What Are You Missing?

I have to manage your expectations

It is a horrible phrase. I hate it when somebody says it to me. It means that I am not going to get what I want when I want it. I am being softened up. There is going to be a delay.

Suddenly I am thrown into the cost or speed conundrum. As the customer, my position is simple.

“Pull your finger out and get on with it.”

But that stance rarely works, no matter how much I throw my weight about.

I hate one-dimensional trade-offs.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

In his TED talk Roary Sutherland tells the story of Eurostar.

There is a train which goes from London to Paris. The question was given to a bunch of engineers, about 15 years ago, “How do we make the journey to Paris better?” And they came up with a very good engineering solution, which was to spend six billion pounds building completely new tracks from London to the coast, and knocking about 40 minutes off a three-and-half-hour journey time.

Now, call me Mister Picky. I’m just an ad man … but it strikes me as a slightly unimaginative way of improving a train journey merely to make it shorter. Now what is the hedonic opportunity cost on spending six billion pounds on those railway tracks?

Here is my naive advertising man’s suggestion. What you should in fact do is employ all of the world’s top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train, handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. Now, you’ll still have about three billion pounds left in change, and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.

His point is a simple one. Don’t just assume there is only one dimension that is important. Understand what else is important to your customers and throw that into the mix as well.

A more workaday example

We don’t all have supermodels at our disposal, so here is a more down-to-earth example:

A team was charged with improving turnaround times at a hospital pharmacy. It took two hours for the pharmacy to give prescriptions to outpatients. They did some good work to cut the wait to 40 minutes. But that wasn’t the clever bit.

Being a patient is a soul-destroying job. Hospitals hand you off from waiting room to waiting room for hour after hour. Another 40 minutes wasn’t the issue. The real problem was that these people had been trapped staring at hospital walls all morning.

The solution was to give every patient a beeper as they do in restaurant queues. Now the patients weren’t bored to tears in the waiting room, they were free to go wherever they wanted.