There are two major trends that are now coming together to reshape our economies and societies. One is the continuing replacement of humans by computers in the workplace. Computers are essential in manufacturing and in the office. They continuously replace human effort and boost productivity.

Consider this: most of the products we design today could not be designed without computers. A new computer from Dell, for example, can only be designed by using computers from a previous generation. In other words, an older model of a computer is helping in the creation of a newer one.

So in which areas are computers not likely to replace humans (at least in the short term)? Service. The caring industries. People like being cared for by other people. A genuine smile and a friendly voice have a powerful affect on us. The computers will look after the hard space, humans will look after the soft space.

The Web thrives on interconnections; cloud computing and virtualization live on the Web. If you are not connected—if you live on a remote island with no outside connections—then to live you must physically have everything you need beside you. But if you live on the Web, it doesn’t matter where what you need resides, once you can make use of it. It’s not the owning or the physical proximity that matters—it’s the use. And what are the implications of all this? Service.

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, said in March 2010 that Microsoft was “betting our company” on the cloud. I hear the same sort of statements in other big companies I deal with. There’s a shift to the cloud; a shift to service.

Part of this shift is of course technical. But there’s an equally large cultural part . A service-driven economy will be different from a product-driven economy. Why? Because the most important thing will be the service. You pay 10 dollars a month, not 400 dollars as a once-off payment. That changes how you think about what you’re getting.

Most organizations are structured around a launch and leave project-based culture of products, marketing and communication campaigns. The reward is for producing things (products, websites, brochures, videos, advertising campaigns). In a service-driven economy, the reward-structure will be based on how happy the customer is with your service.

How does a service-based brand thrive? By showing customers that you care about meeting their needs, month-in, month-out. These customers have not bought your product; they’ve bought your service. And that means they judge you on your service and can leave you more easily if your service declines. In service-driven economies people are locked in by trust and satisfaction, not by the fact that they have made a major investment in a product and must stick with it.

Are you ready for service? Because that’s where the Web is at. Great websites are run by service professionals. People who want to help their customers succeed. People who care more about whether the customers are happy than whether the organization is. If you focus too much on the organization—the internal politics—you invariably lose focus on the customer.

When was the last time you were bored with a website? Do you get bored with Google? Do you get bored with Amazon? Perhaps the last book you bought from Amazon was boring, but was the Amazon website itself boring to use?

Do you get bored with Facebook or Twitter? You might get bored with your friends but it’s unlikely that you’ve been bored by the websites themselves. When Facebook announced that they were redesigning their website did everyone go: “Great! We’re so bored with the old one!”

Quite the opposite actually. “After a redesign in March, a Facebook poll revealed that 94 percent of users didn’t like the changes,” Caitlin McDevitt wrote for Slate in February 2010. “When Facebook introduced its News Feed in 2006, students organized to protest against it.”

The Facebook changes may have been the right thing to do. In the long-term, people may have found them very useful. However, people liked the old design because they were used to it. They didn’t want change. Often, the organization wants change much more than the customer.

Why do organizations want change? A number of reasons. To make more money. To improve the quality of the service or product. Because a new manager has been appointed and they need to make their mark. Because the marketing department is bored with the old design. Just bored. It’s a few years old and they’re sick of looking at it.

Redesigning is fun. You feel important. Agencies are great at making you feel that way. They show you way cool designs and you can bring all your intellectual and artistic skills to bear as you discuss way deep things like emotional appeal and branding. Be careful.

The best word to describe your customers on your website is “impatient.” The vast majority of them are at your website to get something done as quickly as possible. The only people who are likely to complain about your website design are website designers. Craigslist is constantly being told that its site is boring. “But the people I hear it from,” Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster told Wired in 2009, “are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site.”

This is a really difficult message for marketers and communicators to hear, but we need to hear it and really, really listen. Those of us who think the essence of our jobs is to make our websites exciting don’t have much of a future in the web industry.

I have said it so many times: Offline marketing and communication is about getting attention. Web marketing and communication is about PAYING attention. The difference in the getting attention skill set and the paying attention skill set is the difference between night and day.

You pay attention to why customers have come to your website. You judge success based on whether they have succeeded in quickly completing the tasks they came to complete.

Focus on reducing your customers’ impatience. And remember, you get paid to be bored.

“Much of the conventional wisdom about downsizing—like the fact that it automatically drives a company’s stock price higher, or increases profitability—turns out to be wrong, Jeffrey Pfeffer writes for Newsweek in February 2010. Pfeffer writes that there is “empirical evidence showing that labor-market flexibility isn’t necessarily so good for countries, either. A recent study of 20 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development economies over a 20-year period by two Dutch economists found that labor-productivity growth was higher in economies having more highly regulated industrial-relations systems—meaning they had more formal prohibitions against the letting go of workers.”

