New York, Tuesday February 3: Per usual at the Hilton Midtown, the only thing slower than the elevators is the wifi.
But events like this are about networking and it appears the lift corridor is the place to be this year. People are mostly curious about the call buttons, which have been replaced with a touch-pad and graphical menu blocks for each tranche of floors. It then indicates which elevator will arrive first and an estimated wait time. Those I’ve chatted with have found the countdown to arrival similar in accuracy to the stated on-hold period when trying to contest a car insurance estimate.
“Repre-effing-sentative!”
I’ve watched several people step inside with the assumption of finding a familiar user interface, a superjacent bank of numbered buttons. Their reaction is a sour cocktail of confusion and embarrassment.
Like a lot of the tech tools I’ve seen and heard pitches about already today, the elevator is overengineered. It solves things that weren’t problems, adding only operational clutter. The elevator vendor is projecting its capabilities on to the customer, whose only concern was the speed of the interaction.
This is a common problem in software design today, particularly in proptech. Don’t pretend you know more than your customer and please, determine if there is an actual, measurable need for what you want to sell. Simply declaring “CRM is broken!” doesn’t give you the keys to the industry. Make something leaner and smarter, then we’ll talk.
Granted, change is hard (something I’ve been reminded of recently). Maybe we should take more time with the touchpad? You know, get more training. Then again, hotel guests are not permanent residents. (I’m barely here 48 hours.) We don’t have the time and thus, the solution doesn’t fit the customer profile.
And all we wanted was to get to our room in less time.
Speaking of lethargic, the event wifi password is “GetSelect.”