Customer Service, Delivering the Elusive Margin, the Last 20%

1. Customer Service, Delivering the Elusive Margin, the Last 20% Greg Wadlinger Tuck School of Business @Dartmouth College October 6, 2010

2. My agenda (intro.) Service: necessary in the smart room age? Four margins we influence in our field and some practical approaches to bridging them Conclusions: service is the basis for a strategy that will deliver – the virtuous cycle, the good life

3. Gaps can be exquisitely influential in human perception

4. “Although the literature on the management of service quality is vast, empirically rigorous data on service excellence in higher education are limited. (Khan, Matlay)

5. 4 margins AV encounters in the field • From what the client ordered to what they really wanted • From what the room is built to do to what the customer wants it to do • From technician accountability upward to accountability downward (customer focus) • From what exists to what is possible

6. What the client ordered vs. what they want Option 1 = “that’s not my fault…” Option 2 =

7. Tools of the AV MacGyver:

8. Delivering the elusive margin means building personal and organizational capacity to a n t i c i p a t e and embrace the demanding client.

9. Creating the conditions that permit staff to grow their own capacity to serve will help bridge the gap between what the client ordered and what she really wants to happen. What she wants is never a c o m p l e t e l y homogeneous set of deliverables. This is why they are hard for the client to describe to us and hard for the scheduler, let alone the planner/designer to ascertain in advance.

10. “Sticky” information What defines sticky information is “the incremental expenditure required to transfer that unit of information to a specified locus in a form useable by a given information seeker.” - Eric von Hippel, MIT

11. Factors that increase information’s cost of acquisition VIPs and other guests for whom heightened service is simply a given - these guests and their hosts are too busy to allow us access to their detailedpreferences in advance. Plus, the fear of public speaking sometimes drives them to insist we stay and make sure things go right.

12. Factors that increase information’s cost of acquisition Faculty members are professional thinkers who sometimes get ideas about what they would like to do when they’re in the moment. So much of the time there are higher priority things competing for their attention that it’s hard for them to focus on practical classroom needs.

13. Factors that increase information’s cost of acquisition The layperson’s perception may be that IT and AV are in our own silos. We’re like strangers in the neighborhood, and good people may reasonably doubt that our purposes are aligned to theirs. They may instinctively tend to game us to their advantage and feel about us the way I tend to feel about parking operations.

14. Factors that increase information’s cost of acquisition Legitimately late requirements like an oversubscribed event mean a room change, or bad weather means a videoconference instead of an in-person visit.

15. Factors that increase information’s cost of acquisition The “rare birds” also provide the technician with memorable anecdotes to share over coffee (e.g., You want WHAT?)

16. Users surveys are ineffective with such clients

17. So what do you do? Ask the technician!

18. Basement View Image courtesy of Information Week

19. 4 margins of influence and accountability • From what the client ordered to what they really wanted • From what the room is built to do to what the customer wants it to do • From technician accountability upward to accountability downward (customer focus) • From what exists to what is possible

20. Room features vs. actual uses

21. SOLD!

22. Meanwhile… the technician, secretly harboring his wealth of invisible knowledge goes into his field to gather more evidence of how much more efficient and customer-pleasing his operations could be…if only his rooms had this or that capability…

23. …if only the dimmable flourescents wouldn’t flicker …if only the HVAC didn’t sound like an airplane hangar …if only I had a house audio feed right here …if only the electricians could design a hum-free power environment for my inputs …if only the AV rack had a UPS so brown outs don’t trash the presentation …if only I had a signal jammer for Blackberries

24. The inertia of “good enough” “Good service, good food, good price, pick 2” (sign on a restaurant wall) “We just want YouTube quality.” (administrator consulting me on a web video initiative) “It doesn’t require extraordinary effort to produce extraordinary results.” - Warren Buffett

26. Why smart classrooms don’t get smarter. The technician’s information, his invisible competency, stays under wraps. Where a tech sees an opportunity, a project manager sees a co$t.

27. Why smart classrooms don’t get smarter. Installations happen all at once, even faster if they have to wait for slow P.O. execution…so there’s no time for iterative, trial and error innovation.

28. Why smart classrooms don’t get smarter. Except for high profile disasters, we fail to capitalize on client feedback at the point of performance because it doesn’t stay on our radar long enough before the next fire drill.

