Allow me to start this post by saying that while I have never met, nor spoken with Nicholas Negroponte, the noted scholar, academic, philanthropist and professor from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s famed Media Lab, I have immense respect and admiration for him, his work and his contribution to our society. There’s no shirking that fact. Indeed, he’s on a list I’ve made long ago of people I’d love to have that “someday lunch with” in the hope of learning from him and sharing ideas freely in a casual, relaxed environment.
With that said, I wanted to share my immense frustration and general loathing of Dr. Negroponte’s “One Laptop Per Child” initiative which he has kicked off and spearheaded over the past few years. For anyone not already familiar with the program, and for fear of gross oversimplification, Negroponte’s organization is striving to fabricate and deliver a laptop computer sufficiently inexpensively and self-sustainable enough to allow for meaningful distribution in emerging, poverty stricken countries such as those in Sub-Saharan Africa as well as others. Negroponte’s apparent vision appears to be built around the very notion that if kids, no matter how impoverished had access to a personal computer, their lives would be enriched and likelihood of successful economic development more likely.
Now, I’ll say I’ve never been to Africa, but my wife has been to the small country of Malawi five times over as many years, and one of the unmistakable takeaways from each of her journeys there is how little the people of Malawi have in terms of material possessions and yet how seemingly satisfied many of them still are. Unlike Western, developed cultures where the race for “more and more” continues to drive many of us, Africans appear content by life’s simpler treasures. It does not appear to me that the people of Africa feel disappointed at their inability to join Facebook or otherwise electronically communicate with one another or us thousands of miles away.
These same people, however walk 5-10 miles a day, each and every day to collect drinking water from a muddy well or sinkhole near enough to their villages to allow for realistic transport back. This water which, principally women and children are sent to collect and bring back serves the family for the day, but is often full of horrific disease, mud, and other unmentionables. Yet, while on one hand this dirty water sustains life as they know it, it is also killing them.
What, prey tell, do these people need with laptop computers and Internet access when they do not even have a sustainable source of clean and disease free water which may allow for healthy development and longer lifespans than we see there today? It feels to me that Dr. Negroponte missed the point entirely in his altruism, when in fact these people do not need cheap-enough computers, but rather predictable sources of water and medicine since what good is a computer to people otherwise fighting for their own lives?
Let me get off my personal soapbox and instead relate this back to customer experience in today’s business environment.
Too often companies institute programs to improve customer experience in the hope that a delighted customer will spend more money, and in their satisfaction, refer the company to friends and colleagues producing an endless source of sales and marketing leads. This is fundamentally correct thinking, but too simplistic in its explanation. The ingredient too often missing from company strategies that I’ve seen is the involvement from customers in the shaping of the strategy. Instead, frequently, companies in an effort to shape the perfect strategy sequester themselves, build internal teams, business plans and organizational directives but do not pause long enough to solicit customer feedback as to what areas of the strategy would be most impactful in delighting them. Sometimes this is directly attributable to a competitive need for secrecy, but other times, not. Instead, like Negroponte, companies are mistaken in rolling out strategic initiatives and strategy build in isolation, and with an alarmingly high miss rate, either having no impact on customer satisfaction or even driving customers away because of an ineffective approach or offering.
The advice I can share in terms of customer experience strategy development is simple. Do not try to build these strategies in vaccuums and in isolation from your marketplace. Actively engage your market in formulating your plans, co-creating ideas and offerings with your customers and prospects as active teammates. Learn from your marketplace as to what people really and truly want and need and do not suppose you know better, even if you do. You’d be surprised by the fact that the best ideas often come from the most unlikely places.
If you do not already have one, I’d encourage an immediate effort to deploy a Voice of the Customer program in which customers have an active and involved voice in your daily business decision making, and always strive to link the customer voice back to specific organizational development, alignment, communication, and innovation planning. Very often that link is less than obvious, and sometimes research efforts fall short because they truly are “research for the sake of research”.
Now, as I said at the onset of this post, I truly respect Dr. Negroponte and would love for the opportunity to spend time with him in order to learn from him and would cherish the opportunity to do so. Until then, I stand by my thesis that we must listen before we act, or we run the risk of “read, fire!, aim!”, shooting ourselves in our foot, or worse.
MARC MANDEL IS AN ORGANIZER OF STRATIVITY GROUP’S CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE BOOT CAMP PROGRAM, A FREE, UNIQUE INSTRUCTIONAL SERIES OF WEBINARS BEGINNING JAN 27. MORE INFO AVAILABLE AT http://www.strativity.com/knowledge_center/events/boot_camp/
WE HOPE IF YOU HAVE AN INTEREST IN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE EXCELLENCE THAT YOU’LL CONSIDER JOINING US ONLINE FOR THIS EXCITING PROGRAM!
