Someone gave me great travel advice once: don’t forget to look behind you – otherwise you may miss a great view.
I tend to apply this advice to more than just traveling—to me, it means we should turn things around to see them from every view, no matter what the thing is. In other words, open our minds to all possibilities.
In the customer-service world, we’ve recently begun switching focus from what we’re doing for customers and onto what customers need.
While it may seem like semantics, a customer-focused approach does change how a company interacts with its customers. All of a sudden, employees are putting themselves into their customers’ shoes. Approaches, processes, goals all change.
In the environmental world, researchers have primarily focused on reducing carbon emissions, creating cleaner vehicles, et cetera, to lessen the amount of carbon dioxide humans are adding to the atmosphere.
It’s been a sensible approach, one to continue. But now, researchers are switching their view and taking a serious look at finding a way to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and either store or, hopefully, recycle it.
According to National Geographic, a handful of researchers and startups are getting into the carbon recycling business.
“You have all this CO2—it’s nasty stuff—what are you going to with it?” Byron Elton of California-based startup Carbon Sciences told National Geographic. “People are saying, ‘Compress it, hide it.’ We’re saying, ‘No, give it to us and we can turn it back into gasoline.’”
While research is still in the early stages and faces obstacles, carbon recycling may be a technology of the future. And it may have significant positive effects on our environment.
This point is: we wouldn’t know unless someone turned things on their heads, saw a new opportunity, and began researching it. It’s the same in the customer-service world.