Dear Twitter (a break-up letter)

I’m sorry, but I can’t see you anymore. It isn’t working between us. I need some space. And by space, I mean, I’m leaving. And I am not coming back.

I know this probably comes as a shock and I’m sorry to be so blunt about it, but I want you to understand that this is about me, not about you. I’ve reached a point in my life where I have to make some changes. Changes for my health, for my well-being, for my sanity even. I want to be happy, and I’m not happy when I’m with you. And honestly, I can’t believe you’re happy with me either. As much as it pains me to let go of a years-long relationship, I need a clean break.

Please don’t cry. We’ve had a good run haven’t we? It’s important to me that I believe much of the time we spent together was positive. In fact, when we first met and everything was still so new and fresh, you opened me up to a world I hadn’t been part of up until then. At first, we had the same friends, then you introduced me to a whole world of new people. I was drawn to the stories and the people that you knew and could get me access to. I met all kinds of other writers and artists and people I admired. You let me see practically inside their heads and how they thought about their work, their place in the world, and shared their successes. I even got to commiserate alongside them for their losses and missteps.

To be part of your life while you became famous was really special to me. I got to watch you grow, to ride along as you empowered people to change the worlds. You grew so powerful that you helped people literally overthrow their oppressive governments, settled debates among titans, and gave voice to the creative and the suffering. I fed off your power. I felt connected. I felt like because of my relationship with you, I had a bigger voice than I’d ever had before.

The truth is, as strong and powerful my love for you was, I was always reserved in our relationship. I allowed myself to be pulled by you. When we’d spend time together, I always let you choose what we saw and how we spent our time. You set the agenda. I was passive about it. Which is fine. I know this was my choice. But looking back, maybe that was a sign this relationship couldn’t last. I gave you too much power over my mental wellbeing. I didn’t contribute, I just consumed. Which made me feel weak and controlled. And I began to resent myself for it.

The wings of darkness are flapping over us

Then things turned. I know this is tough to hear, but it’s as if dark forces took you over. The Twitter I loved started to get moody and irritable. It wasn’t long before politics, fear, negativity, and hate replaced that beautiful window into the worlds of my creative and positive friends. All everyone wanted to do with you was fret and wring their hands about the world. Even though I still wanted to see you every day, I would leave our time together feeling bad about myself and scared for the future.

Your success, in the form of attention and growth in numbers, seemed like it was a drug to you. Even if you knew (I believe in your heart of hearts, you knew) that it was bad for you, you kept taking it. You acted like that attention was all that mattered. You didn’t seem to care that it was corrosive and negative and harmful to the great collective human soul. Attention was attention.

You are feeding on darkness. You have become infected with desperateness and mean-spiritedness. I catch a little more of it every time I am around you. Being with you, I allowed darkness to grow inside me. Which means, I am then feeding your need. It is a nasty cycle and I hate myself sometimes for both what being with you is doing to me, but also by what this co-dependency does to you.

Worst of all, you have started to take sides in some of the debate that you are enabling. You had never done that before. And I find myself almost constantly on the side you chose against.

So, for both our sake, I have to let you go. I’m making a clean break. I don’t trust myself to just take some time off or put us through a trial separation. It’s over. I’m leaving. I’m deactivating my account.

I know that this will have no real impact on you, I’m not naive. I was always just a teeny-tiny blip in your journey. You meant way much more to me than I ever meant to you. But I didn’t want to leave without you knowing why. I still love you enough for that.

I hope you understand my choice. And I hope that somewhere, maybe deep inside you, you know that I’m actually doing the right thing and you can be happy for me.

Anyway. Thank you. I love you. But goodbye.

Steve Medcroft

PS: The steps to deactivating a Twitter account are:

1. Login to Twitter in a browser on your PC.
2. Click on your profile image to open Profile and Settings.
3. Select Settings and Privacy.
4. To save your history, click on Request Your Archive. You will receive an email link that allows you download the history of your activity on Twitter.
5. Click Deactivate Account. You will be taken to a confirmation window that notified you your username is reserved for 30 days

After deactivation, some of your activity may be available in search engines, internet archives, and the feeds of other people. You will receive a confirmation when the deactivation is complete. Then you’re free.

The leap from PBX ACD to CCaaS?

A long time ago, I wrote a book called Call Centers Made Easy. It was an attempt to help small businesses realize that they had a call-center inside their company, in the form of their sales team, their service department, IT department, or Human Resources. The book taught that modern PBX phone systems could give them access to the tools large call centers used to manage interactions between customers and staff more efficiently. The book is outdated but the premise is still valid.

Last week, I met with a client with an HR staff of fifty servicing a national workforce using basic PBX ACD functionality and reporting. The goal was to help find ways modern contact-center systems could improve their staff's workflow and, more importantly, help them serve their customers (the company's employees) more efficiently.

The meeting challenged us to lay out clear gains for the business to move from a PBX technology frozen at it's latest release to a provider delivering under the CCaaS model.

So what are the gains? Do we just rattle off a checklist of features that our CCaaS provider partners offer? Or can we frame the discussion in terms that help a business realize their mission-oriented goals of improving department efficiency, enable them to give better client service, and provide them the kind of analytics that help them make smarter decisions is service of the mission?

Here's the case we made. What do you think? What did we miss? What are the other wins for a customer in this same position? And if you are customer with the same challenge, can City Communications help you solve it?

The potential gains for a business moving from PBX-based call-center technology to CCaaS:

• Improved efficiency for the staff. Today's contact-center systems offer new call-routing and agent-grouping methodologies. You'll be able to design workflows to help your team manage more interactions with finer analytics. You can add the ability for your agents to handle department-bound email, chat sessions, text messages and other digital interactions. Which will improve your staff's work experience and your ability to establish policies and processes for how you're handling contact with your clients.
• A better experience for your customers. The goal with any new system is to find ways to reduce friction for your clients and help you to meet clients where they live (increasingly on mobile devices). Allowing you to offer text messaging, mobile-app integration, and chat capability means clients get better access to your department. Interactive Voice Response and integration to your back-office systems could allow you to open up self-help options so employees can get questions answered outside normal hours and offload some calls and messages. Automatic callback and other outbound-calling services allow clients to connect with you at the best times for them (and help you manage busy times more efficiently).
• Analytics that improve service. By integrating all contact types into one system, you'll be able to improve (and demonstrate the improvement of) service levels. You'll get granular, cradle-to-grave data on how well you're servicing your clients (how often they call, email, chat or text with you). If we can integrate to your current CRM, the systems should be able to share information (contact records and notes posted to the CRM, the analytics being able to reference ticket information to contacts).
• Future-proof investment. Cloud-based systems are services you subscribe to, not products that you buy. Your expense is limited to the subscription cost. No capital outlay. No annual maintenance. No upgrade or expansion charges every year or two. Every company we partner with that provides this kind of service maintains you at their latest release and offers new features as they come online as part of the service.

Originally posted on LinkedIn in October, 2017