“Buy new technology so that you can let people go” is a golden rule of modern management. There is a belief that the very purchase of technology will in and of itself make the organization more efficient. People are the problem. Technology is the solution.

At some point, letting go of people becomes a counter-productive strategy. At some point, managers need to focus on the people that are left within the organization. A manager needs to ask: How can I make my staff more productive and efficient, not with a view to letting some go, but rather with the objective of making the organization more competitive?

Organizations bemoan the loss of customer loyalty to brands. Loyalty is a two-way street. From an organizational point of view, loyalty begins after the customer has bought the product or service. Loyalty is built or lost when the customer has a problem and needs help from the organization. The downsizing devotees invariably try to spend as little as possible in customer support. Long term, they reap the consequences.

The end objective of technology should be to extend the capabilities of people, not to replace them. Sure, as technology drives efficiency some people will lose out, but that should not be an objective in and of itself. The objective should be to become more efficient and deliver a better service to the customer.

Properly managed, an intranet can deliver greater efficiency and reduce costs. It can help staff carry out tasks faster. It has that potential, but it is a potential that is not being realized in most intranets because of a lack of focus on the tasks and the staff who need to carry out the tasks.

Technology must ultimately be for people, not a replacement for people. I have met many managers over the years who have little or no concern whether the time of their customers or staff is being wasted by websites with confusing menus and links and poor search results. However, if I tell these very same managers that I’ve found a way to reduce headcount, they get very excited.

The goal of the organization should not be to fire as many people as possible. The goal should be to become as efficient as possible. To achieve efficiency we need quality people working with the technology to test, tweak, mould, refine, adapt, plan.

People are not always the problem. And technology on its own is rarely the solution.

Lay Off the Layoffs
http://www.newsweek.com/id/233131

Dimitris is a small business owner in Greece. According to a TIME article, he estimates he has paid “about a fifth of his revenue in bribes — to tax collectors, health inspectors, police and other officials”. Small firms “are essentially obligated to conduct business this way,” he says. “There are so many legal barriers to conducting business that they’ll shut you down otherwise.”

The Mystery of Capital by Hernando De Soto is one of the most impressive books I have ever read. In it, De Soto comes up with a variety of reasons as to why some countries succeed while others fail. A core reason is corrupt, complex bureaucracy. The government acts as a parasite. It forces you to go through a whole host of unnecessary and complex steps if you want do anything.

If you want to buy land, set up a company, renew your driver’s license, whatever, you will be forced to go through step after complex step. This is bad complexity and it exists so that you will require ‘advice’ from the corrupt official. Of course, a nice bribe will allow the official to ignore all these unnecessary steps, but then you’re in their trap because they can force you to follow the letter of the law if they want to.

Many organizations have enemies within. Departments and divisions care only for themselves. They will introduce complexity that makes the organization as a whole more dependent on them. In fact, the way modern organizations are structured rewards bad complexity.

Examples of bad complexity can be seen everywhere. Marketers and communicators don’t care if they make a website more difficult to navigate once they can push their message. Programmers will add more features to a product, not because these features are needed, but because new features show that the programmers have been doing something. Legal people don’t want you to understand legal documents because that would diminish their importance.

Bad complexity creates dependence. Good complexity creates independence. One of the things the Web reflects is a movement away from the production of products to the delivery of services. In a world of production the thing itself often dominates, but in a world of service the satisfaction of the customer dominates. In other words, in a service- driven world, the measure of success is not what you have produced, but rather how satisfied your customer is.

A service culture hates bad complexity. But we have a long way to go. I recently spoke to a manager of a website and told them there was a problem with one of their customer’s top tasks. “That’s not my problem,” he replied. “That’s an application. The IT department look after that.”

Web teams need to take responsibility for the customer’s experience on their website. But that’s a major challenge because the organization is often working against the web team. Websites are often difficult to search and confusing to navigate—bad complexity—because the organizational units care more about themselves than their customers.

At the root of the problem is the fact that senior management encourages and rewards this bad complexity behaviour by setting organization department/unit-based objectives, rather than customer satisfaction and task completion-based objectives.

“In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology,” the good Google person told me. “This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.”

Why couldn’t they have just written:
“Over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and other older browsers.”

“Thank you for your inquiry,” the fye.com auto-generated email that was impossible to reply to stated. “To assist in providing you the quickest answer to your inquiry, please see the Help Section of fye.com.” Hello? Sorry, fye.com, but that’s not the quickest way by any means. It is, however, the cheapest way for you to deal with support. Why be so dishonest with your language?

