[_bxg1]

I'm sorry, but I find this post insufferable. It just reeks of corporate buzzwording with a dash of disingenuous manipulation.

Also, unrelated: I hate those "conversational" customer service bubbles. I don't know what I expect to happen when I click them, but I know that "Jennifer H", whose picture is shown next to it, is not sitting at a keyboard eagerly awaiting my questions. Maybe I expect a chatbot, maybe I expect outsourced customer-service-farms, but I don't click buttons when I don't know what they really do, especially when I know they're avoiding being up-front about it.

[dang]

I hate buzzwordy articles (and chatbox popups) too, but this article is better than usual and I think the point is a good one. There are situations in which you can't win at the old game, but if you reframe what you're doing as a new game, you can turn yourself into an early defining player instead of a hapless latecomer.

We see this in technical domains too. For example, I think Clojure succeeded this way. (We can argue about how much Clojure has succeeded, but it's a Lisp—we have to grade on a curve.) I don't think any attempt at improving on Common Lisp, no matter how technically solid, could have achieved that without "naming a new game", to use the article's vocabulary. Hot newness dominates improved oldness: every element of the set of hot newness beats every element of the set of improved oldness. Elixir/Erlang is another example. I say this article is one of the rarest things, a piece of marketing literature (like Crossing the Chasm and maybe the Innovator's Dilemma) that is useful to engineers.

[_bxg1]

It came across to me as "Just use this one weird trick and you can convince people of anything!" The runner example in particular seemed to emphasize the convincing over the content. I suppose it's possible to use the same technique benevolently, but the article didn't seem concerned with that question.

[brlewis]

Engineers' emphasis on content over convincing is why we often fail to persuade. I think dang is right that this is a piece of marketing literature that's useful to engineers.

[jimhi]

On my website it goes straight to my phone which I do respond to instantly every waking hour which covers about 9am to midnight. I am going to assume for a vast majority of companies you are right, but just letting you know sometimes its real :)

[petra]

How much better are the results that way, versus forms ? is it worth the hassle ?

[jimhi]

It’s not even a question. We do E-commerce all over Southeast Asia and most people are on their phones and can range from not very tech savvy to pretty tech savvy.

We offer form, phone number, email, and chat. I would guess 40% chat, 40% direct email, 15% form, 5% phone?

Personally, I think forms suck on a phone and probably go to a black void I can’t even follow up on.

[DeedsMoraine]

>...Maybe I expect a chatbot, maybe I expect outsourced customer-service-farms...

It's usually a chatbot that handles the repetitive questions when they're worded properly, and when it can't, asks you to hold on a sec while it forwards the question to the customer-service-farm.

[proc0]

Yeah it gives too much credit to those cringy ads that are full of cliches.