Pi-Consulting

# Want to make friends with your customers? Perhaps an internet-based social club could help. MySpace, the social-networking website recently bought by Rupert Murdoch, is already the most-visited site in America, with monthly hit rates up from 17 million a year ago to over 50 million today. And they’re all just trying to be friendly! MySpace is now offering advertiser companies the chance to become part of a growing circle of acquaintance, and cement the relationship — nothing too crassly commercial, mind! — with a product-toting web page or two. Big marketers have been taking up the invitation. Consumer-goods giant Unilever, for instance, has made friends with the blonde, flirty and spectacularly well-endowed Christine Dolce, (or “ForBiddeN”, as she is known on the site), whose 900,000 ‘friends’ get to hear about Unilever’s Axe deodorant product when they check out her prominent social attractions on the ForBiddeN page. Ms. Dolce, flush with the proceeds of this ever-so-slightly-commercial alliance, is now launching her own fashion clothing line. Meanwhile a friendly bunch of mad-for-it 18-24 males pause in their contemplation of her spectacular cleavage for long enough to wonder whether they ought to try to smell better. Axe, and Unilever, are the gainers. Wonderful thing, friendship. (Source: The Economist, Pi)

Plano, Texas, is a well-heeled suburb of Dallas, and thus not the sort of place you’d go looking for miracles. Yet it was in Plano last Spring that Wal-Mart, of all no-nonsense retailers, opened a new store built as a “laboratory” for selling organic produce. Get your all-natural chicken, your organic kiwi-fruit and your spinach-flavored organic baby food — at Wal-Mart! Or choose from their 97 other natural/organic items of produce! The way was pointed by Austin’s Whole Foods Market, whose share price has blossomed — organically, of course — by a factor of ten in as many years. Now others are following the Path More Principled. The US market for organic fare is no longer a cottage industry based on local produce, since it has already topped $14 billion a year in sales. If that only represents 3% of American food sales overall, organics can still claim to be the fastest-growing sector of the market. Who needs chemical fertilizers? This stuff just grows and grows, it seems. (Source: The Economist, Pi)

Imagine if you can a world in which the automotive industry have not been invented yet.

If we had to start from scratch and invent it today, would we seriously consider basing the motor car’s future on using one of the most volatile fuels known to man? A fuel which, in order to produce propulsion, depends on detonating several fiery explosions per second in a steel box? A fuel which bursts into flames during transportation if exposed to a spark, a match or a collision? A fuel whose unburned residue pollutes our world and endangers global climate patterns? A fuel, moreover, which we in the West have very little of, and have to buy — at volatile and often exorbitant prices — from faraway and frequently uncooperative nations who understand and use the power it gives them over us?

Pi don’t think so.

Nor, it appears, did many of the people who tried to invent and reinvent the car over more than a century. 100 years ago, the internal combustion engine was getting a run for its money from steam-driven and electric designs. The battery-electric cars now being brought to market come from a long line of similar experiments.

In early 1920s America, there were dozens of manufacturers turning out electric cars. They were quiet, efficient and reliable. Above all, their ready-to-go power source avoided all that irksome hand-cranking that petrol cars needed. That all changed with the invention of self-starting ignition.

But the battery power enthusiasts were not finished. Soon after World War II, Kish Industries of Lansing, Mich. developed the Nu Klea Starlite, one variant with a futuristic clear bubble top, which was to run at 40 miles an hour for up to 40 miles on a charge to its lead acid batteries. The world was not set aflame, and the enterprise was abandoned in 1965. People started saying things like “It’s the batteries, stupid”, and Eisenhower’s new highways were colonized exclusively by petrol-engine cars, which to this day represent over 99% of all the cars on America’s roads.

Not to be deterred, the Henney Motor Company introduced its Kilowatt in 1959, based on the body of a Renault Dauphine. Electric Fuel Propulsion in Michigan had the same idea when they launched MARS I and MARS II Renault-based hybrids, and in 1967 gave the world an added incentive to ‘drive electric’ by installing fast-charge recharge stations at Holiday Inns between Chicago and Detroit. The love affair with Renault bodies was continued by Electricar Corporation of Athol, Mass., when they introduced their Lectric Leopard in 1979.

This was soon trumped by the CitiCar, an electric car which Sebring Vanguard of Florida sold quite a few of in 1974-76. Their two-seater was uncharitably described as “a golf cart with horn, lights, turn signals and windshield wipers”. The CitiCar was soon succeeded by the same manufacturer’s ComutaCar. And then, eventually, came General Motors’ EV1, which GM put on the roads of California and Arizona (leased rather than sold) in the latter years of the 1990’s. That bold innovation depended on charging stations in homes, office buildings and shopping centers, and its sad demise was chronicled in the movie “Who Killed The Electric Car?”. For their part, Daimler Chrysler have already sunk $3.6 billion into their Smart car, and have little to show for it but furrowed brows. Now California-based Tesla Motors is to try its hand with an electric-powered two-seater costing $89,000, reports The Economist. The backing comes from PayPal baron Elon Musk and from Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Maybe electrics can make money for them as electrons did.

