CONFUNDIR
AL CLIENTE NO ES DIFICIL   
Confuse the Customer? It's Not Hard to Do
By Martha
Lagace
HBS Working Knowledge
The
telecommunications revolution seems to be confusing a lot of people, admitted
several executives at a WSA panel. Though the industry may be exciting
and dynamic to people directly involved in its momentum, many civilians
are increasingly less than enchanted with its promise.
And
perhaps the people who can least stand to be confused, panelists all agreed,
are their own customers.
The
technology business is so in flux, in fact, that black humor is even sneaking
into their own executive lexicon. According to Jan Dehesh, a vice president
of business development at Qualcomm, the initials for chief information
officer really stand for "career is over."
The
challenge facing executives these days is, of course, is how to put communications
back into "telecommunications," particularly vis-a-vis their
own customers.
Despite
the panel’s impressive-sounding title, "The Future of Convergence,"
speakers rushed to make the observation that customers don't care about
convergence. That is to say, they don't care about it in so many words.
"Customers
don’t say, ‘Gee, I want convergence,’" stated Nancy Gofus, an executive
vice president at XO in charge of marketing and customer care. What customers
do say about the industry, she said, is that they don't like it. "Why
are the bills so hard to understand?" is a typical question, she
pointed out.
"They
are very angry with this industry," Gofus warned. "They find
it hard to do business with this industry. They don’t like it when we
talk in technical language, using words like ‘convergence,’" when
what’s meant is the integration of voice, data, and wireless.
Customers
aren’t necessarily very articulate, either, about voicing what they do
want. "That’s one of the ‘great secrets’ of marketing," Gofus
joked. "The secret is, ‘Really listen to the customer.’ But sometimes
the customer is clueless.
"Sometimes,
they don’t understand the possibilities well enough to even tell you what
they want. They think in the same boxes that we think: It’s just always
been a certain way, and they have a hard time envisioning what else is
out there."
However,
small- and medium-size business customers let her know that the reality
of convergence is absolutely essential to their jobs. They cannot run
their companies without communications solutions, she said. And they broaden
the word telecommunications to mean not just a dial tone; Internet
access is also a vital part of the mix. Fast access, she added, is what
levels the playing field for small-and medium-size companies in relation
to their larger brethren. So, fast, well-run services are what give any
company an edge in the market, or not.
"The
most painful thing" Gofus does in her position, she told the audience,
is to try to coordinate so many types of suppliers and technologies and
services. There’s a dichotomy, for example, between recognizing technology
as essential ("with a much broader definition of what’s essential"),
along with the many, apparently Byzantine structures for billing and for
clarifying services and functions.
A
further complication for the industry, added panelist Jill Wagner, a vice
president of Verizon Long Distance, is to understand and apply — and then,
ideally, translate for customers — the various types of legislation cropping
up related to telecommunications.
What’s
next
For
the future, Gofus believes that instant messenger will find its way into
business applications for the next generations of customers. It is her
own personal observation that teenagers and children already prefer instant
messenger to picking up the telephone, and they presumably will carry
that habit into adulthood.
When
one member of the audience wondered whether all types of uses — pager,
cell phone, PDA — would converge on one single handheld device, most panelists
thought not. Dehesh, of Qualcomm, suggested that two devices, not one,
would become the norm. "The devices will be smaller," she allowed.
And
the notion of checking e-mail via cell phone does not appear to be a tremendous
boon for efficiency, at least according to Gofus. She gets 150 e-mails
a day, she reckoned; and many of those come with multiple attachments
in tow.
"How
the heck am I going to read those on a little screen?" she cried
with mock despair — in the spirit of any good customer besieged by the
wonders of modern technology.
Copyright 2001. President and Fellows of Harvard College
El retorno de la inversión en entrenamiento y capacitación de equipos gerenciales es normalmente exponencial y en minutos. Vincent Peale.
          
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