I work from home from time to time. Mostly I choose days that I can keep to myself and do things with data or charts or presentations or whatever works well when I’m alone. But it isn’t uncommon for me to have to call into a meeting or two while I’m at home. No day ever goes undisturbed.
Being obsessed with data about my own life (see my post on my oil company), I do what I can to optimize my spending on just about everything. One thing we decided to do was switch to Vonage for our phone service. I’m not going to rave about Vonage’s service. It’s quirky, but mostly reliable.
I pay about half what I used to pay for Verizon, maybe a little less. Verizon was pretty much 100% available, while Vonage isn’t. I’d say it’s 75-80% available. It’s common that the connection isn’t that good and I have to call back or that if I’m using my computer to download or upload at the same time that the connection breaks up. But most odd of all, and I don’t know why, Vonage and my company’s conference bridge don’t seem to get along. I break up worse than anywhere else on conference bridges.
First off, a little diagnostics, in case you came here looking for it. The key to Vonage not dropping my incoming calls is to make sure the Vonage box is in the demilitarized zone of my router. That stops my router from treating calls like denial of service attacks and solves most of the problems I’ve had. In fact, you probably can’t blame Vonage directly for the poor service. It’s a combination of Vonage and my internet service provider.
Anyway, point is, I was on a conference call and my connection started breaking up, so I mentioned that I use Vonage and someone said “well, you get what you pay for.” Fair enough, in the case of Vonage, that’s true. The service isn’t that great all the time and the trade off is I don’t pay as much for an inferior product.
Does it really have to be this way!?!?! “You get what you pay for” suggests what should not be a universal truth. Low cost does NOT have to equal low quality. In fact, it’s the ultimate paradox that every company should be seeking to solve. In many industries, it’s hard to pick out the better competitor because all things are not equal. Is Windows Vista inferior to Mac OS? Hard to say. It’s a monopolistic oligopoly. Products are very different but serve the same niche – home computing. Vista runs on a vast array of low cost hardware, but is kind of ugly. Mac OS, very pretty, only one choice when it comes to hardware. There are trade offs.
Phone service, not so much. I make and receive phone calls, have caller id, call waiting and voice mail. If the services work, I’m happy. If they don’t, I’m not. Vonage attempts to make up for their lack of service with some other features – Simulring (ring my home phone and cell phone at the same time), and call forwarding (call my cell phone if my home phone is down). Nice, but honestly, I just want to get phone calls that work.
Phone service, most of my power tools, my watch, my clothes (you didn’t think I was fashion conscious, did you?), most groceries (I’m not brand loyal), in fact, most of what I consume - perfect competition in my mind. Everyone makes the same thing, every competitor has the same set of features. I want to pay the lowest price for the highest quality. I want a product or service where “you get what you pay for” isn’t applicable. The processes I work on strive for the same thing.
If the only way for you to get high quality is exorbitant expense, you’ve missed the point. You can’t focus on just one characteristic of your customer’s needs, like quality. The miracle is not improving quality at any expense, it’s improving quality AND cutting cost. Strive to do what everyone says is impossible and change “you get what you pay for” into “you paid how little to get that!?!?”
