Some weeks ago I had a shopping experience that I would be tempted to define as a disaster. I had to recharge my mostly non working 3G internet card (there isn't a very good reception for Orange in my intended area, which of course I hadn't checked before buying it) and one of the few places where I could do it was in a small shop located within a large shopping mall. Pretty bad idea to go to a shopping mall just for the one thing (in/out/park/pay time overheads tend to be terrible) but my wife had to do some additional shopping so we though about going parallel. There was a longish queue in the shop, but as didn't have anything better to do, |I decided to stay and wait. To fast-forward till the end of the story, I will tell you that after half an hour wait the top-up couldn't be performed because some relevant computer system wasn't working. Half and hour wasted?
Well, not really. One of the things that kept me from leaving the shop or being discouraged by the slow moving queue was the chance to observe the shop clerk work. The first thing that struck me was the clarity and ease with which she was delivering her sales pitches. They actually didn't feel, understated as they were, as sales pitches at all, but rather the way somebody could advice a friend when explicitly asked. And most importantly, it felt like she actually cared about what she was telling her potential customers. This is specially striking when compared to the attitude one tends to find in large sales surfaces, where either the sales persons are overexcited (if the get a commission from the sales) or they don't care at all (if they are on a fixed salary). To be completely fair the information delivered by her (details, numbers, phone features) wasn't always complete or fully exact, but this brings me to my second point.
Another reason why I felt that customers were particularly at ease with her was the lack of that all so frequent patronising attitude towards the customers. This may come as a surprise to some salesmen or technologists (truly, technologists are only another kind of salesmen, and salesmen of snake oil, most of the times) but no, clearly no: people don't want to feel ignorant. They know they are, but then that's a completely different thing. And then among technologists a patronising attitude is yet so common. The popularity of comedy story series like The Bastard Operator from Hell among system administrators may be taken as an example. The stories themselves are quite funny, but I do believe that it is precisely its adoption by that particular segment of the general population that reveals a subplot of an often patronising attitude towards users. I believe it is there, in a higher or lower grade for one person or another. We (I've worked as a sysadmin too, that's maybe why I find BOFH funny too) like to dumbfound users with “precise” data and then revel on their confusion. I was once told that from a delivered half an hour presentation (with PowerPoint, a blackboard, a storyteller carton or a Rivera mural, whichever you choose is irrelevant) people will only remember one in ten things at most, so you'd better make sure that the audience remembered the right ones. I think this particular saleswoman was doing the right by pre-filtering information, making sure that potential customers got the yeast of the difference between one product and another, which is precisely what her customers were asking of her, nothing else. And all this while still making them feel good about the shopping experience, as opposed to making them feel stupid. I'm sure she was behaving this way because she had a deep understanding of her customer's needs, an understanding that only can come from an even deeper empathy.
While I have said that this person was a women, I have said that she also was a not very young one (I would guess 40+), so you this person obviously sits comfortably in one of the population segments least likely to be concerned with technology. In the light of the results, I believe this situation was working completely in her favor. But then how many managers would choose a male twenty-something to deliver this service instead of her? Aren't they supposed to be a lot more "knowledgeable" about technology? But what about empathy with larger segments of population?
I guess that all this could be dismissed as an anecdote, but I believe that there are far more important implications. Most companies tend to have a “corporate culture” that tends to make all recruited employees look alike, aligned towards whichever is the main "mission" of that company. Even when some don't have an explicit culture to use as a benchmark, in my experience most persons in charge of recruiting tend to settle for persons who are as similar to them as possible (let's think of it as finding the “another me”), which after time will lead to the same results. These homogenous employee bodies are, by definition, unable to empathize with the population at large and are disconnected from the diversity that thankfully still defines the world. And you know what: that disconection is a recipe for failure. Eventually, unless the situation is corrected, it will happen.
The same way I hope that this saleswoman employer is really aware of the value she's bringing to the company, I am convinced that only companies that have a workforce that understands and empathizes with their customer base (read: a diverse workforce) will eventually prevail.
Microsoft is a good example. They use a heavily peer-based recruitment procedure, where all coworkers participate. So there you are, they will all be trying to recruit their own clones, because most people empathizes with similar people. To make matters worse, Microsoft is adept to asking "clever" questions that require equally "clever" answers. However, we all know that there are many types of intelligence and it is a very hard thing to measure, so the most likely outcome is that the company will look for people with the same kind of intelligence that they already have, based on some kind of arrogance like "we're the best and we only want the best". No darling, you are "you" and you want more like you.
But what is the problem with all this? Microsoft is one of the most successful companies ever and billg the richest man in the world, but yet they haven't managed to be loved, or ever liked by their customers, who buy their products because there is no other better or sometimes even possible option. Then, most of their enterprises beyond Windows and Office have failed, famously failing to "get" the Internet in the 90s, or to "get" open systems. I really think that one of the reasons of all this disconnections is the lack of empathy with their customers, in part produced by their monoculture. Remember that while IBM or HP have been with us for centuries (in computer time) across changing paradigms, Microsoft is a much smaller blip in the radar, which hasn't been through any major transformation that implied modifying its very essence. Both IBM and HP have, though. Do they have a more diverse workforce?
Now, I believe Google is going the same way. They have famously failed to get social networks, the part that will probably end up being the most valuable. My wife recognized Facebook immediately as the most interesting thing coming out of Web 2.0, so why couldn't Google. Well, perhaps the answer is that there is nobody like my wife working at Google, and I'm quite sure they wouldn't hire her if she applied. It is an engineer-centric culture, for good and for bad where like in any endogamy, all errors of judgement are magnified. Guess what, Google is popular with engineers, but will they manage to get to the general public when it gets to things that matter?
But this problem is not exclusive of big companies. I think that the Open Source communities have the same issue. Linux, for example, according to Eric S Raymond is "an operating system developed by geeks and hackers for geeks and hackers .... and too many of us like it that way and will actually defend our isolation as a virtue". So just imagine how can you empathize with a majority of users with that attitude. Forget about it.
World domination will have to wait, I'm afraid, just as Microsoft's or Google's.
No comments:
Post a Comment