Interaction debt
When a company is young, with few products and fewer customers, the phone doesn’t ring and customer service is a lonely job.
As more customers arrive, each one is made a promise: we’ll be here when you need us.
Add more products, and each one carries an interaction load as well.
Add shareholders, partners and retailers, and each expects an ongoing interaction as well.
The same is true for your social media accounts. While it only takes a minute to open one, it brings with it the promise of hours (or hundreds of hours) of future interaction.
And it adds up.
If a children’s book author commits to answering the mail she gets from classrooms, each book sold (and each book written) increases the interaction debt, until there’s no time to continue writing.
Interaction is a privilege.
But it doesn’t often scale.