Slow To Change…

February 24, 2010

I don’t know if I’m beating a dead horse (sorry PETA) here or not, but a recent conversation with a friend brought up a phenomenon that has intermittently held my interest through the years since getting into the Internet biz – how slow some folks are to embrace change. Yeah, not a revolutionary thought, but conventional wisdom and philosophy gain personal meaning through our personal lives, and seeing the change firsthand, as well as the ramifications and consequences of the varying degrees of reactions to it, has colored the concept with my own experience. And, as I mentioned before, in many ways it has only left me more puzzled.

The conversation involved my friend’s boss and his ongoing reluctance to admit a good, easy-to-use, visitor-friendly website has long since reached “necessity” status in providing quality customer service. That reluctance has resulted in my friend getting his ear bent daily by visitors about what a crappy site they have, how they couldn’t find this or that page or this or that schedule, how they “need to get a new one”, etc. And, lest he visibly cringe, he avoids mentioning that the website went through a redesign fairly recently, and that its reconstruction involved less thought and planning than your average “garage Dad” uses when building a bird house.

You have to wonder, don’t you, what this man was thinking at the time. “It’s just a website”, maybe? “Not everyone uses the Internet”, perhaps? “People won’t notice they can’t navigate to the ‘Contact Us’ page”? “Even if it pisses people off, they won’t bother to complain”?

It’s hard to say. And, unfortunately for him, and everyone involved with him (including, obviously, my friend), it’s a good bet that in a competitive market his reluctance to embrace change will have taken the biz down and everyone else with it.

I once worked for a shop that proved the point solidly. Shortly before I arrived, two owners of a single shop, due to circumstances irrelevant here, decided to split them into two – I worked for the first owner, who kept the original location. The second owner, who kept the original name, built his shop right down the street. So in the beginning, it was quite an even playing field. It rapidly became clear, however, that one was going to dominate. Can you guess the reason? Yep, despite my somewhat nagging pleas, my store owner wouldn’t build a website. The owner down the street was a bit – okay, a lot – more open to it, and had a website up within a couple of months. Within a year, he decided to include an online reservation system for their services (both shops provided both goods and services). Within two years, their overall service numbers had increased by 20% and they were booking 40% of their services online. A year after that, they were selling their goods on their website as well. Two years after that, my store closed its doors for good. True story.

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. ~ Charles Darwin

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