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Archives / October 2009
Hertz changes its logo
Hertz, the rental car company, just changed its logo.
I occasionally have fun commenting on companies that spend millions of dollars changing their logo without ever talking to customers.
But this one - if it's true - is really notable. Apparently Hertz conducted customer research - a 25- to 30-minute survey, including live-chat Q&A, according to one person - just to get feedback on the new logo. Just reactions to the graphical change. Not about what being a customer of Hertz is actually like, or why people choose Hertz (or not) over its competitors. Just the logo.
Translation: yes, they did customer research. But no, it still wasn't directed toward improving the customer experience.
What has to happen before large companies take an authentic interest in improving the customer experience? (I'm biased, but I've seen lots of companies dramatically improve their business metrics with some simple, common-sense research.)
A few fun Halloween pointers:
• Chris "in a van down by the river" Farley, on Halloween
• Halloween Health Scare, by Zina Saunders
• Jerry Seinfeld's Halloween memories
• Now on the games list, Plants vs Zombies - a fun casual game for the season.
Reflections on the patient experience (after Gel Health)
I'm just catching my breath after running the first Gel Health conference last week in New York - a unique two-day event exploring "the patient experience."
The event was a success, and there's a lot I could say about what I learned and experienced there. But I'll just share some scattered thoughts.
We can fix healthcare.
I was struck by the number of real-world solutions we learned about. Improving the patient experience isn't something we need to wait for - it's happening RIGHT NOW, and has been for years, and we can learn from what's working:
• Dr. Bridget Duffy spoke about Code Lavender - where it came from, what it means to her, and how it works in several major hospitals. Living proof that the system can change - we can make improvements.
• Medical errors (described well by patient advocate Dan Ford) are getting better response, said Dr. Sigall Bell, and she has the data to show the advances.
• Pediatric wards all over the world are getting the gift of laughter, via Clown Care - we heard from founder Dr. Michael Christensen how subversion, risk, and improvisation played into the beginnings of the program almost 20 years ago (and continue today).
• Dr. John La Puma teaches and advocates, through ChefMD, better health through nutrition, especially where simple, healthy food can replace more expensive drugs.
• Bill Brownstein at Kids RX is running a pharmacy that listens to customers - answers the phone before the second ring - makes friendly deliveries - and still is in business. Serving the patient, it turns out, is good business.
• The cancer center at Johns Hopkins - working with Performance of a Lifetime - is changing the culture, actually making real-world improvements, to the day-to-day experience for oncology nurses (maybe the toughest job in the world), thus improving the care given to patients.
There is hope.
The theme of "hope" kept popping up throughout the event - organically - again and again. Dr. Mark Pochapin talked about why he never tells a cancer patient "you have x months to live," because there's always hope. He brought a former patient, pancreatic cancer survivor, to the stage to prove the point. She just turned 90.
Dr. Robert Martensen talked about dying with dignity - and what it means particularly for older women, who tend to outlive their husbands.
Olie Westheimer talked about a unique program that partners Parkinson's patients with a modern dance company. In the video she showed, patients who are facing this devastating disease talked about the hope and joy the program gives them.
A good first step is to acknowledge the other.
Bridget Duffy began the day by talking about how invisible she felt when she was in a wheelchair after an accident earlier this year.
Later, Dr. Javette Orgain took us through the day-to-day life of doctors in inner-city community health centers in Chicago.
Dr. Jim Withers gave a moving presentation about caring for the chronic homeless in Pittsburgh (and founding a worldwide "street medicine" movement). And the day finished with Daniel & Ken Trush, who run a music foundation for disabled people.
Attendees say it better than I do.
Several attendees have shared how they'd describe Gel Health; here are just three I thought encapsulated it well:
• "A place to be re-energized about the possibilities of what patient-centric healthcare delivery would and could look like, through real-life examples."
• "This is the only healthcare conference I know where the focus is on real people's needs and how they've been met. It doesn't lead with a technology solution."
• "A unique conference highlighting inspirational stories by thought provoking speakers who shared their ideas (and how they made them reality!) for creating positive experiences for various healthcare stakeholders."
Thanks again to everyone who was there.
For everyone else - I hope this gives some sense of the great progress quietly being made in healthcare, and what the real possibilities are for future transformatian.
For anyone who wants to vote for a "next year," I've put up a temporary discount (thru Friday) on Gel Health 2010 tickets. Click here to sign up.
