In the "Instant" world of "Push" Technology how long is 4 minutes?

Question: In the "Instant" world of "Push" Technology to upgrade web solutions, how long is 4 minutes to a user?
The answer: Per minute delay in instant connect, increases the probability of losing a sale (a customer) or disengaging an employee by 5%.

First, a disclaimer, our company blog is not a bully pulpit to bring personal gripes. This is a case study that I share in order to help us and our readers learn about critical thinking skills, crowd-sourcing, social media and customer service.

We are a remarkable learning SaaS company. We consider ourselves small, but innovative and agile and have maturity to listen and address prospect/customer's needs. So! what will happen 5 years from now, when we have grown and introduced the complexity and structure? Will that not bring down the level of innovation and agility to meet our customer's needs?

When people ask me, "what keeps you awake at night?" I can safely say, this scenario of impending downside of growth keeps me awake at night.

Why does this scenario keep me awake at night?
Let me share an example of a Great Company where some of my good friends have worked and some continue to work. It is a company whose innovation, business model and spirit of agility were something I admired and emulated for PAKRA --- that Great Company also happens to be a key technology provider for us. Their once innovative technology helps our company reach out globally, conduct meetings both internal with our employees and partners and is the place where every potential buyer experiences our products for the first time. In other words, this service provider is as valuable as fuel, electricity and water for our existence. Using their products, we do 100% of our sales and almost all our staff and internal meetings.

This past Monday, they launched and delivered their new upgrade on client-user instance via push technology (browser and O/S agnostic). This upgrade was supposed to bring some delightful array of features (which frankly we did not ask for). By their own estimates (and verified separately by three unrelated individuals) "it can take on average 4 minutes on a reasonable connection for a participant to download this upgrade on their side before they can connect".

This push upgrade brought our lives to a standstill.
After 24 hours of my first tweet (I heard from a conference speaker about their great use of social media to drive customer care) and retweets of other users, I finally heard from them and then it took another hour and half for them to call me.
Then the situation of mitigation became more frustrating.

The customer service representative who finally called seemed to be in a hurry and with a non-empathetic voice wanted to determine the root cause. In summary: why our customers are concerned about on average 4-minute delay; if it was a user related error i.e. us.

This is why?
"All participants over 6 meetings with innumerable O/S and browsers and their versions, from different parts of the world(India, US, Canada, UK) had problems connecting from 3 minutes to 20 minutes. Let me explain, it takes me weeks to coordinate a prospect company to get their team to agree to a 20-30 minutes meeting and coordinate their calendars to find a date and time. Let's say there are 1 to 5 participants and the last person -- the Boss Man joins and starts the process 5 minutes past the scheduled meeting time. Now we are theoretically into a wait of 9 minutes of a potential 20-minutes sales call. We are not even going bring in the statistic of variation, where in one case, one person could not connect over 20 minutes. We just lost a sell. Now do you see the problem?"


When we operate in the world where instant meeting connect means "instant". That 9 minutes just decreased our chance to win our prospect by 45%. Most of our meetings got rescheduled which given the timing of the year, meant delayed the sales cycle by additional 60 days. That's how long 4 minutes is.


What do we learn at PAKRA from this experience – because this can happen to our customers, as we grow?

First lesson:
If at any time, our developers tell me to push a new upgrade to all our customers, and in testing it shows that it will take the user X minutes wait time before they can use the product, I say, "No Go forward".

Second lesson:
Teach our customer service agents, critical thinking skills when discussing with the customer (our brand after all).
For example, teach the necessary skills to the customer service agents, such that they never say things such as -- (These are paraphrased quotes.)
(i) "Oh I am so sorry your customers are not nice to you."
(ii) "Ma'am, your participants delayed in joining -- we cannot be responsible for their actions."
(ii) "Oh! we are giving such a better interface. This is only one-time interface download. Upgrades are free. so! this should be only a minor frustration."
(iii) "How is a few minutes delay an issue?"

Third Lesson:
Teach all employees to understand
-- the impact on the customer when our product and services fail to meet the "must-have" and "more-is-better" Kano features of our products.
-- how the customer uses our products and how they get value out of them.
-- the value our company provides to our customers.

