I am a big fan of Seth Godin’s Blog. The brilliant post, which inspired me to write this, is named The magic of low hanging fruit.

It’s way more profitable to encourage each of your existing customers to spend $3 than it is to get a stranger to spend $300. It’s also more effective to get the 80% of your customer service people that are average to be a little better than it is to get the amazing ones to be better still.

So how come our mobile phone providers keep wasting advertising money to sign new customers, instead of improving quality of their services? That is just an example, not a specific attack on phone companies. Although, come to think of it, these are the same people who where harassing us with “fantastic” long distance deals only few short years ago. Was that waste economically justifiable?

I can see similarities with many organizational transformation initiatives:

  • many “new and revolutionary” technologies are introduced with big announcements and disruption, but with no guidance of how or why it would benefit user community.  Low key, phased changes to people’s routines that focus on their benefit as well as real, but not necessarily dramatic, productivity improvements are much more effective;
  • multi-million call centers implementations with fancy routing software, but half trained attendants with bad attitude. IVR systems interrogating customers for information for no apparent reason because the person who takes the call asks the same thing again. Much less expensive “chatting” mechanism would be much more effective for customer service;

Why is it so unpopular to do really simple things really well? Perhaps because it is not glorious enough. Well, that is true - but it surely is very profitable.