I had to call my broadband company today. “Your call is important to us,” the voice said as I waited on hold. Is it indeed? If my call was important to you then you’d answer it. You wouldn’t put me on hold and you wouldn’t insult my intelligence by saying “Your call is important to us.”

Do organizations actually test their lies, deception, spin, and half-truths on customers? Does it really work? Or does it instead annoy and irritate customers?

I was staying at the Royal Lancaster in London and I wanted to sign up for broadband. I clicked on the link. “Welcome to the The Royal Lancaster,” Thank you for choosing us to serve as your “home away from home”” And it went on and on and on. “Whether for work or pleasure, we are pleased to introduce our industry leading in-room high-speed Internet services amenity … It’s Easy to Use … We hope you find this service exciting and valuable.” When I clicked “Continue” I was then told the price. £17 for one day. Yes, £17.

“We are delighted to inform you that the Guest Elevators are currently undergoing a complete refurbishment,” the sign outside the Hilton Edinburgh elevator told me. And me, I was absolutely delighted too, thrilled, and jumping for joy as I carried my heavy bags up the stairs.

I remember reading about a study of house selling in the book Freakonomics. Seemingly, in for-sale ads the following words were associated with houses of genuine quality: “granite, state-of-the-art, corian, maple, gourmet.” Poor quality houses, on the other hand, had these words associated with them: “fantastic, spacious, !, charming, great neighborhood.”

I saw an example of this one day when I visited a house for sale that was advertised as: “Fantastic and rare opportunity to acquire this beautiful 7 bedroom detached home. This property has got it all!” As the sales agent quietly said to me, “The only thing you could do with this house is knock it down and start again.”

Here’s a radical idea: Tell the customer the truth. They can handle it.

The Christmas 2009 airline-bombing attempt in the USA showed what can happen when there is too much information and too little skilled analysis. “It’s clear now that there were multiple signs in recent months that Abdulmutallab was a potential risk,” Bruce Crumley wrote for TIME in January 2010, “but they were simply lost in the unmanageable flood of information the U.S. intelligence and security agencies are designed to produce.”

As President Obama stated, “This was not a failure to collect intelligence, [but] a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.” U.S. authorities are forced to sort through a massive flood of intelligence on a daily basis. “Connecting the dots becomes more difficult when multiple streams of intelligence empty into several different lakes,” the TIME article pointed out.

As one spy official put it, “Basic details can now get overlooked as surveillance becomes more technical and computerized and people wait for a warning beep to sound.” Basic details such as the fact that the would-be bomber paid cash for a one-way ticket, and that he didn’t check in any bags.

Ours is the era of the information Big Bang. I think it’s an absolutely wonderful time to be alive. Information has been whipped away from the grasp of the elites and delivered into the hands of the masses. Information is power and power has been distributed.

However, as with any explosive event there are challenges that need to be faced. I thought I’d be used to it by now but I am still often stunned at how badly most organizations manage their websites.

Take, for example, the web ‘management’ approach called distributed publishing. The theory was: buy the tool, train people to use it and watch them go. What happened? Each division or department that the publishing tool was distributed to sought to publish to the website with the absolute minimum resource input. If ever there was a disastrous non-strategy it is distributed publishing. It led to website junkyards full of vanity publishing and out of date garbage.

The Web is important. The Web is very important. For an increasing number of organizations, the Web is critical to success. We need to seriously raise the standard. Anybody can put up a document. It requires precious little skill to write boring, vain, unreadable, organization-centric content.

It takes a whole other level of skills:
1. To reject such organization-centric content.
2. To commission content that will help customers complete top tasks.
3. To organize top-task content in a way that will make it easy to be found and to make sure that tiny task content does not disrupt searches for top task content.
4. To review and remove out of date content.
5. To connect the right dots (to link well).

There is no greater skill a web professional needs to develop than the ability to create quality links. Many websites do not need more publishing. Rather, they need more linking of content in appropriate task journeys. Linking is a complex skill because it requires you to see the task through your customer’s eyes.

Too much intelligence to blame
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1952203,00.html

I am a customer of a number of banks. I judge these banks, at least partly, by the experience I have with them online. I used to really like the National Irish Bank experience. Then they ‘improved’ it, making it more secure. And this of course is the problem at the heart of security. You can make a process so secure that even the people for whom it is designed can’t use it without huge effort.

