Nate Beran writes about how it is time for IT to start trying to change business from within. I have to say that I agree.
This is where companies are going to rise or fall. When there is a partnership between IT and the business, big things will happen because IT does not have all of the answers … but IT does have some different answers or at least some different questions.
The future is coming.
I’ve recently been working through the interview process for a customer service position with a company that I greatly respect. One of the cool benefits of going through the process is the questions I get asked during an interview and how my mind works over those questions during the next couple of weeks.
I work in the “customer service” business every day. Working IT in a higher education setting puts me in contact with staff, faculty, students, parents, and visitors from all different walks of life. While I don’t ascribe to the saying “the customer is always right”, one thing that I have learned is that service counts.
It counts a lot.
I worked here for only four months, but I learned so much about customer service in those four months that it made the four-moves-in-six-months worth it.
The big takeaway for me was that excellent products can bring a person in and can even get them to buy something. Products can always be shiny enough, or “new” enough, or “fast” enough to get a person to purchase them. You can always market your way into purchases.
Loyalty, true customer loyalty and satisfaction, only happens with excellent service. Don’t underestimate what excellent, timely, and available customer service can do for your bottom line. Customers who feel like they are being taken care of are going to speak more highly of your product and your company than they would have if they don’t get that service … obviously, right?
This all seems elementary on the base level, but how many companies have outsourced or claimed to “help their bottom line” by gutting their service department? What a terrible fate for the company because that will rot the company from the inside, not just from the outside. Not taking service seriously means not taking the company as a whole seriously because you are saying that it is the sale that matters only, not the experience that someone has with whatever you are selling.
Just think about that? How terrible.
This goes to even how easy it is to GET service. Don’t bury service and support on the bottom of your pages, requiring people to set up another account just to talk with you. The Apple Stores are important for Apple not just because they sell a lot of stuff there, but because it is a place for people to gather and get their questions answered. That builds relationships and loyalty that Microsoft and Samsung are trying to replicate by having their own stores instead of relying on the Verizons, Best Buys, and independent PC resellers of the world.
Customer service is vitally important to the health of a company. That is one place where investment is necessary and will pay off in the long run.
There is a mini-controversy brewing in New Ulm again, which shouldn’t be surprising. It seems that any change, no matter how small, is met by some amount of disagreement.
The funny thing is that they would support adding such a tower if it were in someone else’s backyard, more than likely. Either that or they wouldn’t care and just reap the benefits of better coverage and service when the new tower came online.
Someone’s backyard is going to be within “eyeshot” of any new tower. Someone’s property is going to be adjacent to any new tower. In any somewhat-developed area you are going to need to add towers as far inward as you can. You can’t avoid that. I don’t think anyone would complain if we could just blanket whole areas with a single tower and provide the sort of service that people want and expect.
Just read up on all of the complaints about AT&T and the iPhone when the 3G iPhone was released. Read about the network congestion and problems people had. The way you fix those issues is to build out the network by adding towers … or by getting fewer people to use the existing tower. One way to have that happen is to force people to move (I guess).
When I talk about wanting to bring better network infrastructure to rural Minnesota, I’m not even thinking of trying to bring new people into the area. I’m not worried about bringing the next Google, or Facebook, or Goofacetubtwipple. No, I’m thinking about the people who are already here with small businesses and jobs already here. I’m thinking of the small business owner who wants to finally add credit card processing using something like Square on an iPad. A LTE connection removes a barrier of entry for something like that to work well. No longer do you need to have a separate internet connection for your business, but an iPad with LTE and a Square reader gets you started.
There is a lot of opportunity to bring about minor, yet significant changes to rural areas by expanding and improving the network infrastructures in the area. The next time you are complaining about your property values going down with the addition of a tower nearby, think of how much your values would drop if a percentage of the population left instead.
I don’t want to trample all over correlation and causation, but there is a lot in play here. Let’s let go of the past just a little bit so that we might march into the future together.
The first commentator on my post about the Wii U stated that he sees gaming moving more and more toward a tablet-centric world. This got me thinking about the future of Nintendo because they are really the last video game console centric company in the world. While Microsoft and Sony still carry on with their respective platforms, they are huge companies with their respective hands in many honey pots.
That means Nintendo is the one company most in danger of being destroyed if the gaming world shifts.
But we really need to keep around a strong Nintendo for that very same reason. They are uniquely positioned to really push the envelope in video games and, more precisely, video game hardware because they need to keep ahead of everyone else in different ways. The Wii might not have been the most powerful system in the world, but their motion-control remotes pushed other companies to release their own motion-control peripherals. I have a feeling that the Kinect would have sat in the workshop for a much longer time had Nintendo not pushed things just a little bit in a different direction.
A software-only Nintendo, having shed its home and portable consoles a la Sega, will be boring and, really, quite useless. The software won’t be as “fun” anymore and will truly lose its luster. It will be a sad day.
Not just that, but I have a feeling that ideas will be slow. What will be next? I don’t know, but I DO know that Nintendo probably has dozens of crazy things just flying around in R&D right now waiting for the right time to head out into the world. Will they all work? Well, HELLLLLOOOO Virtual Boy … no. However, they ARE all valuable experiments in what MIGHT work and helps people get more ideas to grow into possible new interfaces, or products, or … who knows what!?
Nintendo is unique and needs to be strong because they NEED to push video games forward. That’s all they do. If they fail, we’ll lose too much.
I’ve been using Reminders for most of my todo tracking for a while now (since the release of iOS 5). However, I’m starting to read Getting Things Done by David Allen (thanks to Back to Work and Merlin Mann) and I’m finding that Reminders isn’t going to fit my workflow anymore.
So I’m headed back to my original task management app: Things by Cultured Code. I’m already invested in it via Things for Mac, Things for iPhone, and Things for iPad, so I’m covered in everything possible way (at least for now).
Is it overkill? Maybe. Will it help me get things done? Probably not.
I guess only time will tell.