Are you asking the right question?

"Why is it that when we want to call and talk to a person, we have to call a place?"  This was the question that led to the invention of a mobile phone.  When everyone wanted to build a better landline telephone, the right question led us to this innovation.

When every retailer was working on making the checkout process seamless or empowering shoppers to checkout in self-service terminals, someone at Amazon asked "Why don't we just get rid of the checkout process itself?" and it led to Amazon Go!

The right question can be a disruptive agent.  Another example of innovation and disruption is in cooking.  A pressure cooker works on the principle of building high pressure and cooking food at a high temperature.  High pressure allows cooking with water at temperatures higher than 100 °C. The first generation pressure cooker came around 1960 and the design had not changed until recently.  A weighed pressure regulator is used to cover the steam vent.  Based on the weight, the regulator releases steam when the pressure cooker reaches a particular pressure (and temperature).  The instructions guide the cook to wait for the regulator to start releasing the steam indicating the reaching of the correct pressure.  From there, the user counts the number of times steam is released before stopping the cooking.

Everyone was asking the question "How do we automate the process of counting the whistles and inform the user?".  That lead to solutions like the Cookoo or the Pressure Cooker Whistle Counter.

Whereas, Robert Wang asked "How can I build a pressure cooker that cooks without supervision?" and he came up with the Instant Pot.  He got rid of the whistles completely and used sensors and electronics to automate the cooking process completely.  No more whistles to count!

That is the power of the right questions.  Questions are more important than answers.  Right questions have a way of leading you to the answer.  Right questions lead to big ideas.

Asking the right question is an art.  It is an art that is cultivated by being curious, being open minded, being engaged and being customer centered.

Future of drive-thru

McDonald's announced last week that it is buying the AI company Apprente to automate drive-thru ordering.  It will be interesting to see what they come up with and how they will revolutionize the drive-thru experience.

I have always been thinking of how the future would unfold in various areas including the drive-thru experience.

Imagine you are driving on the freeway around noon to meet one of your clients.  Your smart car wakes up and asks if you would like to order lunch.  The conversation goes this way:

Smart Car (SC) - Would you like to order some lunch?  It is close to your lunch hour. 
You - Sure.  Why not?  What is around here?
SC - There is a SubWay on your route.
You - Nah.  Not today.  Is there a McD?
SC - Yes, there is a McD on your route.
You - What are today's specials?
SC - There are no vegetarian specials today.  Would you like to order the usual?
You - OK.  Just add a chocolate milkshake to it.
SC - Chocolate milkshake.  Small?
You - Sure.
SC - Placing the order.  You will arrive at the McD in 8 mins and your order should be ready.  Anything else I can do for you?
You - Play the next podcast in my queue.
SC - Certainly.

What happened here?  The car is smart enough to figure out that you are on the road and it is your lunch time.  It also looks up all the restaurants nearby.  Especially the ones you frequent.  It finds a place that is on your route, not the nearest one.  It knows what you generally order at the various restaurants.  It knows you are a vegetarian.  It calculates the approximate time it takes to prepare the order (dependent on the order) and places the order at the location nearest to where you will be at that time.  Even though there was a McD a minute away, it still places the order at the McD that is 8 mins away.  It wants to reduce the wait time to almost nothing.  It automatically takes care of paying the restaurant with the credit card attached to your application.  It now knows that on certain days you prefer McD over SubWay.  It also learned that you like to have chocolate shake with your veggie burger.  The Smart Car keeps getting smarter everyday. 

How did the customer engagement and experience improve? 

You don't have to stand in line at the drive-thru.  You don't have to speak to anybody to place your order.  You don't have to wait for the order to be ready in order to pick it up.  You are saving time and reducing pollution.  The traditional drive-thru experience changes dramatically and the only thing needed is the pickup window. 

As far as technology is concerned, everything is available.  You just have to expose your geo-location to the app as well as the restaurants.  The app tracks where you are, maps your location and route and determines the restaurants en-route.  It places the order at the restaurant and notifies the arrival time.  It also allows the restaurant to track your geo-location so they can be ready to deliver your order in time.  Similar to how you track your Uber ride as it arrives to you.  The technology is readily available.  We just need to work with the restaurants that are ready to jump on the platform. 

