Peel Me a Tomato
I was slicing a tomato for a salad the other day when I suddenly remembered my Grandmother, standing with her cane in the kitchen peeling tomatoes. She always peeled tomatoes if they weren't going to be cooked. As she saw it, the peel was an unpleasant part of the tomato which should be removed. What makes this interesting was that for most of her adult life my Grandmother was a professional cook. In WWII she was in charge of the kitchen at an aircraft factory making fighter planes. She loved to recount how many sandwiches they made each day, how many pies were baked before dawn.
I used to peel tomatoes, but it's fairly messy, requires a sharp knife and flawless technique, and frankly takes a lot of time. Realistically no one does it. I thought of this in context with a growing awareness of the trend in commercial kitchens for “diner participation” in the preparation of food: in short, a trend to leave the bones in the fish, the shells on the shrimp, and the strings in the beans. It becomes the eater's job to deal with this final step without landing supper in his or her lap. Under the banner of bold new cooking the kitchen gets out of a lot of work and the customer fills in the slack, like it or not.
Why this trend disturbs me, and what it's got to do with software, is the removal of what the customer really wants from the definition of the service provided. I'm seeing similar trends in all sorts of businesses. This nonsense with call centers of entering your account number three times before you reach a human, only to be asked “What's your account number?” Help systems that make the user wade through the FAQ, email support, and user forum before ever there's a customer support phone number revealed.
There's a time and a place for tight financial controls; for keeping costs down and margins high. Investing in customer satisfaction and loyalty is not one of them. Remember that something like 70-80% of your business comes from existing customers; that delighted customers are the best sales force in the world; and that excessive customer support loads are a result, not a cause. Look to your software and make it more usable, easier, more intuitive, better tested.
Then find a tomato to peel.
