SARS Sells Stuff

Carol Smalley
Managing Editor, CRMGuru
Member

Posted 24-Apr-2003 09:51 AM
Paul Anderson grabbed my attention this morning. Today's daily blog entry is SARs Changes What the Economy and War Couldn't.

His opening paragraph hits hard:

"SARs changes how we communicate in ways that even globalization of economies and military might have not been able to. SARs changes social habits. History will demonstrate that the turning point in the concepts and implementation of collaborative technology wasn't with the Real Time Enterprise prowess of the second Iraqi War, although powerful organizational lessons were learned, but with the contagious viral advent of SARs—severe acute respiratory syndrome."

Read his perspective and then share your thoughts. He made me think today. You?

Carol Parenzan Smalley
Managing Editor
www.CRMGuru.com
carol@CRMGuru.com

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 24-Apr-2003 11:01 AM
Just goes to show how fear (of the realistic or unrealistic kind) not only stops some changes from happening, but also drives other changes to happen.

Repenning's research on the dynamics of successful change suggests that unless others change their behaviour too AND the pressure to change is maintained for at least 18 months plus, then the change probably will not stick.

It remains to be seen if others really change their behaviour and whether SARS is either brought under control or if it just disappears from the news. Either could result in no long-term change from happening.

One things SARS has influenced, or maybe not really; I did notice in an editorial somewhere that the PR people at Peoplesoft have blamed SARS for their poor sales results. I'm not quite sure how this one works!!!

Graham Hill
Independent Management Consultant

Paul A.
Member

Posted 24-Apr-2003 02:29 PM
So Graham, you may be right and we see no net change in time of the adoption of technology because of SARs, but it will only be something else in time.

I got a note from a Toronto-based Collegue;

re: the SARS scare in Toronto.
Hi Paul;

I live in Toronto and I can tell you we are NOT all walking around wearing face masks. The SARS scare has been blown way out of proportion. The W.H.O., without even visiting the City to get the real facts, issued a totally unprecedented and unjustified travel restriction that is really going to impact on us economically. This, in spite of the fact the CDC has been here for several days, and has confirmed Toronto's response to contain & control the outbreak has been exemplary. If you stay away from the one hospital and funeral home that got infected, there's nothing to worry about. IF IT'S SAFE FOR US, IT'S SAFE FOR VISITORS! Canada is the United States largest trading partner with an estimated $1 billion dollars a day crossing back & forth over our borders. If our economy suffers due to this insane media frenzy, it won't be long before it starts impacting in the U.S. Therefore it would really help if you notified your subscribers that it is perfectly safe to visit Toronto, for business or pleasure.
Keep up the great work.
BH, Toronto

So, let's compare that to just a few of today's headlines:

World Health Experts Treat SARS As If It's The Big One
Beijing Begins Drastic SARS Quarantine—Thousands Flee
More SARS Dead—China Fights Spread To Poor Provinces
China Seals Hospital—Canada Angry At WHO
Tougher Measures Fail To Stop SARS—15 New Deaths
Canada SARS Death Toll Rises To 15
WHO Warns Travelers Away From Beijing, Toronto

I think that the point I wanted to make was that the impact of SARs may or not be exaggerated in Toronto, but the in-flu-ence is certainly significant on the economy. For better or worse I could argue that SARs is good thing for Toronto, stock value in Nortel for example, a benefactor of increased demand for collaboration technology, should increase, contributing over all to the Toronto economy.

Regards,
Paul
www.paulandersonwrites.com

Paul Anderson
Consulting Futurist
Customer Relationships
www.paulandersonwrites.com

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 25-Apr-2003 04:25 AM
Paul

As you quite rightly suggest, only time will tell whether SARS is something that changes our oh-so-difficult to change behaviour, or not.

As Duncan Watt's work on message transmission across small world networks, and the much larger programme of work on network dynamics within complex adaptive systems at the Santa-Fe Institute has shown, the dynamics of 'infection' across a human network makes it dificult to say whether SARS is effectively under control in Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong or elsewhere. It doesn't seem to be under control in China from what one reads in the quality press. And as we know, it is fiendishly difficult to predict future behaviour in complex adaptive systems with any accuracy. All of this mitigates towards a careful approach to an as yet unquantified risk in the near future.

I hope that SARS is not going to be a problem that modern medicine cannot defeat quickly. Let's wait and see what the (unintended) implications are for business.

Graham Hill
Independent Management Consultant

Vishal Sarkar
Member Council
Member

Posted 05-May-2003 06:50 AM
As I follow the news of SARS spreading across regional boundaries and hear the stories of the affected and those in quarantine, I wonder what the desires and needs of the people undergoing the trauma and those under fear psychosis were, before this happened.

Just looking at the changing priorities of the individuals, I am sure that a multitude of them are customers to some company or the other for some product or service—whether it be communication, books or just plain grocery!