Waiting to see how the drive-thru experience will transform. 

Driverless cars are here to stay!

I have always owned a manual transmission car, until recently.  I switched to an automatic recently and have not looked back.  Once a while I do get the itch to drive a manual transmission, and that is when I switch to the manual mode in my Steptronic transmission and hit the winding mountainous roads of Pacific North West.

The Steptronic is incredibly quick and smooth in shifting (thanks to the paddle shifters) as well as forgiving on inexperienced drivers.  Even with this clutchless manual transmission experience I cannot shift at the right RPMs as does the automatic transmission.  I know the main reason to shift to manual is to rev up the engine before shifts so you can feel the power and have complete control over it.  After some fun time, I get back into the Auto mode so I don't have to think anymore. 

That is when I realized how dependent we are on the automatic transmissions.  In the early days of the auto transmission, it was still clunky in shifting and you could feel the jerk and it did not always shift at the right RPM.  But, with technological advances the awkwardness is gone and nobody ever realizes that gears are shifting underneath (unless if you keep any eye on the tachometer).  Today's auto transmissions are so smooth, quick and efficient that it is better than a human shifting gears.  Some times during my travel to Europe I rent manual transmissions for the fun of it.  Even for an experienced driver, the modern cars instruct when to up or down shift if there is a slight delay in shifting. 

Similar to the early auto transmissions, the driverless car is going through its growth period.  Soon, the time will come when we realize that they are much more efficient than us and we will accept them as the better drivers.  I know the driverless cars are much more complex than a transmission, but the journey to maturity is still similar.  With technological advances and inexpensive compute power, the day will arrive sooner than later.

Amazon Go Store experience

Living in Seattle, I had to go and experience the Amazon Go store.  It is an awesome concept.  When everyone was thinking of self scanning shopping carts and RFID tags and such, Amazon went for the moonshot of completely getting rid of the checkout process and they have nailed it.

You enter through the turnstile by scanning your QR code in the Amazon Go app.  This code identifies you and the store lets you in.

Once inside, you can freely pick up anything and stuff it in your shopping bag.  Cameras in the ceiling (there are a ton of them.  Look at the picture below) are used to recognize you and your activity.

Every item had a large bar code that is read by the camera (I assume) when the item is picked up by the user.  The system is smart enough to recognize if you put something back.  I tried to take a few items and put some back, and take them out again, and it worked flawlessly.

Once you are done with your shopping, you just walk out of the store through the turnstile you entered through.  It is as simple as that.

On a subsequent visit I noticed another nuance that is purely Seattle.  I had enthusiastically bought a lot of stuff in my previous visit and wanted to return a few items.  I walked into the store and asked the employee at the front door.  BTW, this employee is positioned at the front door to help new comers use the app to get into the store, or allow visitors (without the app) into the store.  To my surprise, he said that the Amazon Go store does not accept returns.

What?  I was flabbergasted.

Then, he corrected himself and told me that I could "return" anything on the app and I get money back instantaneously, BUT, the store does not take back any items.  He told me that if I didn't want the items, I could give it away to a friend or someone.  The store is completely trust based.  This seemed weird since the items I was returning were fully sealed packages.  Still, I left the store with a good feeling, looking for a homeless person to give the packages to.  All in all, a great experience.

The store is small and carries a few categories of groceries, lots of packaged meals and drinks.  They have an onsite kitchen to make the packaged meals.  But, the same concept could be extended to all kinds of stores.

The future of grocery shopping has arrived!

Mobile Room Key

Technology is making inroads into the hospitality industry.  Last week I was at a Marriott resort in Mexico and got a change to experience the mobile room key.  It was a good experience since I didn't have to carry my key card everywhere. 

The next experience I am waiting for is the ability to choose my own room.  Empower your guests, and they will reward you with loyalty.

