“Delivering Happiness” Day 3
Written by Gloria Metrick on . Published as written. It may not reflect how these systems work today.
Today, I want to share my own thoughts on the book "Delivering Happiness" and the topic of Customer Service regarding its relationship to our industry.
First of all, since we are not selling consumer products in the Laboratory Informatics industry, such as what Zappo’s is doing, I wonder if we can even try to apply the same standards of customer service. After all, we sometimes read business books that talk about how to “delight” the customer. If you’re a customer, how often have you felt “delighted” by what we do? Or felt that we just delivered “happiness” to you? Since our products are not used by the people that buy them for personal use, will they ever feel that same sense of satisfaction that a person can get from making a good purchase of a consumer good?
This is difficult to evaluate since our industry does not appear terribly concerned about the topic of Customer Service, to begin with. As I pick up periodicals from other industries that have similar issues and articles to what we find in our own industry, one specific difference is that other industries do sometimes discuss the issue of Customer Service from its software and services vendors. I also want to be clear that I am speaking to all areas of our industry, LIMS, HIS, ELN, and any other software and services we provide.
Since we have so little of the conversation, to begin with, it is difficult to set up a measurement of our expectations of customer service or our achievement (or not) of it. We seem so bogged-down with conversations regarding the sad state of our projects and how terribly our industry performs in its software projects that we don’t seem to make it to the step of evaluating the customer experience, overall. We assume (possibly rightly so), that the experience has been bad and just leave it at that.
Still, there are ideas in the book that even we can identify with, to at least some extent:
Regarding Strategy (p. 67): “Don’t Cheat. Cheaters never win in the long run.”
Regarding Culture (p. 68): “Be nice and make friends. It’s a small community.”
I certainly believe in the first one and the second does apply to us, as we are a relatively small community. Thus, there might be hope for our industry that, even if we can’t “deliver happiness” that we could deliver something less traumatizing than we’ve collectively done up to this point.
Tomorrow’s posting: A contest.
Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/