Introduction: Concerned but Uncaring
In the fifth week of a customer experience nightmare over a fundamentally simple transaction, I am in the midst of a stark reminder of the difference between concern and care. Every agent I deal with in my customer experience disaster is deeply concerned at the incovenience, the delays, their failure to deliver over and over again and concerned that this be fixed. At least, the scripts they cite endeavour to convey that concern.
However, neither they nor their organisation have any care for me. The system is established to move me through a series of deeply concerned transactions with no interest in the overall care for the customer. Nobody has enough care that the process doesn’t work to change it. Everyone accepts their role in the broken process to pass the customer on to the next broken process. Achieving an outcome for the customer is lost in the concerned delivery of tasks that never end.
In a world without care, it is concern all the way down.
Enough Concerned Voices. We Need Care
Everywhere I look I hear deeply concerned voices. So many of our global challenges are roiling debates of earnest concerned voices. We have battles to demonstrate our great concern and the conflicts of our concerns. There’s so much concern that we lose sight of people, action and the specific outcomes of change.
In all this concern, we have lost sight of the obligations of care. Care is not talking. Care is action. Care is taking specific actions for specific people to achieve meaningful outcomes. Care is delivering an unique individual or a unique group a specific outcome that matters to them.
Care involves moving beyond transactions to change the system to deliver better outcomes for those specific people.
If you are concerned, you have started the journey to care. To complete that journey you will need:
- Understanding of those affected by your concerns
- Clarity of their goals and how they want them to be achieved
- Compassion with their circumstances and the experience that you create
- A passion for action to create change for those people
- Willingness to care about those who share your concerns, find them and collaborate with them
Concern without care is simply theatre. Empty voices shouting into the wilderness will not enable the change we need. We need to partner our concern with care to deliver the meaningful action that will make change.
Care in community is the way forward. We can leverage our concerns to make the first steps to change.
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