A few years I sold my small company to a big company. One of the first thing they wanted to do was ‘professionalize’ our processes.
Improvement is always good so I happily complied.
We started with the helpdesk and they asked me how this was organized. I answered
‘When the phone rings the whole office races to it. The one who gets there first gets to answer it’
It was kind of an office running gag to see who could get the phone first and people were often surprised to get someone (out of breath in some instances) before the phone rang twice.
The big company guys smiled politely and pointed out that that wasn’t very professional and wouldn’t scale and that we would hire a professional helpdesk service. So we did.
The result was terrible. It cost thousands of euros a month and the quality of the service was no where near what we offered in the past. The service would let people wait for minutes until someone would become available and then the person who answered didn’t know anything about the problem or didn’t seem interested.
The other effect was that we didn’t hear about problems directly from clients anymore. The helpdesk service acted like a Berlin wall between the customers and the company.
After a few months I suggested to the bigger company to get rid of the helpdesk company and get back to answering the phone ourselves. They thought I was crazy and answered that this was now a professional company and that it was unthinkable and impractical to just have everybody answer the phone personally.
I figured that everyone in the company would have phone duty once a month, answer between 10 and 30 phonecalls a day, still be able to work and feel a lot more responsible and connected to clients. But no matter what I said, it just wasn’t professional in their opinion.
I think every industry, product, service and technique goes through the same phases:
- interesting
- improved
- perfected
- boring
- personalized
- interesting again
I’ll give you an example: Art.
At first humanity tried to reach perfection. The perfect painting, indistinct from reality. But when we reached that point we started experimenting with reality and suddenly reality seemed less interesting than the interpretation of the artist. That is how we got to cubism, pointilism and abstract art.
Another example: Virtual reality.
At first, we tried to mimic reality as much as we could. But not until we added lens flare and other small imperfections did we really achieve it. And now we want to go beyond reality and shape new worlds instead of recreating our current one. Perfection just doesn’t cut it anymore.
The last example: Amateur Porn.
The first popular porn images (And I don’t mean the ones found in Pompeii) were black and white photographs that people took of each other and distributed among friends. This became a popular industry which strived to perfection. They tried to improve the images by using more muscular actors who could do things most people can’t and who had seemingly ‘perfect’ bodies. No hair where it shouldn’t be, no celulite and oversized… ehm… tools.
Until that became boring. It turned out people were fed up with looking at ‘perfect’ bodies having sex for hours in positions that required impossible flexibility. They wanted amateur porn that looked real. And they got it.
So what is the point of this story?
If you are starting a business you might think ‘I need a typewriter so I can send professional letters’. Now imagine how your clients would feel if you would send them a handwritten letter on a simple but elegant piece of paper. My guess is you will impress the hell out of them.
I think ‘professional’ is not always better than ‘amateur’. And it is always better to be a well meaning amateur than an uninterested professional.
