Having had a bit of a rant in my last post to bust a few industry myths, I’d like to close the series by bringing it back to the one things that I always come back to. People matter.
No matter what technology we have, and how we hang it all together, how we run businesses must all come back to one basic human idea that people matter.
“It must all come back to one basic human idea that people matter”
Whether those people are customers, clients, or our colleagues, they’re all people who respond to being treated well. Our job is to minimise their frustrations, surprise and delight.
For our colleagues, that comes down to how we attract and employ them, how we reward them, how we involve them in developing our product and service, how it feels to be a part of Woven. After all our colleagues are on the front line, they represent us and they represent our clients. They take the flak when the going gets tough, they can make or break relationships, and they expect us to look out for them fairly and robustly in business. I won’t dwell on it here, but how we work with our people is of utmost importance to us at Woven.
Customers will pay for better service and how they feel when they’ve interacted with us keeps them doing that or has them telling the rest of the world why they shouldn’t either.
“Customers will pay for better service”
And for clients, I want to be absolutely clear, we need to start talking about value, not cost. Because that’s where the biggest opportunities lie. “People based Procurement” would flip the current model and award points for the quality of service proposed and connection with a brand’s customers through initiatives and strategy. Those initiatives can be technological, commercial, process or people. Then come down to the bottom line, rather than starting at the bottom line.
“People based procurement would flip the current model”
Because when the lowest bidder wins, everybody loses.
This series summarises why we’ve created Woven and what we hope to achieve. I don’t mind saying that we’re not there yet, and maybe we never should be, because if we don’t continuously strive to try harder to be better, to be smarter, to create new ways to deliver connected services, then we’ll have failed. Our whole business is built on the premise that we innovate, test, learn, deploy and then do it all over again, setting ourselves new goals and looking for new hills to climb, built on some key foundations:
We need to start talking about value, not cost.
People, not technology.
Because customers are not commodities.
And service is not a number on a balance sheet.
We’re not putting the first man on the Moon. We’re not developing the world’s first electric super car. Nor are we not sorting out Brexit… thank goodness
But it’s most certainly time for a rethink. It’s time we redefined connected services.
