I moved from Long Beach to Santa Monica this past weekend. Whether it was the chemical fumes I was inhaling while cleaning the old place, or my new experience as a small business person, I realized that the world is getting smaller again– and that business is once again becoming truly personal.
I have used the eMove website a few times now– in getting me ready to move across the country and now in moving a few miles north. I’ve had a really terrific experience with all of the people I’ve hired: they take pride in their work, they’re on time, and they really work with you to get the job done. (For any of you in the LA area, I found Ray’s Moving Help to be terrific).
This is very different from my experience hiring a professional mover before I found the service, where the window for showing up was wide, the estimate missed some significant components (e.g., price for all the extra boxes and wrapping they insisted my items be protected by), and I received an entitled attitude where they asked me for more than what was a pretty reasonable tip for their labor (I didn’t think it was reasonable to tip a percentage of boxes I was forced to purchase).
So what do I mean by a return to personal trust in small business? In a word, personal accountability. Pierre Omidyar‘s founding of EBay created a self-monitoring community reminiscent of how smaller communities ensured quality business: reviews of transactions create trust or quickly put those not adhering to good business out of the system. While not perfect, the system did allow people to transact with folks across the country they’d never met– similar to my pre-paying for moving services from someone I never could have heard of, and having a reasonable expectation that I would have a good experience.
This is very different from the corporate world, where a faceless company that is mostly internally focused, whitewashes the individual who works with you– making them largely anonymous and interchangeable. You might get a good experience and you might get a bad one, but there really can’t be an expectation of what you’ll get while calling into the call center. (Aside: whoever decided that an automated apology over IVR was a good idea really has one coming to them– talk about mocking your customer with meaningless corporate babble). Actions and accountability speak much louder than words– and this is why anything requiring a personal touch is likely to leave the corporations as community and trust-based tools allow small business to gain reach and reputation that previously was only available to the big branded companies.
At the end of the day, personal service with an individual is what we experience– and allowing you to find the individuals who can reliably get what you want done will drive us back away from the psychotic financially-driven corporate behemoths that feel no loyalty to community, customers, or any shared sense of human values. As the internet and other technologies enhance distribution and connectivity, in aggregate the little guys will offer more personalized options and that complexity will be hard for the corporations to control top-down.
We’re trying to create similar personalized experiences and accountability in the health system with HealthShoppr– I hope you’ll stay with me as the experiment unfolds and we can learn along the way.
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