Oct 26, 2022 | Customers, Marketing
We live in complicated times, none more disturbing than the now regular breaches of data privacy and subsequent risk to the financial and personal security of individuals.
The recent spate of data breaches is probably just the beginning, but we, the general populace in the absence of any deep technical knowledge about data security, assume that those who collect our data do so for good reason.
Silly us!
This should never, but it seems always does include, ongoing marketing, and selling of personalised data, even well after we cease to be customers.
I have been a customer of Optus since their first days. I switched the day there was a competitive market born in 1993. They have all my communications business, which may be chook feed to them, but is a substantial hole in the monthly household budget.
The best Optus can do in the face of the breach, presumably enabled by minimum level investment in security, is send a form letter, full of assurances that all will be well. However, if we want to phone them, here is a number, but there might be a wait.
While the letter was addressed to me, at my residential address, the header was ‘Dear Customer’. They know my name, email, and phone numbers, and certainly can aggressively ensure bills are paid, so no detail goes unnoticed.
Surely Dear Mr. Roberts instead of Dear Customer would have been easy?
It might have been sensible for them to also list the services I hold with them, and give a risk assessment of each? Perhaps I do not deserve such a level of transparency?
Then, the signoff:
‘Sincerely. Your Optus team’.
No names, not even a duplicated signature of the cleaner, let alone anyone on a huge salary who might be taking any responsibility for this marketing clusterfuck.
I guess I will have to bite the bullet and change, be a part of the great communications customer churn. These nignogs spend tens of millions tapping into this churn, rather than shoring up the customer base they already have and reducing the churn. As an advisor to SME’s my advice is to cherish your existing customers, particularly those who are unlikely to change, even if just for the avoiding of the inconvenience involved.
When your business faces a crisis brought about by external factors that will impact customers, rule number one is be up front, take responsibility, accept the shortcomings that led to the crisis, articulate a recovery plan, and most importantly, personalise it to those affected.
Optus has done none of those things.
I am glad my super fund that also hides behind barriers I struggle to breach, does not hold any Optus shares. Presumably it is unable to given Optus is 100% owned by a Singaporean billionaire. Is this ownership, and the key place Optus holds in the communication infrastructure of this country a part of the problem?
Oct 24, 2022 | Customers, Marketing
Following on from a previous post about the value of information, it seems relevant to ask how long any value created lasts.
We are all familiar with the notion of the ‘1/2 life’. The time it takes for radioactivity of an element to decay by 1/2. Uranium 238 has a 1/2 life of several billion years.
What about the 1/2 life of information?
The 1/2 life of a daily newspaper is arguably 1 day, today’s news is ‘tomorrows fish wrapper’, and for 99.9% of blog posts, and most other so called ‘content’, it is about 2 seconds. This seems odd in what is supposedly the ‘Information age’. Why is the life so short, in most cases, and what make the difference for the 0.1%?.
The answer seems to be: It depends on the value of the information, and the ‘friction’ or resistance which is applied to its transmission.
Businesses, and most institutions are structured to be top down, in functional silos. This is a system that evolved before digitisation of information, which enabled the scaling of effort and the most efficient allocation of resources. A 20th century solution to the challenge of information transfer and leverage.
In the 21st century, with digitisation, the structures of the 20th century are redundant. They are simply too slow to be competitive in an environment where the action happens at digital speed on the ‘front lines’ of customer interaction. It takes too long for the siloed decision making processes to work, the customer has moved on to someone who is able to satisfy their need on the spot.
This change requires a wholesale change in the way our organisations are structured and the tactical actions that take place every day are managed.
What happens on the ‘front lines’ evolves quicker than the siloed information and instruction exchanges that worked well last century. We must turn our power structures upside down, and give the front lines the authority to make on the spot customer focussed decisions within a much broader remit than was previously the case. The risk if we do not is that customers will simply go down the road to someone more responsive.
This creates huge complications for organisations, as the status quo is upset. The power people at the top have worked for all their lives is diluted, and for those at the bottom, suddenly they are being tasked to take decisions that last week were being referred up the chain.
There is a driver of activity, always present, but to date well in the background for most, being the ‘operating rhythm’ of the market in which they compete. When their decision cycles are slower than the operating rhythm of the market, the market will go elsewhere, or at the very least, opportunities will be lost.
Getting ‘inside’ the operating rhythm of your competitors and the market more broadly, being able to respond quicker, is an emerging key to strategic success.
The 1/2 life of information is now in the hands of others, those who really count, by being customers.