Fourth lesson:
Have 24X7 coverage to listen-in, since social media is the most important channel for us to listen-in.


Fifth lesson:
We must provide influence-capital to the employees who engage in social-media channels with our customers. The agents servicing this channel of in/outbound listening are typically handling situations where "must-have" needs of customers are not being met. Those inquiries require special skilled people not your "let me see which browser you are using M'aam?" problem solvers.

OK! Now I feel relieved, we are just beginning to define a plan to prevent and mitigate issues as they emerge while our company grows.

As I still feel loyal to my friends at this Great Company and I have no guarantee that other providers would not have lost their vision, their strength like Great Company has, I will not cancel our subscription yet. Plus, they said it will take 48 hours while they petition their Bosses, whether our company's account can be locked to past version such that no one invited to participate in our meeting ever has a 4 minute delay, --- I am dying with curiosity and want to see how this plays out.

Meanwhile, we have a company-wide moratorium to use our key provider's products for 2 days -- because we are loyal but not stupid.

Few days from now, on our blog, you will read a fabulous case study of another company that has figured out how to use social media channels to implement a great customer-care and customer acquisition.

Tweet

Conversation with Mrs G. -- Arlene Gregory: an educator and motivator

A 72-year-old educator and grandmother of six, Arlene Gregory (known as Mrs. G to all who have learned from her), is the subject of our first conversation in a series about learning, games, social media, crowd-sourcing, user-adoption and work performance.

Arlene worked in the Delaware City School System of Delaware, OH. After retirement in 1995, she continued to teach communications and English classes at Columbus State Community College and Marion Technical College, as well as educational psychology at Ohio Dominican University. She has 1034 friends on Facebook; she is a Mafia Wars queen; she has played more Mind Jolt Games than anyone I know.

RD> Arlene - When did you start teaching?
Mrs. G.> January 1960. I have taught literature, writing, communication, business communication, and education psychology. Over the years, the age of the students varied with the youngest at 8 years old and others ranging to past 55 year olds who returned to college.

RD> Why did you become an educator and remain an educator for these many years?
Mrs. G.> My own teachers and my mother pretty much directed me to a career in education; in many ways, I lived my mother’s career dream. Fortunately, her dream was also mine. For me, one important value of education to students is creating a set of choices and opportunities. Obviously one value to a teacher is successfully motivating a person to continue to increase choices and the span of opportunities. I love doing the motivation part; I love watching students capture ideas and concepts that lead them to further inquiry. What other job can give that?

RD> These days, there is a lot of discussion in the web-sphere and media, about how people get information and how they learn has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. Over the years, what have you seen that has remained the same in how people learn?
Mrs. G.> I think how people learn has fundamentally remained the same. There are those that are the top-performers and then there are those that I call Middlers. There is always a curve. What I think has changed in my fifty years of motivating is how educators have embraced how they motivate.

The top-performing students who received opportunities to be creative and taste success using their learning at an early and formative age, learn and explore in inventive ways --- they did it before and they do it now. The educators who have been successful have figured out how to keep them motivated in this technology age. I have found that the best way to do that is engage them to reach their peers. One adaption that occurred is using technology to communicate but inherent interaction between educators and students in this group has not changed all that much.

The underserved group of adults is what I call were “Middlers” in middle and high school. Their performance was average or below average in middle and high school. These Middlers typically will not go to college at 18 years of age. I found that these Middlers need nurturing and not more of boring repetitive learning activities. For example, when I was teaching grammar in middle school, we were instructed to teach the same modules taught to a 3rd grader, 4th grader and 5th grader. Guess what! These students did not care the second time it was presented to them and it certainly was not interesting to them in 4th grade. So! They tune out and the time they could have used for learning is wasted.

People of all ages, learn very quickly how to be lazy in their learning when they know they will have repetitive lesson plans. The same group as adults often do not want to go back to school because they expect the same boring repetitive learning activities. In the last few years, I find that this group is getting better opportunities to come back and acquire skills and knowledge and expand their horizon. Columbus State Community College and Marion Technical College – here in central Ohio have devised curriculum that helps them acquire meaningful learning. If you, as an educator provide the challenge to the students where they figure it out, and they taste the success in figuring it out, then they go to the next stage of wanting to learn more, thus expanding their set of opportunities. Their learning desires have not changed but they are learning faster and more with the new technology such as Google, Wiki and a curriculum that keeps them engaged. I find that Games and such technology have changed the Middler’s desire to learn.

