Apple TV, VoIP Service Providers, Design & Perfection
Many of us in this industry are gadget junkies and I admit that I belong to the club. The desire to check-out and play with new products has always fueled our new product research and helped us find the better products for ABP’s portfolio.
Good solid products that are leaders in their respective fields and interoperate well and interface well with others are the main criteria by which we select products in the VoIP and IP Communicatons field. But there is more to it when we look for the WOW factor. We get really excited when things work out of the box and show no apparent flaws. Every now and then we encounter products that are designed masterfuly and leave us in awe.
This weekend I found one of these products in the new AppleTV. Unrelated to VoIP but nevertheless there was something to learn. The Apple TV is a slick and flat square box of minimalistic design similar to the Minimac that you connect to your TV and wirelessly connects to your PC or MAC to create a multimedia center. The intrigue starts with the packaging of the Apple TV. A gorgeous case, special cellophane wrap that opens like flower petals without having to be torn open like shrink wrap. The unit itself looks solid and has a great tactile experience. All I needed to do was connect the enclosed video and sound cables and in less then 2 minutes the unit was installed. The first sights and sounds dazzlied me with a world class, TV studio type welcome trailer. Two minutes more on my minimac to register the unit and it started syncing my entire photo and music collection. Five minutes later I saw my first pictures on the TV and could see my music collection with the covers of all CDs on the widescreen TV. Flawless, intuitive and with style. Needless to say I was ecstatic over my new gadget. The next two days I enthusiastically showed the Apple TV to three friends and I think at least two will buy their own.
What can we learn? To start there is nothing that sells like enthusiastic, excited and thrilled customers. That’s the stuff that creates buzz and fuels mouth to mouth advertising. It also shows how powerful it is to meet and exceed expectations. Give customers what they want quickly without hassles and problems. Had it taken me two days to get things going, I would not have been able to show it to anybody during the first 24-48 hours and would have lost most of my excitement.
In our industry the same lesson applies. One of our service provider designed his product and process in such a way that it will work flawlessly 99% of the time at the first connect and give the customer such a WOW. We can see their succcess every day! Thousand of units with nimimal returns and very little churn. The key elements were design and attention to detail followed by a meticulously thoughtout process. Interestingly enough this Service Provider is one of the smallest in size of on the payroll people but, has the highest growth rate and monthly sales.
ABP can also be a bit proud because we are one of the enablers of this Service Provider. They outsourced fulfillment to ABP. Like the choice of the right packaging and the right ATA, it’s also key to have the right partners to build a quality supply chain. In our case we thrive in creating and implementing an uncompromising process designed to exceed expectations which, in turn, becomes part of the product. Like in the case of the Apple TV one could think that the packaging ads cost but at large volumes this becomes negligible. Quality goes before price.
Our volume in processing shipments allows us to have more more controls, better people, a well trained team, redundancies to cope with vacations, illness and emergencies. This creates the foundation for contimuous improvement and a fast growing experience curve. Quality becomes affordable and helps create a product that WOWs.
Talking about gadets… do not miss out on ABP’s new DUAL Wi-Fi & GSM phone from Pirelli. Yes you heard right. Pirelli the tire and submarine cable company makes Wireless phones now. The interesting trivia is that Pirelli just like Nokia and Hitachi Cable all decided to invest in wireless a long time back to hedge from being too copper dependent. Pirelli Wireless is a small division focused mainly on the software and has made a great SIP VoIP Phone that roams smoothly between Wi-Fi and GSM and works great as a Cell and as a WiFi Phone. This new DUAL PHONE also works flawlessly right out of the box with any GSM SIM card and on Wi-Fi networks with any 802.11 b/g access point infrastructure. More in separate post. I just remember how we had the the feeling of a quality product when we tested it and decided to carry in ABP’s portfolio.
By Sunday evening my wife and the kids had watched 7 years of digital family pictures. I downloaded and watched a comedy with the family, ripped 4 DVDs, transfered a first vacation video and set the Apple TV to download my wife’s favorite TV series. Everything worked flawless at the first try! (I did google once to find a DVD to Apple TV Converter and downloaded one from MP4 Converter Software Studio which worked great. Not a single crash or reset of ay of the components. Needless to say the Apple TV was fun and found a place at our house.
For all of us in the VoIP and IP communications field – Lets make sure we always do our best to deliver this kind of WOW experience on the technology we sell!
Robert
