Make it ‘dumb and simple’.
It is something that I spend a lot of time on; convincing the CEO to think from the customer standpoint, talking to the department head about what will deliver results at the frontlines. It requires a lot of thinking to make something ‘dumb’ and it is never simple to make anything ‘simple’.
Companies are often caught in a situation where they are terribly excited about a slew of product launches or service upgrades which they think is going to be terribly exciting to the customer. The customer may indeed be excited, only if somebody told him about it or better still answered all his queries.
Our client, a travel company, launched a few options through which air ticketing could be done. This included the GDS option, tie up with a wholesaler & an alliance with an OTA. These competitive options would enable the client & his franchisees to offer the best deals and a variety of options to their customers for a specific route say Mumbai-Bangalore.
This presented exciting possibilities to the customer. Obviously this was rolled out with a lot of fanfare and aplomb to the channel.
The distribution team waited with gleeful anticipation for the monthly sales report, a month after launch. Alas ! There was no significant improvement in the air ticketing numbers. A detailed investigation and a series of mystery calls highlighted some interesting issues.
Not surprisingly, the air ticketing executive when asked for price & options for a specific flight sector continued to use her GDS for information & quote. Besides the usual comfort that she had with the old habit of using the GDS, it was cumbersome (not simple) to open three different sites, query for the same route while keeping an impatient the customer on hold. At the same time she needed to analyze (not dumb) the options presented by three sites on attributes of price, refunds, convenient timings and commissions to the agent.
It is an old story and the easiest solution to this is making a meta search based front end so that the air ticketing executive has an option to review various pricing & commission options in one single page so that she does not have to navigate between options (simple) and can review the price & commission table on one page (dumb).
If we all spent our time more on making things dumb & simple rather than getting excited by the 'next thing' / bright new idea, we would have stronger businesses and get more value from our strategies.
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