HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS
SOCIAL DISPLACEMENT
60 % of leaders struggle to find soft skills.
For adults too, digital communication often replaces or interrupts face-to-face conversations. Many Americans now default to texting or social media to“ catch up” with friends, reducing the need for in-person visits. Social media use has skyrocketed, and some studies find that heavy social media users have fewer in-person interactions and feel more socially isolated. In short, technology has made it easier to stay connected remotely, but this convenience appears to have come at the cost of less frequent physical togetherness.
In the 1990s and even 2000s, most people worked on-site, generating daily in-person contact with colleagues and customers. Today, a much larger workforce works from home, meaning fewer daily face-to-face encounters during the workday. This shift translates to millions of Americans no longer chatting with coworkers at the office or meeting clients in person each day. Casual workplace conversations, lunch meetups, and Keurig conversations— once a regular part of daily life— have been reduced for those working from home.
LACK OF SERVICE APTITUDE SKILLS
My favorite podcaster, Scott Galloway, recently said,“ More than half of 18 – 24 males have never asked a woman out in person. Think about how tragic that is, that these young men are not developing the social skills … the ability to open and establish contact and connection with someone.” This is frightening.
You can check out the entire interview here:( around the 4-minute mark, he starts talking about young men).
GEN Z HAS TELEPHOBIA
Do you remember when the primary method of communication was calling someone? Can you remember that long ago? Things have changed a little bit. Today, tech-savvy Gen Z is consumed with anxiety by picking up the phone.“ Telephobia is a fear or anxiety around making and receiving telephone calls,” according to Liz Baxter, a careers advisor at Nottingham College in the United Kingdom.
To help, there are now telephobia courses to teach the lost art of a call.“ They’ ve [ Gen Z ] just simply not had the opportunity for making and receiving telephone calls. It is not the main function of their phones these days. They can do anything on the phone, but we
Heavy social media use linked to fewer in-person interactions.
automatically default to texting, voice notes, and anything except actually using a telephone for its original intended purpose, and so people have lost that skill,” she explained in a CNBC interview.
Service aptitude skills do not apply to the technical or operational side of the experience. However, they are among the most critical parts of an organization’ s customer experience. The quality of your customer service and your organization’ s customer service level comes down to one thing and one thing only: The average service aptitude of every employee you have.
Service Aptitude: A person’ s ability to recognize opportunities to meet and exceed customers’ expectations, regardless of the circumstances.
Service aptitude represents the hospitality side only. This means how an employee makes another person feel. To be a company that consistently delivers outstanding customer service by all, these characteristics need to be screened for in the interview process,
20 • SpectrumInsGroup. com