29. Why smart classrooms don’t get smarter. We forget that many users would like an easy button, say, a motion detector that wakes up the touch screen’s backlight and a tactile button that simultaneously: • powers on the PC • powers on the projector • selects the PC source automatically

30. Why smart classrooms don’t get smarter. We’re almost too busy to imagine, let alone invent the future.

31. A proposal: - to encourage dreaming again • to test innovations for feasibility and value • to troubleshoot quality gaps • to enlarge our capacity for service • to be more welcoming to the user community • to capture the value of the invisible technician competency - deliver the elusive, endangered margin

32. First, restore the habitat Software developers have a well-known habitat that sustains and gives meaning to their particular competency – the Beta environment

33. First, restore the habitat In the pre-smart room era, the entire campus was our Beta environment

34. AV technicians were the critical path for diffusion of AV innovations Example, the Kodak Datashow:

35. I propose a physical beta classroom lab Test your theories on real equipment in real space: Does a voice activated gate work quickly and accurately enough to usefully point a pan tilt cam and a panning spotlight on an audience member for a real time distance learning session? At what angle of the white board is the writing legible to the far corner audience seat? Is the projector bright enough for the ambient light settings, and can we dim the latter to enhance the former without other negative effect?

36. “We first consider why it might indeed be attractive…to allocate the application-specific portion of the problem solving work of custom product and service design to users rather that to specialist suppliers.” - Eric von Hippel, MIT

37. Even the best classroom design committee will have a hard time getting costly innovations past the scrutiny of the financiers of the project. Consider the very humane edge mounted power and network connection panel $250 x 35 = $8750 You have to be very confident of the value of an innovation to advocate effectively for it.

38. In an Educause case study of Emory U.’s Cox Center “Responsive discussions in a facility conducive to innovations can lead to more effective learning. But the partnership between faculty and staff can itself be highly productive when both are receptive and open. - Albrecht, Bender, Kvavik, 2004

39. All you’re buying once again are the boxes You can confidently build the racks because you’ve made all your mistakes in a safe environment You do all the design work iteratively, collaboratively, unconstrained by confining intervals You buy during the slow season – no more backorders, year end models at a discount

40. 4 margins of influence and accountability • From what the client ordered to what they really wanted • From what the room is built to do to what the customer wants it to do • From technician accountability upward to accountability downward (customer focus) • From what exists to what is possible

41. On innovation ecosystems “Depending on others for your own success has important strategic implications…Because critical bottlenecks may reside outside your own organization, allocating resources externally, to partners, can be more effective than allocating resources internally to your own project. - Ron Adner, Tuck

42. Creating value = delivering academia’s promise

43. 4 margins of influence and accountability • From what the client ordered to what they really wanted • From what the room is built to do to what the customer wants it to do • From technician accountability upward to accountability downward (customer focus) • From what exists to what is possible

44. Senge/Fritz exercise Consider the following statement: “I can create my life exactly the way I want it, in all dimensions – work, family, relationships, community, and the larger world” (is this believable?)

45. What’s working against us? • Without competition we must compete against ourselves • Pareto logic – good enough is OK • We’re a cost center (ding) no strategic value • IT stepchild with no budget • Our successes go unnoticed • Faculty not promoted for what we help them do.

46. What’s in our FAVOR? “I feel better when you’re around.”

47. “America’s schools – from its grammar schools to its collegiate schools of business – would contribute more to excellent organizational practices if they devoted more attention to exploring the powers and mysteries of human values* and organizational soul.” - Leonard Berry, Texas A&M (*like love)

48. “Excellent service companies define their business in strikingly clear terms. They know how they want to create value for customers, they know their “reason for being,” and they stay focused on this central purpose. Focusing facilitates excellence. Strategically, less is more. -Leonard Berry

49. “The first person the reformed Scrooge encounters on Christmas morning is the small boy who happened to walk by when Scrooge opens the window. Just the day before the boy would have been treated with contempt. Now Scrooge finds him “delightful”, and useful, and worthy of hire.” Ken Shelton, “Beyond Counterfeit Leadership”

50. “We are free to use or abuse the million little things that drop into our hands, the small opportunities each day brings.” - Helen Keller