We Need To Be Better
I have been a listener for a long time. Recently, I've had numerous members/guests coming to me with complaints about innapropriate behavior from listeners, long wait time when waiting for a message back, and a majority of other issues. As listeners, we need to dedicate ourselves to helping people. Even if the conversation is "hard" even if its "not interesting" we need to stick through it. it seems so many listeners are blocking members/guests and they tell me about it. It seems that so many listeners are taking 3+ conversations and taking a long time to reply back. PEOPLE. These people need help. They need assistance. We signed up for this. Today someone told me a listener tried to ask for her social media accounts. THAT IS NOT OUR JOB. It makes me so mad, because honeslty I've seen such a deterioration in the quality of listeners over the years. Please. Try to be better. Please.... for them.
@BrianM Thank you.
I partly agree. I've had people complain to me too, and it's tempting to believe that the answer is simply for listeners to listen better. There was a time when I believed that.
However, now I wonder if that's missing the bigger picture. As you probably know, 7 Cups began as a telephone service. Later, there was a transition to the chat system we have now. I imagine it must have been a painful transition for listeners who valued the sense of presence and closeness that can be achieved in a long phone call.
Some time ago now, a project to improve listener training was dropped. The focus had shifted to subcommunities, where a relatively small number of listeners can help a relatively large number of members. @MerlineSaintil , our new Chief Operating Officer, keeps mentioning scale—envisioning a future 7 Cups maybe ten, a hundred, or a thousand times bigger than at present.
Another factor is the cost of listeners. On the surface it can seem like listeners are free, but in fact the best listeners cost 7 Cups money by reducing the uptake of paid-for growth paths and paid-for therapy. Having a lot of good listeners at 7 Cups means having less money to build that future.
Perhaps the thinking now is that 1-to-1 chats are on the way out, just like the old telephone bridge system in its day. Perhaps the future is scalable artificial intelligence (Noni 2.0), huge numbers of subcommunities organized by region, language and support category, and volunteer community organizers instead of listeners. Perhaps this will be 7 Cups' next painful transition, away from a 1-to-1 chat model in which it was just too difficult and too costly to ensure quality.
@BrianM