Dortch's Digressions

Sometimes, Technology Works TOO Well...

Earlier today, I came across a job opening I found interesting. (In case you haven't been following my career development at www.DortchOnIT.com, I got laid off from my Aberdeen Group analyst job in January.) Clever me thought, "I'll write a blog entry about the company, then point to it as an example of how well I understand what they're doing and can help them do it." So I wrote and posted the blog entry, then went back to the company's Web site to begin the official job application process -- only to find that in the ensuing hour or so, the job was no longer open.

Frankly, I was too stunned to be very disappointed...

Apple and MacWorld: Who Needs Big Trade Shows Anymore, Anyway?

So Apple has decided that Steve Jobs will not give the Macworld Expo 2009 keynote address in a few weeks, and that the company will pull out of the 25-year-old show altogether after the 2009 edition. And speculation runs rampant across the Web and print media worlds, about (1) Steve Job's health and (2) that of Macworld Expo itself. I'll ignore issue (1) because it's none of my business, and focus on issue (2).

The large computer industry trade show has been a dying dinosaur for years, but has stubbornly hung on in many cases. However, there are now too many factors mitigating against the success of such events. These range from the abilities of companies such as Apple to turn retail stores and Web sites into far more manageable, controllable, and profitable "mini-expos" to growing requirements to reduce or eliminate costly, low-productivity business travel. (I mean, the MacBook Pro on which I'm composing this very screed already has built-in Internet connectivity, a microphone AND a camera...)

But don't cry for Macworld just yet. There is an awful lot of value to be gotten out of the event, even should Apple disappear from it entirely as a participant, or radically reduce its participation. I'm old enough to remember when networking pioneer all but owned the NetWorld trade show, but that event retained value beyond Novell itself, especially when it was combined with Interop, another pioneering big industry event. So there's semi-relevant precedent for the possibility of an Apple-free (or "Apple-reduced") Macworld continuing on successfully, at least for a while.

All depends on how Macworld Expo 2009 actually plays out, and what Apple does, if anything, before, at, and after said event. (If you want to read similar, more granular, and "closer-to-home" musings on this subject, I highly recommend "Apple at Expo: What went wrong?" by Jason Snell of Macworld.com, a corporate cousin of the company that runs Macworld Expo.) But regardless of how things play out at Macworld, what's happened to Macworld is definitely indicative of a larger truth: with few if any exceptions, the larger and/or more focused on a single vendor the trade show, the more likely that its days are numbered. And those numbers, if used to measure years of remaining longevity, are in the low to very low single digits, at best.

Sprint Nextel to Troublesome Customers: You're Fired!

So Sprint Nextel has "fired" some 1,000 of what it says are its most troublesome (and apparently troubled) customers. The company said in published reports that these customers made as many as 40 to 50 calls to the company's customer service team every month. And yet, there are folks out there in the blogosphere chalking this up to callously typical Big Business behavior, and stating with falsely ironic wistfulness that it must be nice to be able to fire customers at will.

A few things.

1. ANY business has the right, if not the ethical responsibility, to part company with any customer that business cannot satisfy. As long as the business makes the customer contractually and financially whole, which Sprint Nextel has done with its 1,000 former customers, why stay in a relationship that's not working? (Hold on, hold on -- let's stick to business relationships here, people!)

2. Sprint Nextel says it researched its customer base and complaint call logs extensively before doing this. The fact that the company was able to find 1,000 people who averaged 40 to 50 complaint calls monthly out of a claimed subscriber base of 57 million seems to indicate at least some research was in fact conducted. It should have taken a fair amount of digging -- any wireless carrier where a majority of customers were that unhappy would have gone out of business before most of us would have heard about them. (Fill in your preferred former carrier here.)

3. What happens if customer service and satisfaction levels increase measurably for the 56,999,000 or so Sprint Nextel customers still under contract? Will critics of the move lapse into grumbling silence? (Unlikely.) Will Sprint Nextel seek out the next 1,000 most complaint-prone customers and send them warning? (Possibly.) Will other wireless carriers or other types of companies follow Sprint Nextel's lead? (Unlikely, at least "out loud" among wireless carriers; possibly, in other cases.)

4. This is not about Big Bidness trampling the individual, something that constantly troubles me personally, make no mistake. Nor is it, I believe, anything about getting people to suck it up, shut up, and stop complaining about what they perceive as poor service. I do that all the time, but would have to give up blogging, if not working full-time, to get to the level of 40 to 50 calls a month. This is about a company using business analytics, business intelligence (BI), and customer relationship management (CRM) tools and processes to identify a relatively minute set of apparently extremely, chronically unhappy customers, and walking away from them rather than draining significant resources continuing to try to satisfy them. If it were your business, and you could, why wouldn't you, if it offered a chance to make life better for you and the vast majority of your customer base?

That last is not a rhetorical question. If you have an answer you'd care to offer, as Ross Perot said when he ran for President, "Ah'm all ears!"