Yet are all these Quixotic efforts no more than tilting at windmills? Even enthusiasts for battery-powered automotion confess that the driving experience feels “primitive”. One aficionado actually enjoys the startled looks on bystanders’ faces when his electric chariot (he himself says it looks like “a phone box on wheels”) glides past them in almost total silence.

And that’s where consumer insight points up a fundamental problem. People driving cars like the feeling they get from fast acceleration, throbbing motors, and above all vroom vroom noises. The market is addicted to the macho growling sound-effects provided by the internal combustion engine, and feels deep-down that near-silent electric engines sound “alien”.

“Oh, is that all?”, say Tesla’s engineers. “Fine, we’ll program the software with a variety of engine roars, like ringtones on your cellphone!”. Errmmmmm… Guys, don’t call us, we’ll call you.

Humanity’s propensity to don green eye-shades and take a bet on a hand of cards is being expanded significantly by the internet. There are already 2,400 online sites for playing poker alone. The leading site, PartyPoker.com, sees just under $1,500 wagered on thirty-two hands of poker PER SECOND, making a pot worth $45 billion a year. As with most games of chance, the guys providing the green baize table (or in this case screen) can expect at least some of the money to stay with the House. In 2002, PartyGaming made $4.4 million on revenues of $30 million. By last year, the revenue was a few thousand dollars shy of $1 billion, and profits came close to $300 million. Care to raise? (Source: New York Times, Pi)

“And would you like that orange-juice medium or large?” says the voice responding to the lady’s drive-thru breakfast order at McDonalds. “Fine, that will be $12.40 in total. Have a wonderful day!”. Nothing unusual there, you would think, as the New York Times reports, except that the teenager logging the order was in a call center 150 miles from Los Angeles CA, while the lady driver ordering breakfast on the other end of the squawk-box was in — Honolulu.

The next customer our teenage order-taker talks to is in Gulfport, Mississippi. Seconds later, she effortlessly logs a to-go order for a gentleman in Gillette, Wyoming. She and her 35 out-placed call-center co-workers are filling orders for the McDonalds morning shift in a geographic area covering six time zones. They simply tap on-screen buttons to file the requests by internet with the computer systems of the restaurant concerned. When the order arrives on THEIR screen, local workers carry the food and beverages the necessary few yards to the customer waiting at the collection window. If a restaurant is out of a particular item, a warning appears on the call-center’s screens. No-one seems to care that the request for their food may have made a round trip of several thousand miles, though if customers are told what’s going on they describe the experience as “weird”.

Far from seeking able burger-flippers, new outsourced call centers are looking for skills that have more to do with being fast on the mouse-click.

Why bother? What’s wrong with the old squawk-box in the restaurant itself? The case for long-distance, or rather outplaced and centralized order processing, is based on efficiency and cost-saving. First, the new approach allows close monitoring of employees’ performance. Second, it helps with a growing problem of in-restaurant workers dividing their attention between too many tasks, such as order-taking, serving, counting out change, and cleaning. Mistakes are often occasioned by a kind of multitasking-induced confusion, which can cause employees to forget details and drop the ball. A third advantage is in multi-lingual order-filling; if the customer wants to order in Spanish or Portuguese, he or she is immediately routed to a bilingual order-taker.

But the biggest gain from remote fast food call-centering seems to be in optimizing time-usage. It might not seem important, but there is typically a 10-15 second gap between one car driving off with its order logged and the next car pulling up at the microphone point. While in Honolulu the lady in the green Toyota is lazily pulling forward to the collection window, the girl in California can be using those seconds to talk to a different customer in Baltimore who has already pulled up. The increased order-count can raise efficiency by an order of magnitude. That’s the theory, anyway. The founder of one such call center, Bronco at Santa Maria CA, says it’s about “saving seconds to make millions”. One company in North Dakota is already experimenting with order-taking from employees’ homes, on specially-installed computer equipment.

The Bronco workforce in California grew from 16 to 125 in six months, and has filled two and a half million fast-food orders in the 18 months since it started. The jury is still out on further expansion, but McDonalds say they are encouraged not only by speed and efficiency benefits, but by the system’s ability to improve the customer experience and sell more product. (Other industries are already taking note, such as home-improvement empire The Home Depot, who are thinking of putting speaker systems on their shopping carts so that customer service personnel can help people find their way from Aisle D5 to where the lawn-sprinkler systems are… from several hundred miles away).

Back to McDonalds. Flippers? Got enough, thanks. Blippers wanted! Must be demon mousemasters. Once you’re on the payroll, they’ll test you once in a while to make sure you’re still ‘wired’: fail to click the red box on the computer screen in 1.75 seconds, and you could be thrown out with the uneaten fries. A computer display in the call-center restroom tells employees exactly how long they have been away from their workstation.

But, pressure to perform and meager minimum-wage earnings notwithstanding, there are advantages in working in the call centers rather than the restaurant itself. You can wear whatever clothes you like. You can roll your eyes and make faces at irritating customers — they’re hundreds of miles away and they’ll never know!. AND you don’t have to leave work smelling of hamburgers!

Happy Labour Day.