October 22, 2007

The Impact of SMB Offerings

By Jim Barthold

I'm taking my car to the dealer for service tomorrow. OK, woe is me, it seems like I need brake fluid, and hopefully I'll be able to stop before I drive through the service bay.

Anyway, while I anticipate a short visit, I'm taking along my laptop just in case it takes longer to work on the car than they've led me to believe and a loaner is not readily available. I'm also taking my laptop because this dealer offers its customers free connectivity to the Internet so I can get online, do my work, read my e-mail, fight with editors and, if I had an IP phone, even make phone calls.

It's a high-end dealer, but the Hyundai shop next door offers high-speed Internet to its service customers as well. The dealership group is someone's SMB customer - Verizon or Comcast, and I'm assuming Comcast since its Turnersville, NJ, headend is behind the dealership back by the test track. Offering that high-speed service for more than tracking down vehicles and tallying up lease fees is a smart customer service move by the dealer.

Which got me to thinking. I generally spend enough time in my cardiologist's office to read a novel. I'm not talking about that short story wrapped in a novel's hard covers, the Red Pony here (and yeah, I got around my John Steinbeck reading requirement with this little gem); I'm talking about War and Peace. I assume that someone - Verizon or Comcast, and with the way that medical group handles its phones, both those providers should point the finger at the other guy - is serving this group of doctors. So why not suggest a Wi-Fi connection for the waiting room? If that fries the heart monitoring equipment the patients might be wearing (and in the case of some of those patients, that would be the most excitement they've had in years), perhaps a set of wireline data ports would be more applicable.

Sometimes, in the case of people like doctors, the service provider has to explain customer service. Alien as the concept might be for a telco or cable company, they're probably more likely to understand customer needs than doctors. Maybe the next time you sell service to a doctor's office - hospitals are another thing altogether - you might pitch the idea that if they have to make people sit in the waiting room for hours on end, they might actually give them a way to accomplish something more than chew fingernails, watch whatever hideous game show or reality programming is on in the afternoon, and shut off their cell phones because they interfere with the patient's heart monitors.

- Jim Barthold