I do hope to start posting videos within a few weeks on
Gel Videos - stay tuned (and meantime, watch a few!)
The employee experience at Gap vs. Apple
Comparing the employee experience at big brands:
At Gap my chief duty was to fold clothing that had been unfolded by customers ... felt like an eternity. This was also true of working at Enterprise rental car and Starbucks, where all of our movements were measured and monetized. Perceptions of time, I found, are closely linked to the employees' feeling of freedom: The more constrained the environment, the slower things moved, and the less happy employees were.In contrast, work at the Apple Store was set up so you were focused on accomplishing goals, not filling up time.
Guess which environment has the best customer experience.
Perfectly fine tips for email management. But (like every other story on the topic) completely misses the all-important step of sending action items to a todo list like Gootodo.com.
A post-email utopia?
It's the end of the email era, says the WSJ. To paraphrase: In the bad old days we were overloaded by emails coming into the inbox, but in our bright future we'll be taken care of by the tools - Facebook, Twitter, Google Wave, and others - which will do all the work for us. We'll just calmly dip into the river of information when we need it, and otherwise blissfully ignore it all.
Something tells me it's not going to go that way.
Tools are essential - and we need better tools than we have today - but it always raises a flag when I see someone announcing a new utopian era - based on yet more tools. (It's certainly an attractive proposition to the software industry - users ceding more control, and more attention, to more and more and more tools!)
The article covers more than the tools, and makes plenty of good points - worth a read. Just beware the boosterism.
Last chance for Gel Health this Thursday and Friday.
It's shaping up to be a great event. And this program, this list of speakers, is only going to run once.
Gel is hard to describe because you have to be there to "get it." Though attendees have described it this way in the past.
But if you're ready to take a chance at a different kind of conference experience, sign up here.
The first Gel Health conference is in a few days. Thanks to the good folks who are reminding the world about it: Eugene Borukhovich, The Health Care Blog, Chris Abraham, Philippa, and several others.
On complex collaboration tools
This is why Google represents the antithesis of Apple. With Apple, it's all about simplicity. I once joked that at Apple they don't start with the product, they start with the advertisements. If they can't think up a good ad--if they can't tell you, in a few words, what this product does and why you simply must have it--they probably won't bother making the product.
Not sure I'd go so far as "antithesis," but good commentary overall on overly complex gee-whiz collaboration software.
If you can't explain what you've built, there's a problem.
Best summation of Gödel and paradoxes I think I've ever read:
Godel proved that any consistent mathematical system that is powerful enough to prove anything interesting will include true statements that can't be proven via that system. So from the standpoint of any logic, there will be elements that must be taken "on faith"A healthy way to think about proof systems (where "proof systems" is intended to stand in for a host of mathematic and scientific concepts as well) is that though they are imperfect in the Godel way, they are the best tool that we have for understanding the world and they get great tangible results in terms of science and technology in a way that nothing else does.
Google Wave doesn't stop information overload
Google Wave is too complex, says Farhad Manjoo at Slate:
it's not immediately clear why you should take the time to learn all this stuff. ...waves with multiple people can get just as messy as a wild e-mail threads--more than a few I took part in devolved into chaos. ... In the same way, Wave does nothing for e-mail overload. In just the few days I've had an account, I've already started getting roped into long chains of messages with people I didn't know. Were Wave to become as popular as e-mail, it would surely succumb to the same noise that now crowds our inboxes.
The solution to overload isn't primarily Google Wave or any other tool, because technology isn't the primary reason for overload. Tools are essential, but overload is primarily a behavioral problem: on the sending side people aren't writing clearly or acting with empathy for the people they email to; on the receiving side, people haven't been trained to spend five minutes a day emptying their inbox and sending action items to a todo list.
Send this man (and Google engineers) Bit Literacy! Or at least try out Gootodo - a simple tool that really does address overload.
Want better Web design? Watch real users:
I've long felt we're missing something with the way we go about user testing. ... I prefer to watch them in their natural environment. That would mean being in a motor home, with restless dogs and a kid playing the electronic keyboard while another one is yelling that he can't concentrate to read and watching the mom struggling to find directions somewhere in South Carolina using a cell phone with a screen smaller than a Hershey's candy bar. Understanding the true user experience, for me, means actually going out and experiencing what your site users are going through.