Every hotel has a Rooms Controller whose job is to allocate rooms to guests.  The front desk has a little leeway to change the allocation depending on the situation.  There are several factors affecting room allocation.  Some of which are:
- Availability of rooms (inclusion list)
- Rooms scheduled for maintenance/remodeling (exclusion list)
- Number of guests per room
- Total number of guests (determines allocation of adjoining rooms)
- Age of guests (determines noise level)
- Guest status (VIP or Elite status gets preference)
- Length of stay (determines ability to upgrade)
- Pre-paid advance reservation or not
- Rooms not occupied for long time (need to allocate rooms on a regular basis to avoid dust collection)
- Group reservations (multiple rooms, adjoining rooms, etc.)

The above list is a small list of things a room controller thinks of, and still they make mistakes pissing off valued customers.  So, it makes sense for a computer algorithm to determine and allocate rooms than a human being.  Of course, the front desk manager should have the ability to override the allocation and assign a different room, if deemed fit.  The algorithm can dynamically reallocate and shuffle rooms around whenever a guest arrives.  This is the beauty of algorithms. 

In today's day and age of computers and AI, the computer can make a better allocation of the room than a human room controller.  Computers can crunch a large amount of customer data (personal, profile, preferences, past stays, etc) as well as hotel information and make better decisions for a better outcome. 

Alexa in the hotel room

Last year, I wrote about how Alexa should make in-roads into the Enterprise territory rather than stay in the consumer space.  It looks like this is already happening, now that Alexa is becoming mature.

I travel on work and end up spending a lot of time in hotels in various parts of the world.  Recently, I was at the Copenhagen Marriott and that got me thinking about how VUI (Voice User Interface), and specifically, Alexa, could have made my life a little better and easier.  I started thinking about use cases where Alexa and Echo can be deployed in the hospitality industry.  Today, everything is done by human agents and it is not always efficient or pleasant.

Imagine the following scenarios and see how seamless they can be, with Alexa.

1. Calling front desk:
Me: Alexa, call front desk
Alexa: Calling front desk
Front Desk: Hello, Mr. Shashidhar, how can I help you today?

The reason this is a simple but powerful use case is because of the fact that I can be anywhere in the room while I talk to Alexa.  I wanted to talk to the front desk as well as pack my bags at the same time.  The speaker phone is not very effective in far field communication, which necessitated me to be near the phone during the call.  Alexa would have made this a hands free communication, and I could have continued to pack while talking to the front desk.  A minute saved in the hotel is an additional minute enjoyed at the airport lounge!

2. Summoning your car from the valet:
Me: Alexa, get my car from the valet
Alexa: Getting car from valet.  Do you have a ticket number?
Me: 5842
Alexa: Ticket 5842.  When do you want the car?
Me: Now
Alexa: Summoning car from valet.  Your car should be at the front of the hotel in 5-10 mins
Me: Thanks
Alexa: Is there anything else I can do for you?
Me: Nope

There were instances when I had to call the valet and had to hold for them to answer my call.  Instead, the system can log my call and provide the ticker number to the valet staff on their system. 

3. Ordering room service:
Me: Alexa
Alexa: Good evening, Mr. Shashidhar.  How can I help you?
Me: Please order one margarita pizza from the room service menu
Alexa: Margarita pizza ordered from room service.  Is there anything else you would like to order?
Me: A glass of orange juice
Alexa: A margarita pizza and a glass of orange juice.  Anything else?
Me: That's it
Alexa: When would you want this delivered?
Me: As soon as possible
Alexa: <thinking for a moment> Your order has been placed.  It will be delivered in 40 mins
Alexa: Is there anything else?
Me: That's it for now

Room service orders anyways end up as a ticket in the kitchen.  Why not remove the layers between the guest and the kitchen?  This system would seamlessly take the order and print a ticket in the kitchen.  The system can determine the wait time based on the current open orders as well as the estimated prep time.