Oct 19, 2022 | Analytics, Operations
No matter your businesses size, digital capability has become a driver of commercial sustainability over the last decade.
It has become a clear case of digitise or die.
This does not mean you have to go from an analogue starting point to fully digitised in one step, that is unrealistic. However, failure to start the digitisation journey will eventually be the undoing of your business.
There are a number of logical steps you can take that will build capability quickly, without massive investment, although some investment, particularly of management commitment, is necessary. However, like any investment, you should expect a return.
If you are starting the journey, the following is one set of the steps you might expect to mount, not necessarily in this order, but this is a common pattern I have seen.
Step 1. Assemble a clear picture of the currently available data. Mostly this will be ad hoc, and manually collected. Machinery purchased over the last few years will have the facility to capture data that is often unused, or under-utilised. This might simply require some connection between the data logger in the gear to your server, or better still, to a cloud application.
Step 2. Build a common system for the assembly of data that will enable it to be analysed in a consistent manner. Many factors have differing sets of ‘data languages’ based on legacy practices, and short-term convenience. Creating a common data language is important, and the best tool for doing this are to map all the processes in the factory, and break them into what is in lean parlance, ‘value streams’. The languages can then be tailored to make sense to all who meet them.
Step 3. Invest in further data capture. In the early stages, this is often a case of retro fitting devices onto existing machinery and downloading it all into a common data base. Depending on your operations this can be as simple as excel. There are many available low level options that are of a modular design, so that as capability grows, the modules can be implemented progressively.
Step 4. Invest in the capability to analyse the data and turn it into actionable insights. It is at this point that people become invaluable to the system. Any digital system can only respond to inputs in the way they have been instructed. They are no good at assessing the inputs for which there has been no or little precedent, you need people for those vital tasks.
Step 5. progressively implement data generation and analysis to inform operations. Use the feedback to constantly improve the quality of the data and the analysis that is used to manage and improve operations.
Step 6. Rinse and repeat. Digitisation is not a task with a completion date, it is a journey without an end.
As I headed towards the ‘publish’ button, a notification of a new program by the Victorian government popped into my inbox. The ‘Digital jobs for Manufacturing‘ program will fund training of employees of eligible Victorian manufacturers in a 12 week part time course run by Victorian universities. Have a look.
Header credit: Tom Gauld who takes an ironic, but widely felt frustration felt by SME’s at digitisation at www.tomgauld.com
Oct 17, 2022 | Marketing, Sales
There are many things needed to start and scale a business, the ones I bang on about all the time are cash and commitment.
There is however another.
Trial.
Without trial, there is no business.
Whether you are starting a business in a well understood and competitively supplied market, or a completely new product in a new field, the challenge is the same.
You must generate trial.
The strategies necessary are entirely different for every business, as the challenges are entirely different. However, the common feature is that you must make the value proposition attractive enough to bust the power of the status quo, and often the barriers to exit for the current customers of incumbent competitors, before you will generate trial.
Then, and only then, if the product performs, and the barriers to adoption post trial are breached in sufficient numbers, you have a chance at survival.
It seems pretty obvious, but we do not usually think about trial as the single and first essential barrier to success. Rather, we tend to think about it as just the first step in a process, not giving trial the weight it deserves.
Oct 14, 2022 | Analytics, Innovation
We set out to measure things, to give us a sense of achievement, to allocate priorities, and simply to keep score as we proceed. It is an engineering perspective.
We do not have any way of objectively measuring how we feel, but how we feel is what drives our behaviour.
This would not matter if we all perceived the world objectively, but we don’t. We observe the world through the complex frosted window of our experience, context, opinions, and did we get our coffee this morning.
So, how do we dig away at this problem, and it is a problem, simply because we use objective means to make subjective decisions, and it sucks.
We ask better questions, and we ask those questions from as wide a variety of perspectives as we can. We must ask those better questions, and experiment, test stuff, be allowed to fail, as in the outliers you will find the unexpected. However, you must also expect the unexpected, you just cannot predict where it will be.
Bees, amazing insects that they are, have the process nailed. They have a behavioural characteristic scientists call the ‘Waggle dance’, which is a communication medium that leads others to the source of nectar. Bees must find nectar, that is the job on which their lives rely.
Depending on variables like the weather, location, season, and others, a percentage of bees, 10 – 20% ignore the waggle dance, and go off in a different direction. When they find a new source, they start the ‘waggle dance’ to attract other bees to that new source, thus keeping the hive healthy and well fed.
This is experimentation, sacrificing a small part of the current returns to build for the future.
As we consider how to best allocate our available resources, we can learn from bees.
Bees in blogs
