The Speed That Matters

A branch office of a large life insurance company in New Jersey recently got a speed bump.

Almost every week, for two months prior, management sent memos and e-mails to everyone on site detailing with breathless excitement the advantages of having a dedicated connection replace their individual dial-up connections.

The big day came, the networking technicians walked up and down the aisles offering to help configure the new TCP/IP settings on the desktop and laptop computers. The technicians even carried additional sets of documentation to leave behind.

Within two days, all of the inevitable wrinkles were ironed out and people indeed were able to access web sites faster and send e-mails without the chirping, buzzing, and whistling of modems connecting. Whenever someone needed Internet access, there it was, always there, always on.

The results were that unless you’re running either graphics intensive games or heavy PhotoShop functions, the latest processor is much ado about nothing. For business applications, you’ll get along just fine with either a 300 MHz Pentium II processor (including its Celeron/other clone incarnations as well as Intel-branded) or a 266 MHz G3 PowerPC processor from Motorola, noted for its greater longevity in small business and academic arenas.

Since web sites are physically housed at locations that have direct, secure access to high-bandwidth connections, typically, this connectivity is a separate issue from your office connectivity. Installing dedicated connectivity at your local office will make the employees happier, but your customers may not ever notice. I suggest that the key factor in the equation is the customer.

If so, then the critical question becomes, "What changes can we make to improve a customer’s relationship with our business?" (A corollary question might ask what are the smallest, least expensive changes that can be made by our business to cause the greatest payback in terms of the customer perspective.)

For instance, the loss-leader strategy has been well publicized. Last Fall, Reel.com offered copies of the Titanic video at $9.99, almost $20 less than its list price to generate traffic to its site. The strategy brought in over 300,000 sales and many times that number of mind-share impressions.

Which market segment of your business would become a likely buyer if the price barrier were lowered? How could you sweeten the deal to create additional buzz? What preparations would you need to make so that sufficient follow-up with these new customers "brought them into the fold?" This is a far more important set of questions to address than "how fast is our connectivity?"

Again, think about how you will measure your success, or the return on your investment. Will it be through the ability to respond to more customer inquiries for product information per day? Will it be lengthening the time a customer spends on your site? What can you do to increase the value a customer finds in your site, so that they are more likely to return, recommend, and otherwise reward your efforts?

Here are a few more questions to add to an e-business initiative above:

How will your staff behave differently after high-speed access is added? Identify the opportunities and benchmark behaviors that support your progress.

What opportunities have been created? If faster response were possible, focus on the areas of response would make the most difference to your existing customer base.

How will marketing, sales, and support be affected? Integrate your initiative beyond operations and IT.

How will your customers benefit from this investment? Include your customer’s perspective in your plan. This can translate to suppliers, consultants, and strategic partners, as well.

How will you know when you’ve succeeded? Give your organization a reasonable time frame to adopt the new changes and adapt to the new practices, based on its size and the level of ambition represented in the change. One family-owned investment firm in our area tripled the number of qualified new prospects they got via the Internet by building a plan based on these strategies.

Working smarter with better tools and a better understanding is the competitive edge. To move faster, the speed that matters has more to do with the expertise and training of your staff than it does of the network connection or the CPU on your desk.