Feeling around for Data

I recently decided I'd better figure out this Twitter thing. Although I've taken to "Facebook", I haven't really be able to get my mind, or more accurately, my logistics, wrapped around Twitter. Still, a couple of respected colleagues had been using it well, and they had written about its value as a business tool.

"Figuring it out" quickly turned into contacting Tech Support. And when I did, I discovered the most amazing thing. Underneath the requests for all the expected information - name, email, issue, etc - there was the following prompt " I feel..."

They were asking me how I FELT about my problem. What??

Now, we all know that some of the biggest offers in these customer support interactions are emotional. By the time we get to contacting the company, we are almost always frustrated, or furious, or hopeless, or at very least embarrassed. But when have you ever been ASKED about those feelings. Sometimes good customer service providers "handle" or "defuse" irate customers, but actually seeking information about how the customer is feeling? Doing something other than blocking or ignoring that whole area?

As it happens, I was okay in this case - there was no time pressure, the stakes were low - but if I had been upset, nothing was going to be more likely to make me feel better than asking me how I felt. It is often the MOST important bit of data, and the one we feel least comfortable addressing.

I heard my colleague, Maureen Kelly, say something profound the other day during a coaching skills course we were delivering. She said, when emotion enters a conversation - especially at work - we tend to do one of two things: we completely ignore it ("She's crying but I"ll pretend not to notice and keep talking.") or we make it the biggest thing in the room. "Oh, my god! Are you okay? I'm so sorry. Nevermind."

What if we made emotion more ordinary, she suggested? What if we treated emotional offers just like any other offer, acknowledging them and then accepting and builing with them productively?

That's what Twitter gave itself the opportunity to do. Cool.

Today's questions, then, are:

• How do we deal with the emotional offers in the scenes we're in? Other people's? Our own?
• What other kinds of data (or offers) might we be explicitly filtering out, or failing to search for?
• What would happen if we invited those into the room?