4. Ordering extra amenities:
Me: Alexa, could I get two additional bath towels?
Alexa: Two extra bath towels ordered.  Is there anything else, Mr. Shashidhar?
Me: Ah, I forgot toothpaste.  Could you please get me a toothpaste as well?
Alexa: Two extra towels and toothpaste.  They should be delivered in a few minutes
Alexa: Anything else, Mr. Shashidhar?
Me: Nothing for now
Alexa: Have a good day

Alarms, local weather, room controls, etc. are straightforward use cases.

What these use cases need is a echo device in every room with a unique address.  The devices would talk to a central server and the server is integrated to the existing enterprise hospitality systems (room service, valet, phone system, etc.).  These are hotel specific and not generic as the context for most of the use cases is just the hotel.

With the advances in robotics, the use case of delivering extra amenities could be completely autonomous.  The intent is transferred to the server which orders a robot to fetch the goods and deliver it to the room.  As seen in Eatsa, the San Francisco robotic restaurant, a time will come when robots will make food and deliver it to your room as well.  Since the hotel is a known and controlled environment, it becomes easy to deploy these technologies.  Hospitality industry can be the incubator of all this technology and then it can enter the rest of the world.

What this would do is eliminate the need for human intervention in a lot of the cases.  Initially, when automated phone systems came around for customer service, we cringed.  But, nowadays they have become more efficient and in some cases, better than their human counterparts.  The same way, automation and VUI will make a difference and as it matures, the transactions become seamless and more pleasurable.  We don't have to worry about human emotions and the mood of the person on the other end of the line.

Currently some of the hotel chains are trying to integrate Alexa for in-room controls like lighting and climate control.  But, the bigger ROI is in the other areas where hotels can cut expenses.  In-room automation is cool and sexy, but the big bang for the buck is automating the back office services that are currently manned by humans.

Image courtesy: Amazon.com

Simple Design Innovations

Shopping cart is one design that has not evolved since its introduction in 1937.  The major development came in 1946 with the nesting carts.  After that, the only advances have been in minor tweaks like steerable rear wheels, adjustable height/volume, etc.

Of late, with the advent of digital technology, the cart is getting a fresh look.  IDEO is a design firm that looked at reinventing the shopping cart and came up with this design:

Several other companies are incorporating a digital display into the shopping cart to enhance the user experience.  Some of these displays show the store planogram whereas some display coupons or both.

These are slow evolutions of the shopping cart and taking it over the digital hump.  For all we know, the innovations will halt abruptly because online shopping and home deliveries are taking over all over the world.

Here is a minor design change I noticed.  I was at a shopping mall in Copenhagen recently and saw that it had sloped flat escalators taking visitors from the underground parking garages into the mall upstairs.  They were pretty steep.  I noticed several shoppers taking their shopping cart (the usual big ones) filled with goods down the escalator.  The carts were standing on the inclined escalator without slipping.  My first thought was that there must be a brake that the user applies to hold it in place.  Then, it would be a bad and dangerous design: what if the user forgot to apply the brakes?  what is the brakes failed?  What if the user accidentally released the brakes?  All of this would lead to serious repercussions.  Imagine a fully loaded shopping cart racing towards you on an inclined escalator.  You wouldn't be a happy customer.

Upon closer scrutiny, I noticed the clever design that held the carts in place and stopped them from rolling.  The design of the shopping cart used the escalator design to its advantage.  It was a very simple design change to the wheels that accomplished the task automatically and without failure.

Below is a drawing depicting the wheel design.  Instead of a flat wheel, these wheels had a straight groove tread.  Beside the wheels were pads that were affixed to the shopping cart frame.  Whenever the cart was rolled on a flat floor, the wheels would be in contact of the floor and hence they would roll.  But, whenever the cart was rolled onto an escalator, the wheel treads would fall into the escalator grooves and the pads would grab hold of the 'floor' (escalator floor) thereby arresting the cart since the pads were flat and non-rotating.  Clever way to solve the problem.

The beauty of the design was the simplicity.  This design requires no moving parts and it is fail safe and idiot proof..  Based on the design, irrespective of how you place the cart on the escalator, at least three of the wheels would lock.  Note that the carts were wide enough that you could not turn them sideways on the narrow escalators.

Reminds me that great designs are always simple designs.