Instant Execution is the New Standard
Raise your hand if you love waiting in long lines, especially when it's for something important. Raise your hand if you look forward to going to the DMV every couple of years, appointment or not. Waiting simply is a turn-off. Let's agree to not do that. $300 billion dollars a year is spent on fast food, and 60-70% of that is at the drive-through. There is an entire science (queuing theory) built around waiting in lines. People hate waiting.
This week we rolled out a new Ziptask front-end experience that allows for ‘Instant Execution’ (we define that later), and a very different experience for the world of IT outsourcing. Pando did a piece on the release, and it’s already off to a great start. This email article seeks to explain some background on why we did it, how it changes the game with what we call ‘Instant Execution’, and what it allows you to do.
It takes so long to do anything these days. (Try registering for health insurance on the new federally run USA health insurance system.) And time is so precious. So very precious. In fact, the very fact that you’re reading this email is a testament to the time paradox. You’re reading this email, probably from your mobile device, and it’s a really long email. Why so long? Because we had to put the entire article in an email, instead of just a link to a blog post. Why’d we do that? Because you, (statistically), are not even willing to even take the 2-3 seconds it takes to click on the darn link to go to our blog post that contains the content. That’s why. So go ahead and keep reading this one since you’ve already gotten this far.
“Time it takes to…”, check out what Google has in its auto-completes that caught my eye.
Bing shows a slightly different auto-complete result…
Just kidding, we hacked those screen-shots. But still, waiting is a BIG deal for business, and is literally make or break for small businesses, where they need every sale they can get.
When it comes to customer patience, every second counts. If you don’t answer the phone, you lose money. If your website is slow, you lose money. Worse, if your servers go down, you could you’re your entire business. Servers going down means someone somewhere is in deep doo-doo. It’s true. Server hosting companies even provide 99.99999% ("5 nines") uptime guarantees in their service level agreements and often will drive bonus incentives on those poor server administrators to keep those ridiculously high standards.
For e-commerce and technology service professionals, in particular, making a customer wait means they will probably lose money, and have less fun. For freelance software developers and website designer/developer professionals, the game of finding clients and providing services has been completely redefined. There are no reward or extra bonus points for being available 12 hours from now. Customers want access immediately.
Yep, every second counts, and humanity very rarely ops for the slower approach to really anything. It's always now now now. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and many other top tier apps have redesigned their UX again and again to get eyeballs on content as quickly as humanly possible. Programmers literally create timers that capture the milliseconds that it takes for a person to load the app and look at someone’s cat pictures.
There is real science behind queuing models, as shown below from our referenced article on queuing theory:
The equation that allows a successful business model around queuing models for the image above is:
Ok - so yes, it’s a science, but we re
ally don’t need an equation to figure out that if the line is too long, your business will suffer…. Our business will suffer… The end result of the math (for startups) is simply this: build something that provides scalable and expandable service to customers who can leverage the process, yet control some aspects of the result. This leads us in the order of Instant Execution.
Yogurtland: Instant Execution Is Revealed
But it's not just speed that we crave, it's also getting your hands dirty. Exhibit A: take a look at what happened in the United States’ frozen yogurt sub-industry. In a market dominated by one or two frozen yogurt providers, a newcomer to the market was looking to shake the tree a bit. Yogurtland came on the scene in 2006, and had a different approach to product pricing and customer engagement. Instead of relying on the ‘properly-trained’ frozen yogurt professionals to carefully dispense the yogurt in perfectly symmetrical swirls, Yogurtland offered a fairly disruptive approach. It wasn't brain science… all they did was let the customers pick any sloppy combination of their own flavors and pour it all themselves in any sort of messy concoction they could imagine. That somehow made customers happy. There was some psychology involved, no doubt. Customers want to pull those levers themselves, getting their hands on the product as soon as humanly possible. They opened up the toppings bar as well, giving full access to the good stuff. Instead of charging them by the cup size, they simply weighed the product on a scale, and charged “per ounce”. These changes introduced new concepts of ‘hands-on’, ‘biased accessibility’, and ‘controllable pricing’. These factors somehow netted customers with an overall *instantly-mine-and-customized* experience, and the corporation was rewarded with explosive sales.
Instant Gratification vs. Instant Execution
You might try to label the yogurt land experience as “Instant Gratification”. But it’s not. It's more important and more valuable than a measurement of gratification of the customer. It's actually something we would like to call “Instant Execution”, because it’s the actual fulfillment of the refined process that led to the experience being holistically different. Instant Gratification is like walking up to McDonald’s, ordering a cheeseburger, and having one instantly appear in front of you. But what if your cheeseburger needs to have 10 different items in it, be made only after you order it, and be cooked by the manager of the restaurant and not just anybody. This request requires something more like Instant Execution.
We define our beloved Instant Execution term as: “The immediately-accessible person, skills, and tools that fulfill a customized workflow according to the tastes and preferences of the customer.”
What it is: Getting exactly the right person in front of you, immediately, who will absorb your specific requirements, and through a carefully defined process, will engage in a transparent and predictable pattern of fulfillment to deliver custom professional services in accordance with your expectations.
What it is not: Walking into Home Depot and going over to their design center, asking for an interior designer to work on your bedroom redesign and closet organization efforts immediately. The poor soul working at the desk will shake their head and type away at their computer in a myriad of screens, at which point they’ll raise the eyebrows and say they are booked for the next 2 ½ weeks but can set you up on a Thursday afternoon three weeks from now.
Instant Execution: Why it’s The Future
So many reasons, but here are a few:
- Because technologically, we can provide it.
- Because customers are ready for it, and as soon as they get wind that it’s possible, they will demand it.
- Because your business changes all the time, and you can’t wait till tomorrow to get started on something. It really does need to start today now.
- Because you're not always available and in the right mindset to talk about your project or needs when the service provider is available.
- Because inspiration of the entrepreneur or small business CEO is fleeting and it needs to be properly communicated to someone who can run with it before it fizzles or flutters away.
- Because somebody out there is better stronger and faster than you, and you need every second you can get to compete with them.
- It means you can go to Ziptask, click one button, and be speaking with an expert. You don’t even need to sign up first. You don’t need to schedule something for 2-3 days from now. Simply go in and click and speak.
- If means you can prevent the loss of brilliant ideas that never get implemented. The ideas of many entrepreneurs are left unspoken. They manifest themselves in the moment: on their commute home from a cubicle job, or sitting at the soccer field watching little Kaitlyn or Tyler run around on a Saturday morning. But alas, the effort to implement them is too great, so now they are lost in the caverns of their mind, stuck between two brain synapses, never to fall upon the eager ears of that brilliant (yet slightly nerdy) programmer who makes it become a reality.
- It means there is no time lapse between the time you think of an item that can be outsourced, and the engagement of a resource towards that desired result.
- It allows for your team / company to move quicker, and never wait for the outsourced party offshore to wake up to get something started.
- It gives you Instant Execution, which had not been readily available or possible in the area of IT Outsourcing for the average company, until now.
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