“Today,” he writes, “we spy on ourselves and send electronic updates minute by minute.”
Stephen Baker, New Jersey-based writer for Business Week, in his book 'The Numerati'
Given the amount of information, that many of us are now willing to put online, the statement does certainly ring true, even in India. As a case in point look at this- my profile is on LinkedIn, My Space and (horrors!) on Orkut. My hobbies and interests are tracked through Yahoo and Google groups and my photos are on Flickr. In a fit of efficiency a year ago, I moved all my banking transactions online, and these days can’t be bothered to write a cheque (takes too long!). In the same period, I also decided that, as a self-declared evangelist for “do-it-yourself” software, I would manage my relationships with my service providers – the likes of AirTel, Vodafone, TataSky and Jet Airways – all online. The telecom self service portals are a specific case in point – apart from paying bills, I find myself updating profiles, optimizing tariff plans, carrying out service activations – all online. In effect, I have turned myself into my own service provider, and in the bargain, saving (at least AirTel) a decent sum of money from call center calls, database updates etc.
"The telecom self service portals are a specific case in point – apart from paying bills, I find myself updating profiles, optimizing tariff plans, carrying out service activations – all online."
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Two years ago, I would have simply turned to the office admin to carry out any of this stuff. And the harassed soul would in turn speak to folks at Airtel, Hutch (pre-Vodafone buyout) and do most of this via multiple and extremely harried telephone calls. Obviously, the new approach is so much more efficient – it took me all of five minutes to activate roaming on my new connection – a similar exercise through people channels took many calls and follow-ups (Have you done it? Yes, initiated, will check if it’s done and get back/ What’s the credit limit? – Oh, no idea, let me call and find out………I am sure you get the general idea) over a day and half. But the point is, with most of the new tech tools and tricks – self service portals, Web 2.0 applications and such like; it’s you who is sweating it out rather than the service provider.
And that’s where a version of the long tail effect kicks in! In the new approach, the skill level of the participating user is hugely variable and the onus is on us, as participants, to educate and improve ourselves to ensure a consistent service experience. In other words, depending on how smart you are, you could ramp up the return on the money, time or opportunity that you invested. And the difference in scale of differing experiences can be staggering.
"In the new approach, the skill level of the participating user is hugely variable and the onus is on us, as participants, to educate and improve ourselves to ensure a consistent service experience"
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Take for instance, an application like Salesforce.com – most users know and deploy it as sales process automation software. Smart users know enough about the application to create specialized reports or even integrate it to automatically update data from database providers such as Hoovers. While companies such as Salesforce.com do market and up-sell features to users, there are many that really don’t – especially when the base product itself is free.
Case in point- SEO or SEM using Google’s tools. Entry level smarts will get you a decent way, but it won’t push your company or personal website to the top of the search charts, or earn you an additional million dollars in sales. To really figure out how to use the tools, take a deep dive and (here is the key to the treasure chest) just READ -- the entire “how to” stuff on the site and then some recommended reading would also be, specialist sites/blogs on Google Analytics.
To keep up with the long tail, users need to make the effort – and invest time if not money. It is a democratic approach to knowledge – it’s all out there, equally accessible, provided you just look carefully.
The bottom-line is that not only are the new apps smarter, they also require you to wise-up too! And while there are no losers here, the gap between a top notch user and an average one, may just make you feel like one.