ITE - Complaint Management

Today most service providing consumer organizations are facing a deadlock with lot of consumers who are not happy with their complaints. They have their dedicated customer care units, but all they do is send you an automated e-mail saying 'Assuring you of best of our servives' while they do not even understand the problem. Customers keep writing, sometimes they get the calls from various people in the organization who only say 'I will get back to you' and your problem remains where it is. Most of these problems are systemic issues in the organizations which they are either not aware of or try to ignore the scale or impact of the complaint. 

A case in point is Airtel. You can get a connection with required documentation, but try giving up that connection. Almost impossible. You fill the forms, you write e-mails, you tell them s strict NO on their persuasion calls, but they do not disconnect and keep sending you the bills long after you have moved from the city and have not used their services. Many customers across the country have faced this problem. The key problem is there is no SLA on disconnecting. In their bid to maintain the number of subscribers they do not want you to give up their services. But that does mean they do not have a documented process to do so. 

Idea is to create a problem that understands problems from customers and based on the collective problem asks the company to sort it out in a given time frame. This idea has been tried by Govt, but failed miserbaly. they in fact wanted to charge the brands to provide this service, and apparently brands were willing to pay. They could not get the right momentum going on this initiative and hence never took off. 

I propose a slightly different version of the same complaints portal - Sign up with few brands - Telecom companies and large private Banks would be a good beginning. Use the social media to get complaints - when consumers are suffering they will hold on to any straw handed to them. And see if you can be the mediator between the consumer and the company. Works well for everyone, consumers do not have to take a legal recourse which is expensive and time taking, companies can sort out their issues peacefully while improving their internal systems. 

There are smaller organizations doing it in a small and specialized way, like The Hoot that takes complaints against media misconduct and tries to get them sorted. 

This can be a non-profit idea, or you can charge the brands a bit for each complaint that you take to them. This idea requires some knowledge of law, consumer rights, knowledge of focussed organizations working in some niche areas and operating processes of business organizations. This needs to be tested as you are trying to make a business model based on disputes and complaints. 

I am happy to announce that entrepreneur Prateek Narang has picked up the experience gifting idea and is working on it. 

Rules of Innovation

Harry West of Continuum in his HBR Blog talks about Three Rules of Innovation. Though I think the format of the post is in line with the HBR format.

The important take away is that to innovate in teams, there must be an open dialogues, a free flowing communication which is never personal or personality impacted, and is always focussed on the creative output required from the job at hand. This is important when you are doing a focussed creative work that is expected to generate some output in a given time and with given resources. When you are debating the idea, it is very important be open and transparent and keep your individual egos away in the interest of the work at hand. 

He talks about separate space or a room for project teams, which I think is not really required in all environments, it is probably required in his kind of work where it is all about being creative in each and every project. Also I believe in being frugal and not spending over the head to be creative. Creativity should come from you internally, you should feel the urge to do something creative and not expect the whole environment to turn upside down to help you be creative. Unless you have an urge from inside to crack a problem, no amount of environment setting is going to help. 

Innovation Personalities

This Forbes Article talks about Five personalities of Innovation. You can read the article to know the five types and its possible that you have a bit of all of them in you.

But I like the part where author says that you need to balance the risk takers and risk averse people in your innovation team. If everyone is a risk taker, you may loose on the practicality of the idea and the execution plan may not be as tight. If the risk averse are more, most ideas will be lost on the ideation table and may never get to experimentation stage as people will look more at the down side of trying out the idea.

Having said that, can we really get a perfect balance? People behave differently in different situations. For example I can be very experimental when it comes to travelling but I am extremely conservative when it comes to financial planning. Then there are always external factors that influence people in the corporate environment, like what category does my boss fall into? Most people will tend to tilt towards their bosses personality to an extent, sometimes overriding their own natural personality style as there are many rewards associated with the boss. The peer group can also have an impact. Take me out of my current environment and I may be a different personality.

While these classifications serve as broad guidelines, on the ground what matters is the resolve of the leadership to do something.

ITE - Online Experience Gifting

The concept of gifting and the nature of gifts has changed over time. When we were kids, we wanted games and clothes, when we were teenagers it was all about greeting cards, then came the age of flowers and chocolates, then books and now you have to really think hard to find a gift for most people. The current trend is moving towards gifting experiences as with reasonable levels of affluence people often like to choose their own stuff. Gift vouchers are there, but they are very impersonal and formal, they are like saying take this money and buy yourself whatever you want - works for formal relationships. 

