I think the author misses the most important thing:
The customer.
I'm genuinely mentally obsessed about customer service. When things go wrong (and they do, it's only natural) I painstakingly pull them apart to make sure we know why things went wrong, at what part they went wrong and how we can stop or at least spot in advance the possibility of things going wrong that way again.
I've driven customer service to be the number one thing about all customer interactions with my company. I don't just want my customer to be happy, I want them to be backflipping in the streets happy. It's a high goal to aim for, but I feel it's an area we can strongly compete in.
The other two areas I'm passionate about are customer acquisition and retention. I push our sales team to provide more handholding and pre-sales support for a service company than similar companies we compete with - again, this is a customer service thing and for us service starts at the point of contact, not when the invoice gets paid (which usually comes at the end in my line of work).
Don't get me wrong, the author wrote what works for them, but I felt a lot of the things (like "Work only with the best people") are quite harmful, you're not always going to have the option for the best people, and they're not always the people that work best. Likewise the "be on a purposeful mission" sounds insincere to me. Sure, you might want to do something you enjoy, but not everyone needs to be on a mission to save the world through a photo sharing service.
Customer Service could have been a bullet point on it's own. I happen to think of it as a part of everything, or rather: that everything is part of customer service, and certainly encompassed within "build a beautiful, elegant customer experience." Agreed: mishaps happen, and how a customer handles them is part of the core customer experience. Delighted customers become your extended marketing team by becoming passionate advocates of your service.
I don't think Joe is missing the point at all. As he states: "Being analytical should never mean there isn’t time to do the right thing if a customer is getting “fucked.”
If you can get to the point where your customers are getting "fucked", then you don't deserve them. You can't take pride in a job well done if you're screwing people over.
The customer.
I'm genuinely mentally obsessed about customer service. When things go wrong (and they do, it's only natural) I painstakingly pull them apart to make sure we know why things went wrong, at what part they went wrong and how we can stop or at least spot in advance the possibility of things going wrong that way again.
I've driven customer service to be the number one thing about all customer interactions with my company. I don't just want my customer to be happy, I want them to be backflipping in the streets happy. It's a high goal to aim for, but I feel it's an area we can strongly compete in.
The other two areas I'm passionate about are customer acquisition and retention. I push our sales team to provide more handholding and pre-sales support for a service company than similar companies we compete with - again, this is a customer service thing and for us service starts at the point of contact, not when the invoice gets paid (which usually comes at the end in my line of work).
Don't get me wrong, the author wrote what works for them, but I felt a lot of the things (like "Work only with the best people") are quite harmful, you're not always going to have the option for the best people, and they're not always the people that work best. Likewise the "be on a purposeful mission" sounds insincere to me. Sure, you might want to do something you enjoy, but not everyone needs to be on a mission to save the world through a photo sharing service.