The New Yorker nails book publicity
Masterful New Yorker piece reflecting the trend of book publishers to leave all publicity to the author:
If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they're better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent.
Yes, it's a humor piece. No, it's not too far from the truth.
Also read Secrets of book publishing I wish I had known, in which I describe some of the same problems in publisher/author contracts. (Summary: If you're going to have to blog for publicity yourself, you might as well self-publish.)
(Thanks to Erin McKean for the pointer.)
Video of Jim Withers, street medicine founder
Dr. Jim Withers is speaking at Gel Health in a couple of weeks. This is the trailer for One Bridge to the Next, a documentary made about his outstanding work with Operation Safety Net, which brings medical care to the homeless population of Pittsburgh.
Snacks vs. gourmet meals in online content
Lots of the popular posts on Twitter, digg, etc. promise "7 ways to..." or "15 reasons you should..." or similar bite-sized snack-nuggets of infotainment. And that's all fine. The world of bite-sized Internet content is quick and easy to consume, occasionally informative or very funny, and almost always free. No complaints there.
But what happens when we shift so far to the snacky items that there aren't enough readers seeking the longer piece, written by a subject matter expert? (And by "expert" I mean someone who's spent longer in the field than the Web has been around.)
The publisher of Cook's Illustrated magazine puts it well:
...in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. ...To survive, those of us who believe that inexperience rarely leads to wisdom need to swim against the tide, better define our brands, prove our worth, ask to be paid for what we do, and refuse to climb aboard this ship of fools, the one where everyone has an equal voice. Google "broccoli casserole" and make the first recipe you find. I guarantee it will be disappointing. The world needs fewer opinions and more thoughtful expertise -- the kind that comes from real experience, the hard-won blood-on-the-floor kind. I like my reporters, my pilots, my pundits, my doctors, my teachers and my cooking instructors to have graduated from the school of hard knocks.
Gel Health is two weeks away...
The first Gel Health conference, focused on the patient experience, is just two weeks away! It's on Thur-Fri, Oct 22-23 in NYC - with attendees from organizations like Elsevier, Google, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York-Presbyterian, Philips, Priority Health, and dozens of others.
Attendees include...
• 14 presidents, CEOs, and founders
• 7 principals
• several professors, directors, managers, and VPs
• and a chief operating officer, a director of nursing, a health counselor, and a head of healthcare.
(See whole attendee list here.)
This is a great chance to expand your horizons, make new connections, and show support for the Gel community. Hope you'll sign up!
Does customer experience affect the CIO?
From a recent chat with someone researching CIOs and customer experience (very paraphrased, but you get the idea):
Q (them) - Since CIOs spend their days deciding which system to buy, or migrate, or install, do they really need to worry about the customer experience?
A (me) - Of course they do. Look at Google. Look at Amazon. Big technology-driven companies that talk explicitly about doing right by their users, from the CEO on down, and they're doing quite well compared to competitors.
Q - But maybe that's just a factor of their age. Newer companies, born in the Web era, tend to be more customer-focused.
A - Hardly. Don't get fooled by survivorship bias. There were dozens of search engines battling it out in the 1990s, but only one was laser-focused on serving the user, and that was Google, and it won. The rest of them - which reached for short-term gains, or ridiculous advertising, or meaningless "brand building," or other user-hostile investments, died or are close enough to it. Same thing with online bookstores, incidentally. Only one of dozens really listened to its customers, and it won.
Q - Then why don't you see the same thing happening in companies older than the Web?
A - There are some customer-focused older companies out there, but they're rare. The traditional mode of business for the past 100 years has been customer-hostile, and it's really tough for a company to "turn the aircraft carrier around" to work in a different way. It will happen, though, and when it does, you'll see: an older company "gets religion," gradually becomes customer-centric, and then grows to dominate its competitors like never before in its history.
Q - Well, for a CIO who's mainly focused on technology, how are they supposed to help make this change?
A - Just make the choice. All a CIO has to say is, I'm now committing my career - come what may - to being user-centered, rather than technology-centered, or system-centered, or what have you. And to be clear, depending on the organization, this might get the CIO fired. But there are plenty of executives out there who have made this commitment in their career, and when they get to an organization that values a customer-centric way of business, they thrive and have impact way above where they were before.
Q - Maybe CIOs can only make this change if they have the right technology, or experts, available to them.