Now, when I go to the National Irish Bank homepage I often get a ‘page not found’ error. Usually when I refresh the page that little Java icon appears. I enjoy spending time watching it swirl round and round. It reminds me of coffee. Then I get an ‘error on page’ message. I refresh again and I actually get to the homepage.

It used to be that it remembered my User ID. Not anymore. Now I have to go get it and paste it in, because it’s long and I can’t remember it. Then it requires my password, which I can remember. Next I get to a page where I have to enter a special security number from a card they’ve sent me. It’s annoying and such a waste of time. It now takes me at least three times longer to get into my account. Once in, however, it’s a really excellent experience, well designed and intuitive.

Bank of Ireland, on the other hand, is easy to get into. However, the subsequent steps are really clunky. The National Irish Bank interface has a feeling that it was designed for human beings. The Bank of Ireland interface feels like it was designed for robots. Whereas the National Irish Bank immediately shows me balance information for my main accounts (a top task), here’s what I have to do on Bank of Ireland to get such information: click on a link called ‘Accounts’; click on a link called ‘Select All Accounts’; select an account from a list; click on a different link called ‘Accounts’ (Yes, there are two links called ‘Accounts’); select ‘Transactions’. It’s a real pain, a big waste of time.

Halifax Ireland is positively primitive. You can’t even transfer money. This is a top task for sure and if in 2010 a bank won’t even allow you to transfer money online, then it loses a huge amount of credibility and trust.

This isn’t usability. This isn’t interface design. This is branding. This is marketing. This is advertising. This is management. And you know what? I’ll bet senior management in all these banks could not care less about my online experience. In fact, I have rarely, if ever, met a senior manager with more than a passing interest in the Web. They think this stuff is technical - something you give to the IT department.

Where customers spend their time is where you build your brand. Organizations need to stop trying to use traditional advertising techniques to create false images. For an increasing number of customers, you are your website. It’s about time senior management woke up to that fact.

“Brand advertising, the kind you’re used to seeing on TV and in print, isn’t nearly as big on the Internet as the search ads dominated by Google,” writes Peter Kafka for the Wall Street Journal in January 2010. “But that’s got to change, as marketers realize that traditional advertising works on the Web, too.”

“The above is an article of faith among a certain kind of Web publisher,” Kafka continues. “And some of them are even paying for studies to prove that display ads–basically all the ads you see that aren’t part of search results–really do work on the Web. Except when they don’t.”

Kafka goes on to cite a study carried out for Yahoo that found that brand ads have some impact on those over 40. For those under 40 the impact of these ads is nearly zero; no impact.

What has happened to branding? How has such an important word been hijacked by such a narrow interest group? Whenever I hear branding being talked about these days I know I’m about to enter fairyland. Otherwise sensible people start talking gibberish and lose all track of reality.

Branding has become all about organizational narcissism, vanity, ego and self-delusion. It’s all about what the organization wants (needy child that it is), where the organization wants to go, what excites the organization (or certain senior managers in it), what the organization wants you to do. Branding doesn’t care about you, the customer. It sees you as a target, an entity it must convince to do what it wants.

A number of years ago, I remember buying books from Amazon. After I added a book to the basket I was brought to a page that had a huge ad for jewelry. I was taken aback. What does this have to do with buying a book, I thought? Amazon was ‘excited’ to tell me that they had just launched a new jewelry store. I wasn’t excited. After a while I noticed that these disruptive branding ads that were unrelated to the task I was seeking to complete had disappeared.

What I learned much later was that these branding ads had not just annoyed Amazon’s customers; they had negatively impacted sales and overall customer satisfaction and loyalty. Amazon had listened and removed the disruption.

When it comes to marketing and communication we need to measure both satisfaction and dissatisfaction, both positive and negative action. Sure, if you put a big ad for jewelry in front of 100 people you’ll get 2 to click on it. And if you make it really annoying and intrusive, you might even get 5 to click. But what about the 95 that didn’t click? To get those 5 clicks how annoyed did you make the 95?

Amazon has a great brand and tremendous customer satisfaction because it cares about the 95. It listens, measures, responds. I’m loyal to Amazon because I feel it’s an organization that pays attention to my needs.

Traditional marketing is about getting attention. Web marketing is about paying attention.

Are Web Ads Only for Oldsters? Yahoo’s Disturbing Study
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100112/are-web-ads-only-for-oldsters-yahoos-disturbing-study/

According to a survey published in December 2009, Americans have a pretty dismal view of the 2000s. It has been voted the worst decade in living memory. “By roughly two-to-one, more say they have a generally negative (50%) rather than a generally positive (27%) impression of the past 10 years,” the study states. “This stands in stark contrast to the public’s recollection of other decades in the past half-century. When asked to look back on the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, positive feelings outweigh negative in all cases.”

