No Lines, No Waiting
Bringing service to the fore while conserving your cash
Monthly Archives: February 2009
2009
Scott Kirsner and Brian Halligan on getting hired in a downturn
In my after-hours life I’m involved in creating a new world of more effective healthcare. (I didn’t come to this voluntarily; it happened after I got, and beat, a nasty cancer two years ago.) I’ve become an active healthcare blogger (useful practice for the day job), writing under the persona “e-Patient Dave” on my own blog (The New Life of e-Patient Dave) and the e-patients.net blog. (The “e” is for empowered, engaged, equipped and enabled; that’s a story for a different blog.)
Because of that, I’m participating Thursday night 2/26 in an important evening event in Boston called Transforming Healthcare 2009. It’s being moderated by Scott Kirsner, author of the Boston Sunday Globe’s Innovation Economy column, with companion blog and videos. The man knows how to leverage his content.
Preparing to meet Scott, I discovered two blogworthy things today:
- He thinks like me regarding getting through the downturn (downdraft?).
- He just interviewed Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, the hot Cambridge (MA) startup whose “inbound marketing” software I’m using to write this blog. Scott’s column this week is Even in this job market, you can still stand out, and here’s Brian’s companion video, “Getting hired in a downturn.” (Are these guys channeling me??)
What the people in Scott’s column say is consistent with what I’ve said here: in a downturn, activity and opportunities don’t disappear, they move.
HubSpot’s weekly “TV” show, HubSpot.tv, likes to end each news item with a “marketing takeaway.” Here’s your business takeaway for today:
Smart business people figure out what changes are coming, and go there.
As the man said, “Skate to where the puck is going to be.”
Related posts: Collaborating more efficiently, Sprint’s innovative approach to lean customer service
2009
Online appointment scheduling: Sprint picks up on Genius Bar idea to boost customer satisfaction
In my first post here I said It’s RUDE to make people wait. And costly. People hate to wait. That story was about government, where the people in line don’t have much choice. But in retail, impatient people vote with their feet, and in today’s economy, who can afford that?
Case in point: Sprint Nextel. Committed to
customer satisfaction, in September they
announced a new initiative called Ready Now.
It’s all about great service:
“Imagine this: You buy a new wireless phone with all the latest, high-tech applications, and then someone actually sits with you and helps you unlock its potential … Today, it’s real. Today, Sprint launches Ready Now, a revolution in the wireless retail experience.”
CNet’s Nicole Lee noted that they were adopting a well-known best practice: “Sprint’s Ready Now customer-service bent is similar to Apple’s Genius Bar,where customers can get help with their Apple products.” That’s the gold standard; the Genius Bar is legendary for customer satisfaction.
But what good is it to offer great service, then annoy people by making them wait for it?
Apple handles this with a homegrown online appointment system that offers Genius Bar appointments with no wait. Smart. For quicker time-to-benefit, Sprint took TimeTrade’s off-the-shelf system. Within months of first having the idea, they were able to announce:
“Customers have a choice of sitting down with a Sprint retail associate while in the store, or they can make an appointment for a later time. … [They can] schedule appointments either in the store, or online … Customers can visit www.sprint.com/readynow to schedule an appointment.”
That was September 9, 2008. Is it producing street-level results? February 4, 2009:
“A customer satisfaction study by J.D. Power & Associates shows Sprint’s customer service has quickly closed the gap within the industry by 50% versus August. In December, satisfaction of ‘very and extremely satisfied’ topped an all time high of 93 percent for customers that experienced Ready Now.”
Next time you’re in line at your cell phone store, ask yourself: why am I waiting?? Why don’t these guys have online appointment systems? Maybe they just don’t care as much as Apple and Sprint.
Related news item, 2/23/09: Sprint Simplifies the Customer Experience to Build Loyalty (1to1media.com, Peppers & Rogers Group)
Filed under: appointment scheduling, online scheduling
Tagged: customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer service, economy, retail, waiting
2009
Making it through the downdraft, Part 2: Collaborate more efficiently
Yesterday I read a post by Web Informant blogger David Strom, echoing what I’d just said the other day: To survive and prosper in this economy, people are going to need to learn a new level of efficiency. He writes:
I want to see opportunity where others see looming disaster. And I think one way we can try to make things better is become more productive and do a better job collaborating with each other.
He’s right, and this became easier to see when I reduced it from concepts to the concrete.
See, when I hear about the economy as a whole – a million jobs here, $700B there – it seems abstract, all too much, too big for us to solve. But when I bring it down to human scale the truth becomes visible:
- It’s personal, not abstract. Those are real people losing those jobs, and those are real dollars they’ll no longer spend. To paraphrase Tip O’Neill, all economics is local.
- There are things I can do all around me to “nip and tuck,” making things a little more efficient. That efficiency amounts to money I’ve saved, for myself or my company. And that can save jobs.
This is the opportunity Strom points to.
Look, nobody likes to talk about it, but everyone I know is aware of layoffs around them. Six people in my family or my chorus have lost their jobs this year. (Oops, seven since I first drafted this.) But we as Americans and we as global citizens are far from being out of ingenuity. We will manage our way through it, proactively or reactively.
My advice: be proactive about efficiency. Find better ways to collaborate, find ways to nip and tuck. Most of all, as Strom says, notice when you’re wasting time, and knock it off!
Related content: for a real-life example of how our TimeDriver personal scheduler improves efficiency for a realty coach, read TimeDriver eliminates tedious scheduling time for driven real estate coach. She says it saves three days a month of back and forth making appointments!
Filed under: appointment scheduler, scheduling software
Tagged: collaboration, downturn, economy, efficiency
Recent Comments