What Do You Expect Pt. 3: Customer Sacrifice

I asked some colleagues of mine, who work in distance education at the university level, what were the top two or three things on the minds of the higher education community with regard to the technology of distance ed.  One of the responses was this:

“One of the frustrations that a lot of us in the videoconference business have is that, even if we spend a lot of money on technology for a videoconference room, it still rarely works exactly as needed.” – Tony Hockenberry of Texas A&M University

This frustration goes beyond the ivy-covered walls of the university community. The same problem exists in every corner of the videoconferencing world and incarnates the concept of customer sacrifice from Pine & Gilmore’s The Experience Economy. I wrote about customer sacrifice in an earlier blog article, but to refresh your memory: Customer sacrifice is the difference between what the customer wants exactly and what they settle for.  Reducing customer sacrifice results in a better experience for the customer.  A better experience adds value to the product offering.

For me, the guiding principle here is minimizing distraction or increasing transparency. When the technology does not perform as needed, it gets in the way. It hinders human communication because the humans have to spend their attention interacting with the technology rather than each other.  If the “gold standard” in human communications is the face-to-face meeting, then the more transparent the technology of telecommunications the more customer sacrifice is reduced –  the more the technology “works exactly as needed.”

While professors, doctors and business people have different specific needs here, we can still boil down the “works exactly as needed” idea to reveal the elements common to all:

• Transparency of the user interface: How much does using the technology take your mind off of the subject matter of the class or meeting?
• Intimidation: When the technology appears to be complex, people fear that they’re going to either break it, or look foolish while trying to use it.
• Incompatibilities or inconsistencies between connected rooms: For example, one room supports the use of an electronic white board and the other does not.
• Slow response to innovation in consumer technology:  I get used to using my iPad for so many things in my personal life. I can do videoconferencing with it!  But how long does it take for my company to allow my iPad to join in a company videoconference? Answer: WAY too long.

We need to figure out how to address these deficiencies.  Addressing them is important – but beyond the scope of this article.  However Pine and Gilmore offer some guiding principles that should be used in that process:

• Customize the user experience to their needs.
• Reduce customer sacrifice by customization and adding “customer surprise.”

Customization helps because, to quote the authors, “designing for the average is the root cause of customer sacrifice.”

A customized videoconference experience today is labor-intensive, thus very expensive to do.  This is true for scheduling, as well as using videoconference systems.  But the truth is that companies in other disciplines who get  mass customization right, have figured out a way to do it in an automated way. The most common way is to gather usage information from users (Think about the advertising that happens in the free Gmail accounts.  The ads that appear are relevant to the Gmail user because the system looks for keywords in the email messages.  When I write an email to my friend describing a new recipe for cooking pork ribs, I soon start seeing ads for recipe books and for meat sales.)  This kind of customization through data mining is huge across the Internet.  But do we gather usage information from our videoconference users so as to make their next use more suited to their needs? No. We don’t.

How about customer surprise? What we’re talking about here are pleasant surprises.  Quoting The Experience Economy:

“Contrasted with both customer satisfaction and sacrifice, when companies stage customer surprise they exploit the difference between what the customer gets to perceive and what the customer expects to get. . . . Rather than merely meeting expectations (by providing satisfaction) or setting new ones (by reducing sacrifice), companies deliberately attempt to transcend expectations.”  Imagine the pleasant surprise to a VC participant when they show up and find that the camera angles and presets they used last time are ready and waiting for them now.  What would it feel like if the room “knew” that they prefer to use a document camera rather than PowerPoint and was already configured for that when they arrived? Wouldn’t it be great to see only the places that I call in the address book when I begin to dial my call? I don’t need to see dozens of other entries there which are irrelevant to me.

At the end of the day, what the videoconferencing industry needs are systems which are flexible enough, and easy and transparent enough to operate to allow for customization of the environment.  Customer surprise will follow because these easy, flexible systems will make it possible for operations staff to stage exactly the kind of experience that their customers want and need.  And that gets back to the original problem: today, systems do not work as needed.