Stop choosing mediocrity

The expectations of South African customers and business partners are escalating at a phenomenal pace, driven by exposure to the best of international e-commerce.

That leaves local providers battling to keep up, and ultimately, they will pay the price when they fail - and many are definitely going to fail. The modern economy has catapulted South African businesses into a global playing field, decanting the local big fish out of the small pond and into a much colder, and deeper, ocean.

A large part of the challenge here is simply the awareness of the customers. We know the sorts of services that are delivered through the Internet in developed countries, and we are starting to demand similar excellence here.

We've been glossing over the big fib of Internet commerce - that the Web is the great leveller. That's just not true. Amazon and eBay have invested millions of dollars, and thousands of skilled man hours, into building e-commerce platforms. While the entrepreneurial wave of current generation services like Uber has shown you can compete for less, you can't compete for much less.

There are some local products which are cutting it, but they're doing it (and attracting funding) by meeting the standards that a US customer or venture capitalist would expect. Not by delivering the sort of, frankly, rubbish Web sites and mobile apps that are the norm in South African e-commerce today.

This is not a phenomenon unique to SA - it's common in any industry where the norm is archaic, outdated, and stuck in a comfortable rut of non-performance. But it's going to start hurting soon. And it won't be a gradual hurt either - it'll be an "ouch, a bullet" sort of hurt.

Why did Craigslist obliterate newspaper classified advertising? Because it was better in every way. Why did Uber disrupt the taxi industry so dramatically? Because it's better, in every respect, than the incumbent taxi services.

But those incumbent taxis and newspapers had access to the same technologies for years - they just didn't bother to adopt them, because the status quo was comfortably crap.

Now the taxis are legislating to ban Uber and thereby avoid having to improve, but that's a huge mistake. Not because of anything to do with Uber, but because passengers (and drivers, to an extent) now know that better is possible, and will not accept the same rubbish service from anyone in the future. Metered cabs as we know them are over, the same way classified advertising is over.

Afrihost proved this point for me the other day. I ordered a new long-term evolution modem from the company, and it provides a fairly rudimentary but functional tracker in its client portal, so I could see the order had been processed. The modem had been collected by the courier... and then, nothing.

It sat at the courier for days, until I complained to Afrihost. Afrihost poked the courier, which immediately sprang into action... and said it'd take another week to get the device to me. Two weeks, all told, to move something the size of a box of matches about 500 metres!

I can practically see Afrihost's roof from my office window. So I complained again, this time noisily, on social media. Literally, less than 60 seconds later, the courier company was back on the phone, apologising and arranging delivery for the time I had originally requested.

There are a couple of morals in this story. First, Afrihost's social media and customer service teams are switched on. They acted swiftly and resolved what could have been lost business. Full marks there, but social media customer support was a story for another day.

More interesting to me was the way Afrihost's order tracking system had accurately pinpointed the weak link in its supply chain - the courier - and exposed it to me, the customer.

How many times have you had a courier make excuses for late delivery? It didn't get the parcel on time; the address wasn't correct; it didn't fit the schedule...? No more: transparency from the supplier blows those excuses away, and you're left with a last-generation company gasping for air in a new-generation world.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find Afrihost looking for a new logistics partner - one which better integrates with its order tracking system. All it will take is one to provide a better level of service, and the rest, so comfortable in their rut of mediocrity, will be in serious danger.

That was an interesting experience, and it was put into perspective by a comparable one a few days later. I ordered something from Amazon in the UK, and on the requested day of delivery, I was watching the parcel's movements online. I even knew the driver by name. Geoff had just started his trip, and I was number 14 in the queue.

We've been glossing over the big fib of Internet commerce - that the Web is the great leveller. That's just not true.

The package would arrive at its destination at about 11am, but if I wanted to send specific instructions (I'm not home, hide it somewhere) or defer delivery to another time, I could get the instructions directly to him. I watched Geoff's progress on Google maps, and received an alert at the moment he dropped off the package. Simple enough technology, really. And an amazing customer experience.

I draw two conclusions from this. First, it's just not acceptable to be rubbish when your customer knows better, and South African customers are increasingly knowing better. They put up with crap e-commerce when they didn't know about Amazon, and Uber, and Netflix, and eBay, and dozens of others. But, now they know better, and they know you know they should be doing better.

Second, local providers that do step up are going to kick the stuffing out of the existing guys. Or international players will do it for them. You thought Uber was brutal to cab companies? Wait until Amazon launches in SA. Wait until Netflix lands (or until a critical mass of long-suffering DStv subscribers find out about UnoTelly).

All the companies we love to hate? They're doomed. The smart ones know it, and have strategies to stay competitive, but that just makes it more despicable - they're mediocre by choice, relying on market inertia to protect them rather than just offering a better product with the tools and practices we can see in play elsewhere in the world.

My message to companies is this: stop choosing mediocrity. Look at your products, services, e-commerce sites, mobile apps - the whole customer experience - through the critical lens of an American or European customer, and ask yourself whether you honestly measure up. If you don't, you're going to be Ubered, Craigslisted and UnoTellyed, and you won't even see it coming.