Channeling Emily’s transition

Emily Coltman

One of the fun things to do is watch how people transition from one mode of working to another. It often comes with a dose of reality checking against what they’ve been doing in the past. My current fave is Emily Coltman.

The other year, she eschewed the relative comfort of an audit senior’s position in a regional firm to branch out into the world of video-based training. Emily spent a good amount of time working with More Software. That came to an end and now she has to do the freelance ‘pitch and punt’ routine.’

Most recently, she’s landed a contract that will require she’s away from her home office so is transitioning to ‘road warrior’ status. We hear a lot about mobile workforces, people working from home offices and so on but the transition itself? Rarely. Emily is documenting her progress through her blog and supplements with tidbits on Twitter. It’s a fun read because it is real. Here’s a flavour from her post about moving away from Outlook to GMail via Blackberry:

…as of next week I’ll be starting a project that’ll mean a good bit more time spent on the road. So I’m going to get a BlackBerry. But when I read the spec on the Vodafone site, it sounded like I’d have to pay over £1,000 to get BlackBerry Enterprise Solution if I wanted to read Outlook e-mail on a BlackBerry. And I haven’t got that sort of cash to spare!…

…I need some way to tell my customers when I’m out of the office. If they phone me, that’s fine because I have an excellent PA in the shape of Moneypenny, but if they e-mail me and I don’t answer them, they think they’re being ignored. Not good customer service. I nearly lost 2 bits of work last week as a result of that…

…And Outlook doesn’t give you the Out of Office Assistant unless you’re using a Microsoft Exchange Server. Which I’m not. So on Outlook there would be no way of telling customers “I’m not here”.

Those reasons were enough to prompt me to go Google.

But Tom Gleeson came up with another reason today on Twitter.

I’m about to upgrade to Office 2007. Tom tells me that if I buy the version without Outlook, it’ll be cheaper.

So, to use Google Mail is more efficient, more customer-friendly, and cheaper.

Apologies for yanking so much of Emily’s post but there is much to learn. There are real lessons in here for service providers looking at this emerging market. If the traditional vendors don’t support VSBs then others will step in. People like Emily will silently walk away and then talk about it on their blogs, Twitter and other forums for others to consume and amplify. No amount of market advertising or coroporate PR can push back against that. But in the meantime, if you’re a professional office thinking of taking advantage of the economics that Emily’s way of working afford then what will YOU do to support those people?

Final word – this is an example of cloud computing/the live web encroaching upon traditional modes of communication for people who believe in customer service first.

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Tagged as: BlackBerry, Gmail, google, Microsoft Exchange Server, Twitter