in Creativity, Innovation, Strategy
Competition in industries is essentially competition between business models. A recent tweet by @TimKastelle, which led to a post about the evolution of the business model concept, reminded me of a great creative exercise to help you look at your and other industry’s dominant business model as a lego kit.
You can then break them down and, like a builder, reconnect them like building blocks to create new business concepts.…
in Creativity
To change things up a little bit I decided to take a taxi after I crossed the border to Mexico today. After you cross the border and walked over to the cab station you’ll notice there are two types of cabs, the yellow ones which are the least cheap and the ‘taxi libre’ which takes you anywhere you want for less money than the yellow taxi. But surprise-surprise, I got on a taxi libre and soon found out that there’s a third type of cab and that I was in it.
Are you kidding me?! Seriously that was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. Nowhere on the cabs is it mentioned that there are two ‘taxi libre’ types of cabs, you really don’t know only after you get on a cab and ask for a price. It’s safe to say that if you’re a foreigner you’re paying a lot of money for a cab and I have no doubt that is why this exists. I’ve taken a lot of cabs down here but this is the first time I’ve encountered this, I mean I was surprised at this nonsense!
I ended up telling the driver to drop me off immediately and went back to where the taxis are stationed. Once there I started asking around which ones were the non-economical taxis, that got some of the drivers really angry because it was as if I’ve just crashed their party. They had no other option than to offer me the normal rate.
So why am I writing this?
Because it just goes to show what happens when you change your routines. If you always stick to the same path, the same way of doing things, you’re missing out on other possible paths. If I hadn’t changed my routine today I wouldn’t been able to tell my foreign friends and readers to watch out for those ‘taxi libre’ cabs the next time they come visit Tijuana!
Give it a try. Instead of driving to work like usual, take the bus. There’s nothing like seeing things up close and personal.
Thanks to all the people who share links there was lots of content this week so the list ended up being longer than usual, all worth reading.
The gap between what is right now and where others are become very obvious when you go from one extreme to another. This past week I spent a little time with a friend I’ve known since kindergarten as he just opened a restaurant in Mexico and I went over to see how he was doing. This is his second restaurant venture for him, his first one closed after a year and a half.
While I was there he was telling me how he’d just bought a new restaurant management software homemade in Mexico. The incentive for him was that the top Mexican restaurant chains, such as Sanborn’s, also claimed to use the same software to manage their operation so in his eyes it was good decision to buy. Nonetheless he asked me if I could give it a test drive to see if it was worth the buy…
Before I dig in I just want to say that with any kind of business if you have pitiful customer support you are in a whole lot of trouble no matter how great your product or service is. With that in mind, here we go…
What you see in the picture above is restaurant management software made by Nationalsoft. The software is still delivered in a package, the serial number is taped on the inside (post it note inside the CD) which registers a single computer. The software is less than 15 MB and takes less than a minute to install. Feels like you’re back at the end of the 90’s huh? Wait it gets better!
If a user loses their password (which did happen) they have to call support who then has them create a .dat file which they then have to send back to support by email so they can ‘do something to it’ to unblock it. After support does something to the file, they’ll send it back to the customer so he may add it to a folder and overwrite the previous one. Are you kidding me!? What happened to the ‘forgot password’ link that is not a default setting in any kind software?
If these people were doing business in the US they would be out of business. But wait, it gets even better…you have to pay them to get the software unblocked.
A modern software company not only provides support by phone but also provides customers with online resources such as FAQ, forums or wiki with answers to common problems. Seems Nationalsoft forgot to add this to their checklist because they’re nowhere to be found. Ironically they do have a Twitter account and a Facebook Fan page! None of which are used as customer support touch points. Promote first, serve later right?
There’s more but I think I’ve provided you with enough information to see how frustrated I was when I was seeing this happen before my eyes. The way this software company is designed to operate is to deliberately waste their customers time, not to help them get going as fast as possible.
Businesses in Mexico still operate by the logic of ‘forcing customers to do what I want them to do’ not ‘I make it easier for my customers to do what they want to do’. The result of operating by this logic is that people who may be interested in your product or service have been programmed to expect ‘below average service’, they expect to be treated like crap. They put more obstacles in place for the customer, never taking into account that the customer is a human and therefore ignoring the fact that humans do make mistakes. In a world where software is as ubiquitous as water, the days of bloated software are over. Today every piece of software (including websites) are designed for humans, not robots. As an example see Facebook’s platform, which now 500 million people use, it epitomizes software designed for making social interaction as simple as possible.
Point: Design your operation so that every interaction your customer has with you helps him do more by making it simple. You’ll not only have happy customers but also angry competitors. Here’s how to do it:
Barriers to entry is what you do to make it difficult for competitors to compete with you (like doing everything in your power to make your customers happy). Barriers to use (such as having weak customer support, no online Q&A, making customers pay because they lost their password) is what you do to impede customers from getting on with it and start using your products, and if all goes well they’ll be very happy and tell their friends about it.
Humans make mistakes, in the online world it becomes even more obvious because everything they do online has to be done through a digital interface. As software has evolved from being used exclusively used on the desktop to be used on the web, it’s become important to focus on designing your software to anticipate the fact that humans need things to be spelled out for them just like children, therefore making it easier for them to do what they want to do. For example humans will also forget things, including passwords, so make sure you cover the basics.
No seriously I’m being honest. If you want to make competitors really angry and therefore put them in a disadvantage, focus your efforts on making your customers really happy by actually giving a damn about them. That’s Zappos secret weapon 
What do you think, is making customers happy an unconventional strategy?
in Creativity, Innovation
If we want to encourage better behaviors, we have to make it easier for people to do whatever it is that we want them to do by removing obstacles in their path. What about if we want to discourage behaviors such as smoking? We put more obstacles in the smokers path, Erik Askin proposes ‘design to annoy’.The premise is that if you design the cigarette package in a way that makes it harder for people to smoke; it might change consumer behavior. You can also suggest a safer alternative like vaping. The users of Golden Leaf Shop have the option when vaping to get e-juices like the candy king vape juice with less nicotine.
This is a clear example of questioning the status quo and purposely breaking the rules to encourage a behavior, in this case, to make it difficult for people to smoke.
When we look at our organizations and institutions from this lens, are we designing them to encourage the behaviors we want or discouraging them? It’s clear that if we want to encourage creative thinking in our organizations then we have to do some major changes as most organizations are designed to encourage predictable outcomes and not new ones.
Food for thought!