Experience gifting can be personal gift, tailor made for the person and the occasion to make the receiver feel special or gift them something that they may not buy for themselves. Let me give you some examples:

• Gift your parents a luxury dinner on their birthdays / anniversary. Have them picked up from home, dinner served and dropped back. Yo should be able to design it sitting anywhere with your favorite restaurant and have it delivered on the given date.
• Gift your better half a spa treatment at the best spa in town
• Gift your amateur photograph friend a photography workshop by best known photographer
• Gift a culinary workshop as a wedding gift to your friends
• Gift a custom designed treasure hunt to all the kids at a family gathering
• Gift a custom made vacation to your friends / family

Ideas are infinite. 

Can you setup a website, that will let people gift experiences in collaboration with the service providers of these gifts? If you think it is a good idea, talk to me.

Good Ideas?

Steven Johnson in this TED Talk talks about the emergence of ideas and the three things that he emphasizes are:

You need to have a informal environment for the ideas to come. Not many ideas have been generated in the labs.

Ideas take a lot of time to develop in your sub-concious, though they may appear to you in a Eureka moment. Incidentally we get to hear only about the Eureka moment and not the thought process that may have floated in the mind for years before becoming that idea leading to Eureka moment. But it is important to understand that Eureka moments do not happen out of air. 

Your ideas need to connect with other ideas. Ideas come by interacting with other ideas. In fact he says Idea is a network in itself.

I agree with all of this. And would like to add, have an open mind...keep your conditionings in check and you would find many more ideas coming your way. Like Steven says 'Chance favors the connected mind'.

Why Innovations Fail

Frederick E. Allen in his Forbes article Why Innovations Fail: It's All in the Ecosystem sites many examples of Innovations that were first movers in their categories were failed as a commercial product. He  looks deeper into each of these cases and says they failed because though the product was great, but the team failed to take care of all those in the ecosystem. For example a technology tyre did not think about the repair shops who will have to upgrade themselves to cater to these new type of tyre. He then compares Sony e-book reader with Amazon Kindle, which was launched later but had all the right tie ups with the publishers. He of course talks about Apple products that always seem to get everything right despite being a closed system to an extent. 

I think when you commercialize an innovation, you do not to take a very critical look at all your links in the supply chain and see who all would need to change what all. What are the costs involved for them versus the returns that they can expect from the new product. Most products lie at the middle of the supply chain with some suppliers involved and some service providers at one end and customers or consumers at the other end. You need to fine tune both the ends so that the product can be a success. 

So look for those weak links and strengthen them before hitting the market.

Current Innovation Practices

My friend Dr Vinay Dabholkar talks about the Current practices being followed for Innovation in his blog post. Vinay is somone I really respect for his knowledge and his openness to hear the contrary views. In fact he sometimes seeks those views to validate or fine tune his own.

This what I think of his views in this particular post:

• You need to be very clear of the objective of the innovation initiative in the organization: Is it to make people participate? Is it to get some focussed results / ideas that organization can use? Is it to prepare ground for the future innovations? It is t create a culture of Innovation? While you may say all of them, but I think you need to choose the focus.
• A lot of organizations that I worked or interacted with were good at creating buzz and getting people to give ideas. I found that they were sitting of thousands of ideas, most of which were irrelevant. No organization has a process, resources or bandwidth to do justified evaluation of all these ideas. And if you think of the softer part of the process, it is more harmful to take an idea and not logically conclude it than not taking an idea at all. 
• A big gap that I see is the enabling gap - people are asked to give ideas, without being enabled to do so. They are not made to think ideas that are relevant to business, not trained on how to present your ideas, how to do business evaluation of their own ideas. Most people, specially in the IT industry need to be trained on business thinking, as being technocrats it is not required to do so in their regular jobs. Addressing these issues is a part of creating a nurturing environment where if I have an idea, there are systems, processes and resources available to me to take it to a level where organization can actually use it. 

Define Strategy

This S&B article intends to explains Strategy in as simple terms as possible. Simply loved reading it.

