Sneaky Business

Market Opportunity: Impenetrable Packaging

Analysis:

Packaging, for even the most mundane of products, has grown significantly more robust during the last ten years. US companies, under extreme legal pressure to prevent product tampering, have increasingly turned to clamshell heat-seals, spot-welding and knotted razor wire to keep out troublesome customers. However, progress has come at the cost of increased customer frustration and personal risk. McBainsy, a consultancy, estimates that 1,500 adults were severely injured or maimed while attempting to open Tickle Me Elmo Extreme dolls during the 2006 holiday season. Clearly there's money, in addition to a few severed digits, being left on the table.

Concept:

• Provide adjunct product-opening products at point of sale
• Remove existing product warranties for products not opened using approved product openers
• Provide combined products and product openers in an appropriately priced bundle (easy to open)

Target Markets / Customers:

• Time-sensitive products where desperate customers cannot stand to fight their way through packaging (e.g. ground coffee, bandages, epinephrine kits)
• Shock sensitive products that may well be damaged by ham-fisted attempts to open them with blunt-edged kitchen knives (e.g. eggs, glassware, condoms)
• Ironic-products (e.g. scissors, knives, display swords)

Example - Lego home-package entry system:

Data Dive: Strategic Growth Opportunities

Struggling to break out from the same old planning meetings? Tired of staring at white space opportunities? Our annual SOB Manager Survey has revealed a number of innovative techniques that are being deployed to prioritize growth opportunities.

The complete survey is available from DayNovo Consulting for $125,595.

Psychologist-Enhanced Call Centers

Background information:

Call center usage has increased dramatically during the last ten years. McBainsey (a consultancy) estimates that 23% of the Indian sub-continent is now employed in call center work. Meanwhile, a Woodsner survey revealed almost 30% of all music consumption in Western countries comes from call center music-on-hold tracks. However, service representative skills and menu efficiency have both recently plummeted. 

No wonder then that customer patience and satisfaction are suffering. A recent DayNovo Consulting customer focus group on the topic rapidly degenerated into verbal abuse and fisticuffs. (Fortunately a prompt and forceful Heimlich was able to dislodge the dry erase marker that had become lodged in the moderator's throat).

Companies are becoming desperate to resolve the twin issues of call center costs and customer dissatisfaction. Traditional approaches have typically provided only short-term relief; clearly a more radical solution is called for.

DayNovo recently completed a high profile call center innovation project for a large, Kansas-based mobile telephony vendor. The client has kindly agreed to share our overall recommendations with the Sneaky Business community.

Potential (de-prioritized) solutions:

• Mutating IVR: An increasingly complex IVR (interactive voice response) menu structure that changes during the customer service call ("Please listen extremely carefully – our menu options will change during this call")
• Call-de-sac: An IVR structure that results in multiple dead-ends for callers. Company assumes that reasonably high percentage of callers will give up on complaint without calling back.
• Customer data entry overload: Call initiates with requests for keypad entry of multiple alpha-numeric data-strings from the caller (SSN, phone number, customer account number etc). Requests are sufficiently tedious and time consuming that a high percentage of callers abandon their call before completion.
• Speech disabled call center: Customer is required to interact with call center through a highly inaccurate speech recognition system. Fidelity of recognition is so appalling that high percentage of callers will abandon their calls.

Highest priority concept: Psychologist-enhanced call center

• Identifies a team of unemployed, but highly motivated, psychologists to become call center representatives.
• Provide the psychologists with only minimal product training to reach a veneer of technical knowledge.
• Team employs a "self help" approach to resolving customer complaints and queries, relying upon a rich menu of insightful phrases including:
  • "Why do you think you're feeling frustrated today?"
  • "Why do you think the phone might not be working?"
  • "How does your loss of mission critical data make you feel?"
• Ambient natural sounds play in background of call (birds singing, trickling water, whale songs etc) to make callers more receptive to advice
• Provide series of self-help steps on company web site to encourage customers to resolve issues rather than reaching out to customer service (similar to FAQs, but not providing any useful product information).

Key benefits:

• Significant call center cost reduction through radically improved first call resolution, time to completion and improved customer mental health.
• Opportunity to monetize an extended relationship between the customer and call center representative if further psychological issues are uncovered during call ("Note, all subsequent calls will be billed at $10 per minute").

Key Risks:

• Availability of unemployed psychologists limited in certain areas (e.g. LA, New York).
• Need to ensure consistent approach for repeat callers (e.g. maintain Jungian or Freudian technique).

Acronym: CAGR

Compound Annual Girth Rate

Rate of expansion of personal waistline, typically accelerates during progression from lower to middle management positions. Highly correlated to sales meeting attendance, proximity of drive through Starbuck's and exposure to SOB managers during career.

Data Dive: Cost Drivers

Latest results from our annual LOB manager survey:

Source: Ivy Consulting LOB Manager Survey, Feb. 2007

Source: Ivy Consulting LOB Manager Survey, Feb. 2007

Moving Towards a Perpetual Staffing Model

Analysis:

As organizations seek a global footprint many are hamstrung by local staffing rules that cramp their ability to straddle world markets. While customers demand goods and services 24x7, US-based corporations struggle to remain operational for more than ten hours of every global day. UC companies need to keep their lights on to maintain a leg up on more fleet-footed Asian competitors.  

Concept:

• Pursue an aggressive "insourcing" policy of recruitment from regional offices into US headquarters
• Encourage (or, if possible, contractually obligate) new overseas entrants to stay on their local time-zones
• Develop an extensive "job sharing" scheme between US employees ("day shifters") and enthusiastic overseas recruits ("nights shifters")

Key Benefits:

• Immediate organizational efficiencies, as corporate roles move towards continual productiveness
• Improved cost effectiveness of fixed costs associated with corporate infrastructure
• Dual-staffed CEO can maintain perpetual availability for immediate responses to crises

Key Risks:

• Prospect of massive population influx if model widely adopted across US
• Someone will eventually twig that the CEO looks different during the night

Bringing Back Bribes to Corporate America

Analysis:

In countries near the top of the annual Economist corruption index, corporate culture has moved away from the use of bribes. This represents the abandonment of centuries of tradition and the removal of an important lever for improving intra-organizational efficiency. We believe the practice should be re-introduced, and are willing to pay handsomely to make it happen. 

Concept:

• Encourage employees to settle differences / agree to recommendations using bribes.
• Official company bribe site tracks bribes, provides a formal mechanism for quid-pro-quos.
• Bribe site typically accessible from HR home page – with additional links to anger management, gambling addiction, short term loan providers.
• Company takes a 10% "processing fee" for bribes monitored, deducted directly from payroll.

Key Benefits:

• Efficient internal market sets pricing and provides additional revenue stream for the employer.
• Opportunity to "level the playing field" with respect to corporate hierarchy.
• Ideas that matter the most to individuals will get pushed hardest - built in incentive to have "skin in the game"
• Visibility into bribe site gives all employees window into "big bets" within the company.

Key Risks:

• Bribe site must maintain "Five 9s" reliability - quickly becomes mission critical IT infrastructure element.

Success Stories:

• "I got the corner office – what more can I say!" Jennifer Biggs, Receptionist, Contorso Corp.

Acronym: IRR

Internal Rate of Regret

Metric used for quantifying time value of commitment. IRR is highly dynamic and typically increases over time. Historically IRRs peaked during dot com bust and Enron collapse. Recent IRR local maxima have been observed with the Florida real-estate market, Jet-Blue frequent flyer miles and the brown colored Zune.