However, there is a bright spot in an otherwise dim decade. “The major technological and communications advances are viewed in an overwhelmingly positive light,” the study states. “Clear majorities see cell phones, the internet and e-mail as changes for the better, and most also view specific changes such as handheld internet devices and online shopping as beneficial trends.”

So, do we love technology? Do we love HTML and Flash and JavaScript? Do we love reading off computer screens, and long for the tactile touch of the well-designed keyboard? Are we yearning for robots?

Hardly. What the Web reflects is empowerment and connectedness. The Web has probably led to an increase in negative attitudes to other things because it allows us to go behind the spin, advertising and propaganda. Thanks to the Web we’re not so easy to fool, manipulate or mislead.

The Web allows us to check out for ourselves, to communicate more easily with our peers and find out what they think. The Web makes us more powerful. It allows our voices to be heard more. That’s why we love the Web.

That’s the shift, the change we can believe in. It is the movement of power from organizations to individuals and the groups these individuals may form. Because another thing the Web does is make it much easier for individuals to form effective groups. Like the group of people who stayed at Hotel XYZ and what they think of the service they got. That’s why we love the Web.

We love the Web because we can compare prices for insurance, vacations, cars. We can compare universities and political candidates. Most organizations hate being compared and ranked. Many organizations don’t even want to give you the price on their website. They’re going to have to.

Amazon has the highest level of customer satisfaction of the 40 largest US ecommerce sites, according to an American Customer Satisfaction Index survey.

Customer satisfaction matters. Customers who are highly satisfied are 65 percent more likely to buy online, according to the survey. They will also tell their friends about the good experience. And what drives satisfaction? A good price, a wide selection, and a website that’s easy to use. In December 2009, online spending was 15.5 percent higher than in December 2008.

This is the age of the empowered, cynical, skeptical, hype-resistant customer. It’s a great time to be a customer and it’s a great time to be a customer-centric organization

Pew survey
http://people-press.org/report/573/#

Amazon Tops in Customer Satisfaction
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/news/article.php/3855836

Ryanair represents the rise of the rational consumer. The rational consumer is much less open to manipulation by branding than previous generations of consumers.

What do people really want from an airline? “Affordable, safe air transport from A to B,” Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, recently told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a commodity. It’s not some life-changing sexual experience, which is what the other high-fare airlines have tried to convince you that it is.”

In the past, branding has been very good at getting us to believe that taking a flight from Dublin to London is a spiritual, emotional experience. We are irrational at heart and very willing to believe such rubbish, and that allows companies to charge ridiculous prices for their products and services. It’s emotional exploitation and traditional consumers fall for it big time.

The rational consumer thinks that flying is like riding a bus. They are not shocked when they are forced to pay extra if they bring more bags. They are not disgusted if they have to pay to use the toilet on the plane. They are not outraged by the idea that buying the cheapest ticket means they might have to stand. They are rational. They weigh the cost against the benefit and make a rational decision, not an emotional one.

The emotional customer is outraged, shocked and disgusted by the very idea that you would have to pay to use the toilet on the plane. Because we all know that access to toilets is guaranteed by the UN convention of human rights. We all know that aircraft manufacturers don’t charge for the toilets on their planes and that toilet paper manufacturers are non-profit charities.

Ryanair charges you 100 Euros for the flight and one euro to use the toilet, while another airline charges you 150 Euros, but you can use the toilet as much as you want. The rational consumer chooses Ryanair.

The Web has been a major reason why Ryanair has grown from being a tiny regional airline to being the world’s largest carrier. The Web is a rational place. Many of the Web’s greatest success stories (Google, Amazon, Progressive) are built on rational propositions of value and usefulness, rather than branding propositions that emotionally manipulation the irrational consumer.

Because it sells cheap flights, Ryanair has allowed families to have more vacations. It has helped families get together more often. But because humans are deeply irrational and emotional, Ryanair has a terrible brand image.

Are you happy when, unannounced, a company you buy things from sends you a free gift? You shouldn’t be. What it in all likelihood means is that the company is price- gauging you.

The Web reflects a new era in consumer behavior. The rational consumer does more research, more comparison shopping. They are less impulsive and more considered. They place more trust in their peers than in the brands. They are increasingly skeptical and cynical. They are increasingly averse to warm, fuzzy, emotional words and images.

When you say things on your website like “we care” or “it’s simple”, the rational consumer thinks: “If you have to say you care, it’s obvious you don’t, and if you have to say it’s simple, it’s obvious it’s not.”