A - I'll tell you a story. There once was a company founder who stood by the door of his store every day to talk to customers as they walked out. He used the tool I'll call "listening." Did they find what they need? Is there anything they particularly liked or didn't like? He chatted them up and learned how he could serve them better. By imbuing his company with the simple ethic of listening to customers, Joyce Hall built a company that is about to celebrate its 100th anniversary - Hallmark. His tools were available before the Internet. They're still available today. (Read the Hallmark case study.)
Q - But aren't tools important, like whether to use one enterprise platform over another?
A - Of course. For the CIO they're vital, a daily question and constant concern. But that's all secondary to the very low-tech, common-sense, basic task of learning the needs of the people you serve. They could be customers, or prospects, or employees internal to the company - doesn't matter. Listen to the people you serve. Talk to them. Ask them what they need. If you don't do this, you're not user-centered and it's hard to chart any meaningful direction for the enterprise. Too many CIOs get lost in the thicket of what platforms are hot today, what buzzwords are ascendant, what tool got the reviews here, or there, and never take time to sit down with a user and observe, and listen, and talk.
Q - I'll admit, that's pretty radical.
A - Yep.
I'm speaking at the Apple Store Soho tomorrow, Wednesday about information management and "Bit Literacy." Free event starts at 6:30pm.
If you can't make it, drop by a few days later when Spike Jonze will be there talking about "Where the Wild Things Are."
Why Charlie Brooker won't switch to a Mac:
The harder they try to convince me, the more I'm repelled. To them, I'm a sheep. And they're right. I'm a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I'm also a masochist. And that's why I continue to use Windows - horrible Windows - even though I hate every second of it. It's grim, it's slow, everything's badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn't change it for the world, because I'm an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.
Why Chicago should celebrate losing the Olympic bid
Fun discussion about the economics of an Olympic bid: "it seems reasonable to assume that the Olympics [in Chicago] would have cost at least $5 billion. That would be enough to finance a great engineering college, an online university serving tens of thousands of students, an electric car manufacturer, a bunch of high-tech businesses, a free wireless Internet covering the entire city, and still have a lot left over."
(Couple of other good links in the comments, too.)
Another plea for the media diet
We live in a stuff-a-lanche, says this Guardian columnist:
Every day we humans gleefully churn out yet more books and films and TV shows and videogames and websites and magazine articles and blog posts and emails and text messages, all of it hanging around, competing for attention. Without leaving my seat I can access virtually any piece of music ever recorded, download any film ever made, order any book ever written. And the end result is that I hardly experience any of it. It's too much. I've had it with choice. It makes my head spin.Here's what I want: I want to be told what to read, watch and listen to. I want my hands tied. I want a cultural diet.
Very well put... and exactly why I devoted a chapter of my book to the media diet. Someone send that man a copy of Bit Literacy!
There's only contradiction I'd offer. It's up to each of us, individually, to say no to all the media choice out there. No one is going to do it for you. Solving information overload is a personal choice. It's free, and fairly easy, and doesn't require any extra software or other tools - it just requires learning a few simple skills, and committing to solving the problem.
(Thanks to Matt Shannon for the pointer)
Expect users to be lazy - "not because they're stupid - they're lazy because they've got a million better things they can do than visit your website. So if you don't make it easy for them, they're not going to come back."
(From interview with CEO of Cheezburger Network)
Organizational culture and email overload
Whenever I give a talk on solving email overload, someone inevitable raises their hand and says, "How can I get my coworkers to stop sending me so many emails?" It's a legitimate question, as lots of people suffer from needless emails in the workplace.
Nathan Zeldes covers this more in an article saying that organizational culture causes email overload:
People may hit Reply All because they think sending a message at midnight will impress the boss, or they may be trying to cover themselves and create a paper trail in an organization where mistrust is a factor. The situation calls to mind the "tragedy of the commons" scenario: Everyone would prefer that there be fewer messages, but nobody can afford to be the first to cut back on sending them.Unfortunately, organizational culture evolves much more slowly than technology does.
Nathan is right on. Just like customer experience work, changing the organization is the hardest method - and the most important.
However, there's a step missing. To solve email overload, first learn how to manage your own information. It may be easier to hope that the rest of the world sends you less email, but really - what are the chances? It's better to learn how to survive regardless of what your coworkers do or don't do.
(Hat tip to Bill for the pointer)
