Oozing character and charm*
Your home is too small, too poorly laid out. It’s time to go. So you put it on the market and begin the arduous task of preparing to move. The estate agents come through with their stylists and photographers to do their thing.
Suddenly, your place looks incredible. Clean, uncluttered, filled with light and space. Exactly the sort of home you’re looking to move into!**
It’s a combination of two things.
1. The deceptiveness of real estate photography with its wide angle lenses and hilariously fake grass.
2. All the effort of tidying up and removing stuff from the home. Of course your home can be beautiful and tidy when you don’t actually need to live in it every day.
Inevitably, you’ll face the exact same problem with whichever place you end up in next. The lived reality is always messier than the advertised dream, whether it’s your real estate or your teammate or your customer satisfaction rate.
Switching software tools, for example, might seem like the answer to all your problems. And far be it from me to tell you not to switch to Help Scout…just do it for the right reasons.
The temptation to burn it all down and start fresh is powerful. To clear out all the junk, take what’s left, and move into a beautiful, modern tool that will solve all your problems. The idea is intoxicating.
But a major factor in a successful tool change is all the hard graft of figuring out exactly what you need, removing the cruft that accumulates over years of daily usage. The automations to handle situations that no longer occur, the saved replies for long-resolved issues, the documents still owned by Dave #2 who's been gone since pre-Covid times.
If you spend the time to clean those up, to shift things around to suit your current team goals and capabilities, you might find you don’t need to move at all.
Or you might take a look at your scrubbed clean setup and know for sure it’s time to make the switch, and now you're in a place to move quickly. Making good decisions about which tools to use and when to use them is a critical part of building a customer-centric business.
Choose your tools because they will make it easier to build the type of business you want, and they’ll outlast the novelty effect benefits that almost any old change can bring.