What may have been the preferred medium of communication may not be today—the Net traffic may have increased just as people avoid traveling. More so, as schools and offices shut in certain places, substitute channels emerge. Home deliveries in certain areas may increase as people prefer indoors. These may appear small adjustments in the way companies are accommodating the customers needs, but I would say that they are an indication of how relationships and services change under changing circumstances.

We don't know how long this will last, but as customers' needs change in these uncertain times, so should the companies also gear up to meet this change. The economic benefit may not
be apparent immediately, but investment in customer relationship at this juncture will definitely reward in the coming time.

Vishal Sarkar

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 05-May-2003 09:11 AM
Hi Vishal

Reading through your post reminded me of the BBC World Service programme I listened to this morning on the way to Düsseldorf airport. It hosted a WHO doctor and had many inbound callers, eMails and SMSs.

Some of the callers had distressing tales of coming into contact with SARS themselves, but many more had equally distressing tales of coming into contact with others' panic-stricken responses to a hardly calculable risk of contracting SARS. The WHO doctor suggested that some of the panic stricken responses were to probabilities that were lower than that of being struck by debris from a 747 flying overhead!

This in turn reminded me of the work of Kahneman and others on how poor we are at quantifying everyday risk. And how over time, we become accustomed to our condition, and hardly notice the difference between it and our previous condition, such that net satisfaction levels are not different.

"So what?", you ask. Well, if SARS is a temporary acute condition that will soon return to normal, customers will probably return to their normal behaviour at about the same time. Perhaps we should not go out of our way to incur additional CRM-related costs that will not bring a longer-term payoff. But on the other hand, as Reinartz & Kumar's work on customer profitability has shown, short-term customers with immediate needs that you can satisfy can be extraordinarily profitable if you can sell to them when they need it and without ringing-up additional costs. So maybe there is some profit to be had by being responsive to customers needs?

Have any of you real CRMGurus out there come across insightful examples of organisations responding to SARS in a CRM-related way? Anything that we could learn from?

Graham Hill
Independent Management Consultant

Vishal Sarkar
Member Council
Member

Posted 06-May-2003 12:07 AM
Graham,

I totally agree to your observation of Kahneman's work on how poorly we quantify everyday risk.

However, I would add that fear psychosis generally happens when individuals don't see logic in the surroundings. It would be very hard to convince someone who has been bombarded with news of the SARS strike around the world, that the probability of his/her being affected is very low. I have even read reports of how more people succumb to measles every year that SARS. But I think what drives this psychosis is the fear that there is no plausible cure as yet for SARS. Further I guess that, practically, such behaviors are not driven by rational.

Coming to the Reinartz & Kumar's work highlighting the relationship between Customer Loyalty and Profitability, I think that though Profitability is important, yet developing customer loyalty should not be based only
on the achievement of the bottom-line in short-term. As Reinartz and Kumar put it, "No company should ever take for granted the idea that managing customers for loyalty is the same as managing them for profits."

This does not mean that loyalty investments are not good, but that he objective should be to develop loyalty and then to manage it better for loyalty to be profitable.

Again using Reinartz and Kumar's Loyalty matrix, I think companies should look at fostering 'True Friends' (Loyal and Profitable Customers).

Here, SARS gives companies such an opportunity to establish a customer relationship and build loyalty by offering products or services that are a 'good fit' to the customers' needs at such times. If this loyalty is managed well later, customer profitability can also be very real.

Best Regards,

Vishal

Carol Smalley
Managing Editor, CRMGuru
Member

Posted 06-May-2003 09:37 AM
SARS is very danger, I know it so much as I am living in China, facing the threat directly. That's why I think if it's possible to ride on our expertise to help on any thing any way in this issue. For example, could call center (or multi-channel contact ctr) ease off the tension of the citizens via communicate more efficient and effective with the government and get more update news? Could government use knowledge-based management system to answering better the enquiries posted by every citizen who care their health so much? Could data-mining technology (in fact Hong Kong is using) to identify the source and the possible infected route and areas so that could take proper actions and precautionary measures? Could student relationship management could help the educational institutions to communicate better with students, and to ensure their studying progress still on the right track via e-learning? Could we update the news via SMS/email/online chat. Actually, I do think it could be work in crisis like Iraq war—communicate with citizen faster and better.

It's not all about citizen relationship management. We could ride on eCommerce to reduce the traffic at congested areas, like supermarket, restaurants. To the infected patience and their families (if we regard them as the customers of gov't), could we have a better way of communication and treatment towards them, than the current ways. Now SARS already drives all of us very nervous, could we improve the current situation via our expertise?

I am not trying to help the CRM vendors to close more sales by bringing in that topic. Besides to attract eyeballs, I do want to suggest some ways to help, though may not be all implemented this time. But may also serve as the foundation for the next crisis as risk management measures.

Sampson Lee
Founder, GreaterChinaCRM.org

Carol Parenzan Smalley
Managing Editor
www.CRMGuru.com
carol@CRMGuru.com