The debate that products are services rages on.\u00a0 Are you a Product Company, or a Service Company?\u00a0 Do you sell services with your products? Or, the wonderful finger-pointing phrase, “that\u2019s a product problem, I am in the services department.”<\/p>\n
Today, in the connected economy driven by customer experience, there\u2019s no difference. The line between the physical product, and services is blurred. I\u2019m not the first to recognize this, but I do believe that the majority do not embrace it.\u00a0 I hope this story helps convince you.\u00a0 And, if we are lucky, companies will someday stop artificially structuring organizations and delivery of the two \u2013 because customers just don\u2019t care about the internal monkey-business \u2013 they just want optimal customer experiences.<\/p>\n
You can neither buy, nor sell, one with out the other.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t understand this, stop reading now.\u00a0 In the digital economy \u2013 when service levels fall below customer expectations, it doesn\u2019t matter how good the physical product is or was, it is a failure.\u00a0 And, in the socially connected digital economy, this leads to disaster.<\/p>\n
I have one of the most advanced mobile phones on the planet. It\u2019s an Android device from HTC. My carrier is Sprint, and I use ActiveSync across a number of devices, and expect to get email via ActiveSync, including on my phone. Recently I contacted Sprint about being unable to see HTML mail (graphically) on the ActiveSync Android, and HTC software-provided mail application on the phone.<\/p>\n
I finally engaged in a conference call with senior support people from Sprint, HTC, Google (Android) and Microsoft (ActiveSync).\u00a0 Everyone knew about the flaw, but not one could tell me where the failure was.\u00a0 More seriously, no one accepted responsibility for it.\u00a0 Google said it was a problem with either Sprint in tweaking Android, or with Microsoft with their ActiveSync technology.\u00a0 HTC said they only build the hardware, so it must be Android or Sprint\u2019s OEM tweaking, or Microsoft\u2019s ActiveSync platform, and Sprint said they were just the Carrier with no responsibility for the software \u2013 even though they were the channel for updates.\u00a0 Microsoft had the least involvement, as they didn\u2019t touch the phone, it\u2019s OS, or the apps on it \u2013 but were also not very helpful. There must be thousands of ActiveSync users reporting this problem and wasting the time of that many people should be reason enough to finding a solution as much as HTC, Google, and Sprint<\/span>.<\/p>\n
![\"HTCHTMLCONFIG\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/steinvox.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/HTCHTMLCONFIG.jpg\" "\\"HTCHTMLCONFIG\\"")
<\/a>I spent $499 for a \u201csmart\u201d phone, that could not perform one of the most basic functions.\u00a0 It converted every HTML email message to plain text \u2013 making it completely unusable and unreadable.\u00a0 It was such an obvious flaw, that everyone recognised it as I walked them through the settings page, and showed that the Mail Format setting was greyed out, and set to \u201cPlain Text.\u201d Could it have really got past Quality Assurance and Testing this way?<\/p>\n