Sean told me he was going into hibernation a few months ago, with the intention of surfacing again after Easter. He reiterated this when we had dinner a few weeks ago.
He’s kept his word. Nice to see him up and about again, I really enjoyed working with him. If you have the time, go take a look at his latest post on The Park Paradigm. And if you haven’t seen it yet, follow the link in his sidebar to AmazonBay, if it still works. He’s a really inspirational guy to work with.
I’ve written many times about the reasons why, in a commoditising world, the only true differentiator is the quality of the customer experience. You can read about it here; earlier, when guesting on Shane Richmond’s Telegraph blog late last year, I covered it here, here and here as well.
Where I work, we take this very seriously. And I mean we, everyone in the firm is focused on the issue of customer service. Which brings me to the point of this post.
A poster at work has a summarised version of this story, I’m sure most of you have come across it before:
Two men were walking toward each other on an otherwise deserted beach. One man was in his early 20s, the other obviously much older. The smooth damp sand was littered with starfish, washed onto the land during high tide. They were stranded there when the tide ebbed. Thousands of starfish were doomed to die in the warm morning sun.
The younger man watched the older man pick up starfish one at a time and toss them back into the ocean, giving them a chance to survive. The young man thought, “Why is he doing that? How foolish. He can’t save them all.â€
As they came near one another, the younger one felt compelled to point out to the older man the futility in his action. “You know,†he said, “you can’t save them all. Most of them will die here on the sand. What you are doing really won’t make any difference.†The older man studied the young man for a moment. Then he bent down, picked up a starfish and tossed it into the water. He smiled at the young man and said, “It made a difference to that one.†Then he walked on, picking up starfish and tossing them back into the sea.
Sometimes we can get lost in the metrics of what we do, we start hiding behind the numbers. This is dangerous when it comes to customer service, particularly if we start managing what we do according to those numbers. To put it bluntly, getting something right 90% of the time is not much use to the people who had the misfortune to receive the 10%. This is the sort of thinking that issues instructions to “downsize” departments by “66.51 FTEs”. This is the sort of thinking that designs economy/coach seats on airplanes, I am still looking for the “average” person they used….. or maybe the 0.89 average person they used after someone else “haircut” the budget….
A person is a person is a person. Flesh and blood. Not a number. Not a statistic. So we have to be careful. Customer experience is not something abstract, it is what real customers experience all the time. One customer at a time.
When anyone seeks to improve “the customer experience”, he or she would do well to think about a real customer. Talk to the real customer. Improve the real experience of that real customer. Plan to improve the experience of every customer, one by one.
When you think that way, and plan that way, and execute that way, you will improve the customer experience. You have to think like the old man in the fable above, and make sure “you make a difference to that one”. One by one if necessary.
Some of you may have noticed that this blog now has a Random Page feature. The way I heard it, StumbleUpon announced a Site Specific Stumbling facility; someone asked Photo Matt whether there was a WordPress plug-in that did something similar, and soon there was one. Because Matt built it. Thanks, Matt! and thanks as well for the link to Curt Schilling, fascinating…. particularly for someone like me who follows cricket….
What Matt did is a perfect example of what I meant in an earlier post:
Scarcity models are by definition not scale-free; a hit culture prevails. Opensource, given the lower barriers to entry, allows someone to build a left-handed credit derivatives juicer because he felt like it. There’s a long-tail effect. You are more likely to find esoteric tools in an opensource world than in a closed source one. Opensource people don’t go around asking “Is there a market for this?†They solve problems and see if others have similar problems to solve.
Things happen in opensource communities, happen in ways that are fundamentally different from traditional models. The WordPress community is a good example of how this happens, how an ecosystem evolves around a many-sided marketplace. What Matt did is what opensource people do. And it is worth bearing in mind that while we speak of the community at large, work is actually carried out by individuals. Individual people doing individual things, but aligned to a common set of values and ethics. Values which include experimentation and learning and sharing and transparency and openness and component architecture and reuse. Values which do not include Not Invented Here and selfishness and not-sharing.
What you see in action is the A in NEA. Anyone can improve it. [See earlier post on CIOs and responsibility]. So now I look forward to further improvements, as someone adds collaborative filtering support to site specific “stumbling”.
If you haven’t seen it before, you should take a look at the video I’ve linked to in my sidebar, showing Shane Warne’s eight greatest balls. I thought the Gatting ball was sensational but the Chanderpaul one is something else.
Incidentally, the videos I show via Vodpod are not mine, there is no attempt at defining ownership of the “content”. You should consider the VodPod sidebar on the same basis as my last.fm or librarything coverage. These things tell you what I like, what I’m watching, what I’m reading, what I’m listening to. Why? So that I can hear from you using some form of collaborative filter, something I can do with quite a few of the tools I’ve mentioned.
I’d recently posted about the reasons why enterprises should use opensource, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, just to switch the conversation from the “cheaper to buy/fix/run” reason traditionally provided. Many of you were kind enough to comment, and a couple of you raised some questions on my first point, on responsibility.
So I’d like to expand a bit on that. When I entered the industry nearly thirty years ago, people used to say “Nobody got fired for buying IBM”. When the battle moved from the mainframe to the desktop, the saying mutated to “Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft”.
So who’s next, I ask myself. And the answers that come aren’t that well-formed. Please flame them, criticise away. I will learn from you. And here they are:
Answer 1: There is no next, and there will never be a next. The industry has changed fundamentally and structurally, and there is no longer any space for a dominant platform. Where there is a platform, it will be an open many-sided low-barrier-to-entry malleable beast, run on classic NEA principles. (Nobody owns it, Everyone can use it, Anyone can improve it). Incidentally, there is no Wikipedia entry for NEA. There should be one. Any takers? Otherwise I will.
Answer 2: There is a next, and it’s here already. And it’s called Linux, and it’s NEA already. Distros can try and dominate, but they will fail. The market will ensure that no distro gets that power.
Answer 3: There is no next, but there will be one. It will emerge from that weird space where mobile meets palmtop meets desktop. The only question that’s left is whether an open iPhone can stave off the linux world for long enough, or whether later generations of iPhone will really go where James Gosling thought OSX would go: Linux with QA and style.
I’m probably biased, I think there really is only one answer. Linux with QA and style. What I’m not sure of is where that will come from.
There’s a lot more to the question of CIOs and responsibility and risk. We live in an age of The Risk Management of Everything; so much so that many CIOs seem to believe that outsourcing is a means of offloading risk. I don’t. Outsourcing and offshoring are ways of making sure you focus on the right things, making sure you have access to the right skills, making sure you can do all this at the right price point.
But the risk remains yours. As long as the customer remains yours.
The day you manage to offload your risk successfully, you’ve offloaded your customer as well.
The customer stays with you because there is a relationship, a relationship of trust; there is a vulnerability within that relationship, a vulnerability that is born of the risks you face together, a vulnerability that underpins the relationship, that makes it human. When everything that is hardware and software is commoditised, there will still be something unique: the relationship. And customers will stay with you because of your service. Underpinned by that vulnerable relationship.
More later.