many Financial Services companies have adopted this irritating pre-access special software download approach.

Ironically, the same companies would say to prospective job applicants and small-business prospectors to limit their pitch to a page, failing which they’d lose the attention of decision makers. Yet they, themselves, fall foul of spamming us with irrelevant, long and useless messages.

Inasmuch as companies have employed digital officers monitoring social media commentary about their products and services, there needs to be officers looking at best ways of mining and using information to not only look for ways to sell more products, but improve services and consumer experiences and interactions with their companies.

During the industrialisation era, many organisations invested in process engineers to improve operations and introduce mechanisation. We need similar, but digitisation era investments to improve product and service delivery to meet people’s needs.

And there are times when it may be necessary to provide detailed information, and others when concise and to the point messages may be more suitable.

Short but relevant information chunks create interest among readers, causing them to yearn for more. Twitter has shown how the sharing of smaller bits of information causes addiction among users. The addiction is sometimes so great, one can easily see users constantly scrolling and refreshing their screens to receive more and latest updates.

Companies should invest in the knowledge of their customers’ and prospects’ needs to stay relevant and appreciated, and should take advantage of their digitisation investment to manage those interactions.

I will stick my neck out and boldly claim today’s readership is indirectly proportional to the size of information broadcast.

On that note, let me end it here, lest I induce some fatigue in you.

Have a blessed 2019! For us, 2018 was a hectic year, full of drama, thrills and disappointments. We hope yours will end on a high and those successes will continue in the new year.

If yours was a year you want to soon forget, may you be strengthened and blessed with wisdom to find ways of becoming a winner in 2019!

Happy New Year