Why are 80% of operations destined to be just miscellaneous tasks?

Goal-oriented awareness

What is goal-oriented consciousness?

Generally speaking, all work can be classified into the following two attributes:

1. Purely functional support work;

2. Goal-oriented work.

The sense of value created by the former is very low, but the sense of value created by the latter will become higher and higher.

However, judging from the current situation we have seen among the students in the three classes, more than 80% of the operations students are actually doing the former type of work, which is often not purposeful enough or has no purpose at all.

Let's take an example. Doing customer service, interacting with users, and chatting with users, I believe this is something that most operations people have done, and it is basically one of the common jobs for entry-level operations.

However, when you are doing customer service and chatting with users, you will find that there may be two different ways of doing it:

1. Put the customer service entrance on the product or website. Then, when someone comes to you, you can answer their questions step by step. If no one comes to you, you can just wait and see. Occasionally, you can hold a lucky draw to get the job done. Well, that's it.

2. View "customer service" as part of the entire user experience chain, and even an integral part of the entire marketing. Under this logic, your task may be to use the user feedback obtained from customer service to infer some potential problems in your products and services, or to rack your brains to create some "experiences beyond their expectations" for users and do everything possible to encourage them to help you share and spread more information about your products.

Generally speaking, if you are in the first state, you may easily become a bystander and feel confused - whether you do a good job or a bad job, your day is just like that, just answering calls, answering questions, and preventing users from complaining everywhere.

But in the end you will find that being in the first state is probably hopeless. Because this kind of work, which is achieved simply by selling labor and time, has extremely low sense of value and is very easy to be replaced. Moreover, whether you work for half a year or three years, you may not have grown much.

So, where should growth come from?

You may need to do everything you can to move towards the second state, even if the company and environment you are in extremely look down on the work you are doing. Because the second approach will be more targeted.

For example:

If you follow the logic of the second approach, you might pay attention to all the customer service messages you receive within a week and classify them. Then, through inductive analysis, you might find that a lot of people come up to you and ask, "What is this thing and how do I play it?" So you infer that there may be problems with our product design and expression, or that the product's new user guidance is missing and needs to be supplemented. You then quickly feed back the conclusion to the product, thereby promoting product improvement.

For example:

In order to answer users' questions well, you may try your best to come up with a wonderful and funny reply that will make the users who asked this question laugh, and even be willing to forward your reply to spread it. You may even keep checking how many of the users you have served have actually forwarded their posts to their Moments, and based on that, you can continually improve your user interaction methods, copywriting, and even emoticons.

Don’t think that this is something impossible. Do you still remember the godly customer service girl on JD.com who caused countless people to go crazy about 4-5 years ago?

I myself have personally experienced a real case where our customer service work surprised the users so much that they turned around and recommended dozens of new users to us via Weibo.

A person in the first state may be replaced by an intern who earns less than 2,000 yuan at any time, but if you can enter the second state, you will find that your work output and sense of value will be fundamentally different from before. Once you can produce some results while working in the second state, it will be a huge plus for your resume. For example, if you design a set of funny expressions and make a bunch of funny pictures in the customer service link, and they are spread tens of thousands of times online, for a newcomer, such a small thing can increase your value by 20 to 30 percent.

So, with a sense of purpose, we can talk about something that is actually closely related, which is "efficiency awareness."

Efficiency awareness

From the perspective of efficiency, all your time and all the work you do may be costs. So, with the same cost input, how can you make your output greater? How to continuously optimize your input-output ratio?

You will find that as an operator, the word "efficiency" will run through your career and be reflected in all aspects.

To put it simply, for example:

What did I do this past week? Which things are productive and which things are not productive enough? Which things are particularly productive and worth investing more of my time on? What are the things that are not so obvious that I can probably ignore them completely?

In the same promotion and traffic generation, I have deployed traffic generation content on 10 channels, but in the end I found that 2-3 channels have very high conversion efficiency, while 2-3 channels actually have no response. Should I completely eliminate those channels with no response, and invest more energy and time in those channels with higher efficiency?

At a higher level, for example:

If your boss tells you that you want to triple the website traffic next month, most people might immediately think, “Oh, then we should invest more in advertising. Wouldn’t the traffic increase if we invest more in advertising?”

However, an operator who is obsessed with the concepts of "input-output ratio" and "efficiency" may break this down into very small pieces in advance. For example, where does my website's current traffic come from? For example, what are the traffic compositions from old users and new users? For old users, how much room do I have to increase traffic?

As for new users, which channels did they come from? Is there any channel that has a particularly high conversion rate for visits? So if I focus on increasing investment in this channel, can I get the results I want?

In the end, you will find that a big part of operations work is how to find the path and method with better input-output through continuous thinking, judgment and execution to achieve the results you want.