Author: Franz Malten Buemann

As a customer, do you prefer customer care service through voice communication or instant messaging? Have you ever interacted with a chatbot and was it great at resolving your questions? We at Inqoob are working on a no-code chatbot building service, and we are continuously seeking recommendations for improving the efficiency of our chatbots. To know more about Inqoob, please visit our website: https://inqoob.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=group&utm_campaign=discussion submitted by /u/inqoob-Constructor [link] [comments]

We’ve heard the term “travel chaos” since the pandemic started. Yet, two years later, many customers are still experiencing huge disruptions to their travel itineraries and holidays. Staff shortages in airports and train stations are causing chaos across the country.   With summer weather approaching in the UK, many are looking to make travel plans. But…
The post Holiday chaos: what’s next for the travel industry? appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

I’m a fan of appropriate placebos. They often have few side effects, they’re inexpensive and they work when used in the right situations. You can check out my rant on them here, it’s been read millions of times to date.

A placebo isn’t just a medical intervention. It’s any tool we use to feel better in a complicated world. They don’t just make us feel better, sometimes they actually change our physiology and can make us better. A wine label is a placebo for some (expensive wine tastes better, until the labels are obscured) and even search engine satisfaction largely comes from the story we tell ourselves about what we’re using to do the search.

Many forms of marketing are actually efforts to build placebo effects.

But how do we pick them? Why is chicken soup good for a cold but not tomato soup or turkey soup?

And why are we seeing (often to our detriment) a rise in nostrums, conspiracies and stories around things that used to be driven by facts and replicable studies?

For a placebo to be effective, our brain needs room to maneuver. That probably involves:

• Complicated problems

• Taking place over time

• That have emotional implications

When those conditions exist, our minds look for an explanation, firm footing and a chance to make things better.

But that’s always been true. The other factor is that we need to hear about a placebo from someone who had it work. The power of suggestion requires that a suggestion be made.

If an influential person was dieting on chicken soup when their cold naturally got better, it’s not difficult to ascribe the improvement to the soup. Because the placebo was around when the disease ran its course, we associate the soup with the improvement. We can then tell others (increasing our confidence, status and affiliation) in an effort to generously improve the health of our friends. Some of them will also be eating soup when their cold improves, further cementing the advantage that chicken soup has in the race to be the placebo of choice for colds.

We had plenty of placebos of every kind a thousand years ago. We had no idea why the sun rose, why the snow fell and why someone got sick. Placebos were essential for our emotional well-being. But the rise of the scientific method moved many of these stories to the side, because we understood things more clearly, and things that were complicated became less so.

In the last ten years or so, we’re seeing a shift happen.

And, as always, the internet is the agent of change here. The internet has given people a chance to share their fears and confusion and frustration about the world, particularly complicated things that happen over time. The world is not getting more complicated, but our fears and confusions are getting more widely shared, which makes it feel more complicated. Few people rant about gravity, but it’s easy to see mystery or even conspiracy in events and trends that are less simple.

If someone suggests a placebo as a cure, a palliative or a cultural touchstone, it might be used by others. And some that use it will find that it was present as things got better, and so it gains in currency. Not because it worked in the way that vitamin C works to cure scurvy, but worked in the sense that it was co-existent with something else happening.

Placebos that give us solace and patience with no side effects are magical. Alas, when we apply them to areas where we’d be better off doing something that has a more direct impact, we’re making a mistake that costs us and those around us as well.

By every geologic measure, modern human life is a tiny blip, a spark of static on a very long-playing record.

For most of the time that life has existed on Earth, there were no humans. And when there were human-like creatures, they spent much of their time doing not much. Nomads eat when they need to, move around and hang out. It’s not an easy life, but there are none of the modern distractions or problems that urban culture presents.

Grain began to change things, because agriculture produces far more calories per acre, allowing populations to grow… and to store the results of our labor. Stored grain, though, is easier to steal and to tax than something that must be eaten fresh off the tree or harvested.

And so you get markets and wars and governments and the rise of a group of people wealthier than any individual farmer or nomad could be.

This is all mostly irrelevant. It’s irrelevant in the way that understanding how Edison made movies or sound recordings is irrelevant. It’s nice to know the history, but it doesn’t help you win an Oscar or a Grammy.

The two most relevant forces are in a powerful dance right now:

• The carbon-fueled growth of industry.

• The information-fueled growth of ideas and connection.

Industry changed the way the Earth looks from space, it enriched billions of people and it has driven our species to the brink of extinction due to our impact on the climate. It has often been based on caste and coercion, and created both opportunities and problems.

Connection has enabled culture to thrive, and in recent years, amplified by the noise of the internet, it’s also made many people miserable in the short-run.

As we slog through another long, challenging year, one in which these two forces conflict, amplify and engage with each other, I’m remembering what Theodore Parker said more than 150 years ago:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

We really don’t have a lot of choice about yesterday. Here we are, many of us with more leverage and power than any human on Earth had just a hundred years ago.

In the last few decades, so many areas of culture have moved forward that defenders of the status quo are becoming exhausted trying to defend what was. And they sometimes express that exhaustion through anger, division and vitriol.

The good news is that we have exactly what we need to make things better. If enough of us stand up and lead and connect, we’ll continue to get closer to what’s possible.

Here’s to peace of mind and possibility. They go together.