8. USE DIGITAL SYSTEMS TO ROUTE CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS IMMEDIATELY
Listening to customers means hearing their complaints about current product shortcomings. But getting bad news from customers passed all the way to the product design groups is surprisingly hard to do.
I recommend the following approach:
1. Focus on your most unhappy customers.
2. Use technology to gather rich information on their unhappy experiences with your product and to find out what they want you to put into the product.
3. Use technology to drive the news to the right people in a hurry.
If you do these three things, you'll turn those draining bad news experiences into an exhilarating process of improving your product or service. Unhappy customers are always a concern. They're also your greatest opportunity.
Companies that invest early in digital nervous systems to capture, analyze and capitalize on customer input will differentiate themselves from competition. You should examine customer complaints more often than company financials. And your digital systems should help you convert bad news to improved products and services.
9. USE DIGITAL COMMUNICATION TO REDEFINE THE BOUNDARIES
The Internet allows a company to focus far more than in the past by changing which employees work within the walls and which work outside in an adjunct, consulting or partnering role.
For Microsoft, outsourcing has been a way to temper the expansion of our work force and reduce management overhead, but it hasn't stopped the growth of our work force. The Web work style, in which each contributor or company organizes itself optimally, enables us to extend our electronic web of partnerships and--I hope--keeps us from growing big in the wrong areas and becoming ineffective through too much overhead.
As a business manager, you need to take a hard look at your core competencies. Revisit the areas of your company that aren't directly involved in those competencies, and consider whether Web technologies can enable you to spin off those tasks. Let another company take over the management responsibilities for that work, and use modern communications technology to work closely with the people--now partners instead of employees--doing the work. In the Web work style, employees can push the freedom the Web provides to its limits.
10. TRANSFORM EVERY BUSINESS PROCESS INTO JUST-IN-TIME DELIVERY
M.I.T.'s Nicholas Negroponte describes the difference between physical products and information products in the digital age as the difference between moving atoms around (physical products such as cars and computers) and moving bits around (electronic products such as financial analyses and news broadcasts). Producers of bits can use the Internet to reduce their delivery times to practically zero. Producers of atoms still can't beam the physical objects through space, but they can use bitspeed--digital coordination of all kinds--to bring reaction time down dramatically.
In some industries, the issue is not so much faster time to market as it is maintaining time to market in the face of astronomically rising complexity. Intel, for instance, has consistently had a 90-day production cycle for its chips, which power most PCs. Intel expects to maintain this 90-day production rate despite the increasing complexity of the microprocessor.
Ultimately the most important "speed" issue for companies is cultural. It's changing the perceptions within a company about the rapidity with which everybody has to move. Everybody must realize that if you don't meet customer demand quickly enough, without sacrificing quality, a competitor will.
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