The Story
Whilst researching a post about Morrisons and its customer service on Twitter, I discovered that even though I could see all the customers that had an experience on a given day, they couldn’t see each other and at least one person commented on her impressions being totally different when she discovered the ‘big picture’. This left me intrigued.
Then I was reading about Elon Musk and his suggestion about first principles as great place to start looking for innovative ideas. I prefer this idea to thinking in analogies – which are great for many things, but perhaps less for disruptive innovation.
That is when a weird thought came to me – a first principle of human interaction is that we seek connection. What if we could be connected by shared experiences as customers – what might happen?
Honestly I don’t know and I would like to find out. Better still I would like to see if what I find can form the basis of a viable startup business. Regardless – it would still be interesting to explore what a direct interactive connection between consumers around a shared experience would mean for customer services, how commerce is conducted and maybe even how we think of each other as human beings.
What’s with the timer?
So my last experiment took me almost 6 months to fail – that is way too long – I need it to be 6 weeks or less. I got distracted and I lost my sense of urgency. This timer, along with my plan and a new found discipline are to help me not make the same mistakes again. If this experiment is still running when this clock runs out – it may have been validated as unviable before – I will stop it unless I have a paying customer for something. It sounds aggressive and it is. Game on!