RD> Given that you are such an active gamer, how did and do you use games in your teaching?
Mrs. G.> I always used activities like have butcher paper and crayons and other games in my classroom. This was for students of all ages and from all diverse backgrounds. Games actually provided that challenge and motivation.
My entre into video games came with my grandkids. We created a playroom in our house where we outfitted the room with Playstation and a large number of games. Many of the video games follow patterns and motifs common in mythology and folklore; my grandson Zach was very engaged in playing. At that time I was teaching a classroom course about the narrative of folklore and myths and I found Zach learning how to manage the archetypes of mythology – the heroes and villains. Watching that made me realize that video-games have a great upside to faster learning. Playing the games with the grandkids provided not only opportunities to spend time with the kids, but also a new level of interaction that included several learning opportunities.

Another example was with my youngest grandson. We were playing one of the NCAA games and had to do is pick uniforms etc. for the avatars. I am not good at replaying sports events, and did not want to play. But then my grandson figured out a way to motivate me; he called me on the phone and told me that I assign all the players to have Brutus the Buckeye uniforms. Being the Buckeye that I am, I got hooked. All these kids, when I got stuck or did not feel challenged, were amazing and they would say, “Grannie, try this.”They figured it out and motivated me to keep my interest. Because they enjoy playing with others, they want others to play too and not walk away bored. Games allow people not only to learn by figuring out, but also teaches them how to motivate others to learn and play with them in their peer group. As you know peer-learning takes the pressure off from the educators to constantly battle with how to motivate next. Of course, I am proud to be in the peer group of my grandkids.

RD> What do you see as the downside of so many technology distractions in front of under-40 crowd?
Mrs. G.> I am not good at using mobile phones has they have horrible interface for texting. But that’s not the reason I have issues with the texting phenomenon. I do worry about texting and communication. Over generation, writing had fairly strict style guides and norms. But there are no style guides in Twitter and with texting. It is evolving, but the chance of miscommunication is very high; learning to communicate with clarity is not emphasized. Just because you have to write in 100+ characters and your thumbs are good to handle such a keyboard does not mean one knows how to communicate. There are no style guides or standards on how to abbreviate. The other thing that worries me with new technology like texting is that it has made communication become a reaction and not a dialogue. Lack of focused communication is creating a generation that may not experience sufficient knowledge gain… Information gains sure, but not knowledge gain.

RD> Aside from classrooms, where do you see video-games happening?
Mrs. G.> I am at that age where I interact with many elderly folks at a regular basis. My 94-year old mother-in-law for example. I see a tremendous advantage of introducing computer and interactive games with the nursing home community. Older people – those who are very alert always played games, but they played it as recreation. Nursing homes can make video and online games a daily exercise like mandatory walks for physical exercise. It will help deter lack of alertness and maintain high levels of cognition. In my opinion this is a big opportunity for the video and online gaming industry to explore.

RD> Thank you Mrs. G. It was wonderful chatting with you.
Mrs. G> Let us keep them motivated and engaged and communicate better.

Tweet

Bon Voyage Mr. Salinger

Last week, the ultimate icon and influence of twentieth century J.D. Salinger passed away. For most of us from the Gen X minus 1,2,3,10, 20 years, for all practical purposes and given his recluse and agarophobic predicament, Mr. Salinger was in the Dead/Not Dead betting category for quite a few decades now.

However, his writings and the characters in the Glass family with Franny and Zooey and of course Catcher in the Rye influenced us all. The characters live within us. Reading Salinger, as most like me will identify with, is/was a rite of passage that transcended race, gender, geographies, elite or bourgeoisie, class and languages.

As you know, Mr. Salinger dedicated “Franny and Zooey” to William Shawn, where he wrote on the preface,“I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.” [See reference below.]

We all were William Shawn for that day when we read it.