It says Strategy is different from vision, mission, goals, priorities, and plans. It is the result of choices executives make, on where to play and how to win, to maximize long-term value

If you can answer these 3 questions for your business, you have your strategy in place:

1. Who is the target customer?

2. What is the value proposition to that customer?

3. What are the essential capabilities needed to deliver that value proposition?

Now I wish business managers could think so simply and ask themselves and their teams to think with simplicity. 

How to know what customer wants

Scott Anthony's HBR article on A.G. Lafley vs. Steve Jobs talks about two contrasting approaches to finding out the ultimate question 'What do the customers want?'. P&G indulges in many studies and research projects to find it out what its customers want while Apple goes on to give the customers what they possibly do not even imagine. 

I think each product type needs to choose its own way to peep into the hearts and minds of their customers. These may be the two extreme ends of the spectrum that is available to you for connecting with your customers. You need to choose or if possible invent your own method to find out what your customer wants and more importantly what he needs. How much surprises are they willing to take from you? An Apple user is now mentally prepared to see some magical surprises from the company while that may not be true for the same customer for a washing powder as they expect some predictability there. 

Think of it, a customer is a consumer for both P&G and Apple, but what they expect from both these companies in different, because they touch very different parts of his life. So choose the method to suit the touchpoint that you have with your customer and consumer. 

Innovation is a process...

Jim Stikeleather in this Managementexchange article argues that Innovation is a process. He says it is no longer a stretch goal that you give to employees, it has to be built in their day to day work. They do not have to stop after an Aha moment and get back to routine work, but have to move on to work on creating the next Aha moment.


Incorporating the Innovation goals within the operational goals of an organization is a challenge that not many organizations have explored. It is not going to be easy, specially for those who do it the first time, but it would be rewarding. It may take a few iterations to get it right, but eventually this is what will ensure that there is sustained effort going into innovation across the organization. 

ITE - Repair Centre

In this time and age, repairs is becoming a vanishing concept. It is difficult to find someone who can repairs your clothes, shoes, household goods specially in the upcoming areas dominated by shopping malls. At the same time repair is something that is needed to keep the green cause moving. If you can setup a center for all kinds of repairs say:

1. Tailoring - including repairing broken shoes, bags, curtain rings, changing sofa covers etc
2. Appliances repair - maintenance of mixers, iron boxes, TV
3. Home needs - Plumbing Services, Carpentry services, painting job

If you can provide this at a single point of contact, you would be a big hit. Trick would be to provide reliable and dependable service. If you can establish a pool of trained or skilled service providers, there would be no dearth of customers. Challenge would be manage such a pool and run them professionally. Customers will be willing to pay and even give you time to serve if the service is dependable. 

You can either target it for urban upper middle class, and work on a low volume high margin model or for the large middle and lower middle class with high volume low margins.

Another variation of this could be a working women's aid, all the help that she needs for running her house. 

Paul Sloane talks about this Declaration of Innovation in his latest newsletter.

I think this is what all leaders who want their organizations to be innovative need to do. Not just talk about innovation, but make it relevant to every employee's job. Talk in specifics so that people at every level in the organization can relate to it.  Make it a goal that the organization runs after. Ask for a innovative solutions for known problems, for unexplored opportunities but make it specific so that people understand what is expected of them. It also creates something that can be seen and may be measured. 

Commitment is another big difference maker. the moment people sense a commitment from the leader they take the idea seriously, because they feel comfortable that their efforts would be taken care of and not wasted in 'just another good to seen doing' initiative. Here again commitment has to be communicate through actions more than the words. And the most important resource that a leader can commit is his own time to the initiative, everything else then will follow with a flow. 

Electric Cars and their viability

My friend Arun Kottoli reviews Electric cars both technically and ecologically. I think it is a brilliant analysis by someone who has been a user of an Electric car for sometime.

I think the ecological issues have to be addressed by reducing consumption and not shifting from one energy source to another. Shifting from petrol or diesel to electricity is just doing that. It may give us a 'feel good' factor for sometime, but ultimately we are still consuming non-renewable resources. Only solution is Reduce, Reduce, Reduce.

Tame your memory to innovate

Art Markman in his HBR Article says you do not have to think differently, but you have to think different things to be innovative, to be able to come up with innovative solutions for the known problems. He argues this on the basis of how our memory works. He says when you are in the kitchen, your memory of every associated with how the cooking happens comes in the front just like all the rules and records of a game come to forefront when you want a game. So when you think about a problem from different perspectives you invoke different parts of your memory and get different solutions with the help of these various slices and dices of your memory. 

