This is a guest post
I had my eyes tested at Specsavers a couple of weeks ago:
- First I tried their website, it told me that if I wanted an appointment in the next 48 hours I would need to contact the store.
- Then I rang the store and they told me that they didn’t have any bookable appointments but I could try turning up at the store for a ‘non bookable’ appointment, but the typical wait was 20-60 minutes.
- In the end I went to the local store in person booked a non-bookable (!?!?!) appointment and went back to work for an hour whilst I ‘waited’.
I got my eye test, but not without three separate initiatives on my part and one wasted trip to the store.
Too much technology
All of this happened despite Specsavers having:
- a web presence
- a computerised booking system
- a receptionist handling bookings in-store
Perhaps they had taken a leaf out of the NHS method for demand reduction?
The flat earth approach
I was struck by the completely different approach at Costco. Displayed immediately outside the entrance, about 5 meters from the optician, is a metal billboard. On the billboard is a list of appointment times with a metal slider that slides between ‘taken’ and ‘available’. Each time an appointment is booked or cancelled someone updates the board outside by moving the appropriate slider.
It looks like a real-life example of the apocryphal tale of the American super-space-pen and the Russian pencil.
The problem with IT
Very often projects to tackle business problems are led, rather than supported, by IT departments, invariably resulting in an IT-focussed solution.
Next time you hear…
“Of course, what we really need is Cognos/ Teradata/ SQL/ a new workflow system but they cut the proposed budget, so we are stuck with [insert current system as applicable]”
… it might be worth looking to see if there’s a tin-sign solution that is actually better.
Mind you, just because the solution that Costco developed was simple to use it doesn’t mean it was easy to come up with.
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