Reference: Read New York Times Obituary "J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91" - http://nyti.ms/cYpe4c

Tweet

SaaS, Learning, Ant Colonies and Data: Do we have an answer for businesses to improve the quality of their decisions?

Very few businesses exist today where the culture is entirely autocratic and/or patriarchal. Most businesses, engage in group decision-making (not necessarily democratic -- of course.)

This makes it very important for businesses to understand not only how individuals make decisions but also how groups make decisions. In turn, it implies that a business must:
(a) understand perceptions of risks of a group (especially to minimize group-thinking);
(b) measure performance of the activities and decision-making of the group/team;
(c) understand the individual's critical thinking skills and its impact to the collective intelligence.

Web 2.0, SaaS and great optimization techniques are available now for businesses. Finally! you can improve the quality of your team's decisions.

First goal of building a SaaS application: Make it affordable.
Without affordability, no one will buy or switch from traditional enterprise.

Second goal of building a SaaS application: Make it easy to use.
Without ease, workarounds will be created to reduce (Dare! I say) or sabotage the initial intent of deploying the technology. Also, an easy-to-use application typically reduces GIGO effects of data collection.

Third goal of building a SaaS application: Make it easy to both understand and learn from the collected data.
An intangible asset of a business is the immense quantities of data they gather. This data will remain a swampy mush to reckon with and not good clay to build with, if groups or individuals cannot easily extract and analyze the data. If they cannot easily (a) learn the risks (b) measure the quality of group-decisions (c) understand the individual's critical-thinking skills -- then they will continue to make bad decisions. This "ease of learning" also allows for collaborative sharing across the businesses.

Fourth goal of building a SaaS application: Easily create (almost automatically) the next iteration (version) of the application based on the learning and adaptation of the underlying business process it has modeled.

In my opinion, most products of most SaaS companies have not yet reached the maturity to meet this goal. If we can design and create applications, where the underlying data and learning changes both the underlying work process and the SaaS application then the value of SaaS will be much higher than most experts predict.

Recall, the slow-moving mudslide of traditional enterprise-wide applications such as traditional SAP, Oracle etc. What happens to your SaaS application, when users change their underlying work process for better -- how long will it take your developers to change and adapt the application?

Ant Colony Optimization techniques are becoming more mainstream. This technique uses heuristic (data-driven) models to help systems learn. The models operate on an extremely simple premise: Individual ant is not intelligent, but a colony of ants working together create a swarm or collective intelligence to do many tasks well. See reference [1] for more.

These techniques can be utilized to meet the third and the fourth goal.
Only when these goals are met, then the "cat coming out of the bag" event will happen for SaaS. See reference [2] for more.

[1] Lessons from ant colony overcoming biases web 2.0

[2] The Cat is Out of the Bag (Again): The Hidden (?) Business Model in SaaS

Tweet

Patient Safety Efforts in Ohio

A recent article in the Columbus Dispatch discusses an initiative launched by Cardinal Health's with Ohio Hospitals that will reduce medical errors made in hospital settings.

We are launching a games-based learning software and solution that will help hospitals reduce patient harm events. The launch is on April 15, 20009.
Email Rini@pakragames.com to learn more.

If you are a patient and/or patient-care provider, then come join hands with us to solve this problem of medical errors that affects millions of patients each day.

We are all humans and we can all make errors. But we can do something to reduce the ways that create these errors. Education and learning-by-doing is one such path of doing "something". We commend Cardinal Health for financing such efforts.

Think about the crash of the flight US Airways 1549 on the Hudson river, New York City, that happened the other day. I am convinced that the reasons that saved all lives on that plane are (i) years of practice by the pilot and (ii) investment in the infrastructure around the Hudson river (ii) practice of drills and safety by all crew on board and on the water and (iv) Luck and chutzpah.

Now, consider 8 such fully loaded airplanes crashing every week in the United States. That's the number of human deaths in the United States every week due to medical errors. Luck and chutzpah saves the rest of us who receive medical care every week and live to tell the story about it.

Can we not all join hands to save at least one fully loaded plane of patients?
Read the article ...

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/01/16/Quality.ART_ART_01-16-09_B1_55CI88R.html

Tweet