Interesting take, I think.

Recipe for Culture Change

Strategy & Business article on Culture change tries to draw inferences from Chef Jamie Oliver's experiment in West Virginia city to introduce people to fresh food and eventually replace the fast food culture by healthy and nutritious food. The story lists various challenges that he faces while trying to change the food habits, the resistances he faced to encountering complete lack of knowledge of fresh food and an inability to cook.  

Slowly and steadily he worked with various influential persons and organizations to make his food accepted. Author extrapolates that the same can be done for managing organizational changes. 

Changing a culture is probably the most difficult thing to manage.

Measuring Globalization....

World is globalized...is it, or was it not always? Well, it is not evenly globalized, and you need to understand the extent of globalization based on your world i.e. your product or your service or your market or your country.  Pankaj Ghemavat in his Mckinsey article talks about root maps that show the extent of globalization for your pie of the economy. He takes an example of the entertainment industry which maps hollywood's map as that of English speaking parts of the world and then contrasts it with the Bollywood map that follows the Indian Diaspora. 

For example, this map shows the share of domestic film industry in countries around the world:

I think this is a very interesting data analysis, that can be a very important input into your strategy and planning. This clearly shows you where is your string customer base and where are the potential new markets. Think of intersecting this map with a English speaking world map for Hollywood and Diaspora concentration map for Bollywood and you would know where the untapped potential for both the products lies. 

ITE - Tea Stalls / Chains

Tea is a basic India beverage. Most Indian love to have it, as a matter of habit, as a rejuvenator while breaking, as a company when they gossip with friends and sometimes without any reason. In the new India that is being built, Coffee Chains have cropped up in every nook and corner but they do not serve the basic chai, and even if they serve it comes at atrocious prices. 

Can someone think of a basic tea stall that is neat and clean and serves the basic tea, may be a bit customized on the spot for the customer like letting them choose their favorite flavor.The cost involved is too much, skill required is available or can be easily acquired and there are no entry barriers as such. There can be two formats that tI can think of at the moment - one a small stall, very similar to the roadside stalls that we all use, but neat and clean with glasses or cups properly washed and dried before every use. Second is a chain like Cafe Coffee Day or Barista, that can be a bit higher end with proper branding, something like Cha Bars at Oxford book stores. This may require some capital, some planning and a long term strategy, but stalls is something that can be done at a very small level too to begin with. I would love to see these stalls in all shopping malls where getting a cup of tea is almost impossible and this is a place you really need when you are tired of shopping, when you have to wait while your other family members shop or when you have to just wait for someone whom you plan to meet there. I think even a small stall serving basic chai in a neat and clean environment can do toms of business in shopping malls and in similar urban areas. 

I heard of couple of such experiments in bangalore malls but am yet to see how they are doing. Any ideas?

Better Brainstorming

This Mckinsey article talks about brain-steering instead of brainstorming. 

Basically, what it suggests is to have a focusses brainstorming rather than an open ended that leads you nowhere. You seek answers to the questions that you know or have prepared in advance. You do not throw open the questions to a big group, but spread the questions amongst smaller groups and then let them share their best ideas with the bigger group. It also suggests that you do not pick winning ideas in a hurry as the participants usually do not have a overall view of the problem and ideas need an executive level vetting.

Though I would avoid giving brainstorming a new name, but I agree with most of what the article says. To get the relevant answers you must ask the right questions.

Disney Method of Brainstorming

Paul Sloane in his latest newsletter talks about Disney Method for Brainstorming, which is a variation of 6 thinking hats technique of Edward De Bono. It is a 4 step process instead of De Bono's 6 step. 

Four steps are:

1. Spectator's View
2. Dreamer's View
3. Relaizer's View
4. Critic's View

You look at the problem from these 4 perspectives and then reach a potential solution.

He argues that this is a more productive method than 6 thinking hats as it not only generates ideas, but also helps you evaluate the ideas. I like the spectator's part as most of the times we tend to see the problem from our perspective, and we fail to see it from outsider's perspective say that of out customers, our sales force or our consultants. If we can see the problems from their point of view, we would have a more rounded view of the problem and the solutions would reflect that. After all solutions come out of the right definition of the problem.