Mention Google Plus among certain crowds and they’ll assure you the platform is dead and claim no one uses it. I’ll be kind and refrain from inserting their names into this post and the more salient fact they haven’t spent any time on it so they aren’t speaking from experience.
But me, well I know better because I use it on a regular basis and tonight I used it to help my son complete his homework. Remember the kid in this post, the one who is going to be Bar Mitzvahed later this year?
Well the almost 13 year-old digital native is working on a group project and needed my help with a variety of things so he used ancient technology known as the telephone to reach out and contact me.
It is probably a good thing he didn’t have to use a rotary phone to reach me because I don’t think he knows how but if he did I’d tell him to dial 213-987-3413. Yeah, that was my first telephone number but I think Ma and Pa Wilner changed it around the time when 213 covered virtually all of Los Angeles and not just the downtown area.
Google Plus Hangouts
Anyhoo, the big guy calls to ask for my help because he needs to use Google Docs and isn’t familiar with how it works so being a good father I told him to drop and give me twenty.
He responded by telling me he didn’t have time to screw around and I said he should have done a better job planning his weekend and that calling me late Sunday night was not the smart way to do things. Fortunately we were on the phone and he couldn’t see me doing my impression of my dad’s stern look.
But I am a reliable dad and tech savvy so while we were on the phone I walked him through how to circle me on Google Plus and then set up a Google Plus hangout for the two of us.
What that did was enable me to share my screen with him so that I could walk him through the steps he needed to take to do his homework. It is a really useful tool and since this is more than just your average dad blog I’ll throw out a thought.
Smart businesses should leverage the power of Google Plus hangouts because you can do the same thing I did for my son on a larger scale for your customers.
Customer Service Hangouts/Video Chat
Imagine for a moment what you could do if your customers called tech support for a video chat in which you could share screens. Think about how that might help build customer support.
Technical difficulties make people crazy. If your customer could contact you from the comfort of their own home and have someone walk them through whatever challenge they faced you might revolutionize the industry.
Right now many people hate contacting customer service because they see it as being a hassle. What would happen if you turned things upside down and convinced your customers that contacting your customer service wasn’t a hassle and would be an easy way for them to solve their problems.
You’d be a hero.
One Company That Caught My Eye
ArCompany has a post that I have linked to in the paragraph beneath this that I encourage you to read. I probably should include it in this ‘graph but I like the way the one below sounds and decided to just keep it there.
No one knows if one day the Warby Parkers of the world will turn into corporate behemoths that are lauded for all the good they do or if they’ll be footnotes but it is safe to say that progress comes from and with the people/companies that are willing to shake things up a bit.
But what I really want to know is why do I remember a 40 year-old phone number but I can’t remember where I left my car keys…
