User Education

I noticed the lid to the jar of Natural Peanut Butter I ate last night had this little tidbit:

"Oil separation is normal. Just mix back together and enjoy!"

In other words: "It's not a mistake- it's how you know you're eating the good stuff".

If your product has an aspect that appears to be an error, but is really a feature, educating the user can move beyond eliminating a perceived mistake and move towards a signal of quality.

Second Life

Our new media environment allows for unprecedented recycling of content. With so many channels to fill, content can easily be used in multiple places without too much overlap of audience. This raises the stakes for making quality content rather than lowering it.

I hear too often the call do a project on the cheap because it's "only for the web", even though a successful web segment, if pushed to multiple channels, can have as much viewership as a high profile "non-web" project. Just because the viewership comes further down the Long Tail doesn't diminish the value of those views.

Because online content has multiple lives the effort should be raised because you never know where the content is going to show up down the line. What if by chance it does go viral? Do you want your best work out there, or something you just threw together?

Patterns

A friend of mine who is a doctor explained that medical school got a lot easier once he realized that medicine is about pattern recognition. Med school focuses so much on the small percentage of cases that are actually, seriously sick that those instances jump out at you in the real world. "Normal" is boring in its normalness. Once you are able to recognize the patterns, it becomes easier to focus on the needs of the patient and ignore the ordinary variability of life.

That why exceptional people and exceptional work jumps out to the trained eye- you see enough great work and you are able to separate the great from the mundane. The hard part is keeping your diet of high-quality whatever at a level that it keeps your senses sharp.

Top Shelf

Being really good at what you do has two advantages:

If you are in a crowded space, being the best grants you some separation from the commodities, and allows you a price premium.

If you are creating a space, you will automatically scare off competitors as they can only compete on price. Claiming the top end makes the whole category less attractive.

Being really good might be more work than being a commodity, but there are greater rewards in it.

Peter

Transparency

The best part of great customer service is that it is often transparent to the customer. They don't know how it happens, they just know it happens.

Like a great restaurant, there can be all chaos in the kitchen, but as long as everything is smooth int he front of the house the customer goes home happy.

This can require a lot of very unsexy work to build back end capacity that is well tested and engineered. The folks working "in the kitchen" have to be team players, willing to set their egos aside to ensure a quality experience for the customer.

It sounds so easy you would think everyone would do it- which is exactly why it is so rare. It is presumed to be both easy and free (or at least cheap), when it is quite hard and involves some amount of cash flow to be successful.

When margins get tight, you know exactly what gets cut first: the things the customer may not experience directly, but keep the whole thing moving forward. The result is a leaner operation that can do the job 80% of the time, and probably drive better numbers int he short run. But in the long term that 20% failure rate will chase away all of the customers who are discriminating enough to know the difference between what you used to give them and what you do now. Ironically, they are the customers you need the most.

But you increased margins for a couple of quarters. Bully for you.

Peter