Have you ever heard a requirement or a request from a customer and been tempted to debate with them as to the merits of said request?  I’ve seen a lot of people and companies that do exactly that and try to convince someone that what they are asking for doesn’t make any sense.  This is clearly not a winning strategy.  Best case, the idea is actually not a good one, but in debating with your customer and convincing them they are wrong you end up alienating the customer b/c you’ve made them feel stupid for asking for something.  Worst case, you alienate the customer AND you miss the nugget of value that was in the request that you clearly didn’t understand.  In both cases you probably risk losing the customer.

I find it best to implement a rule that the Chicago Bain office had as one one of their office codes of conduct.  It was a rule called “The 2% Rule”.  It’s premise was simple – consider the 2% chance that you are wrong.  For a company that prides itself on being data driven, very analytic and being full of highly educated type A self-confident folks, this was an important rule to have.  To consider the 2% chance you are wrong means that even when you are 98% sure you are right, you should consider the merits of the other argument and attempt to think about things from the other perspective.  It’s not that you need to give in or change your mind, rather you should be open to the possibility that you are wrong and listen to the other perspective, giving someone else a chance to make the case for why they might be right.  By listening and giving someone a chance to explain their rationale, you may uncover misconceptions on their part or you may learn something you did not know about the situation that may change your perspective.  Even if you end up being right (and you were 98% sure you were right to begin with!) you are more likely to end up in a good place with whoever held the other position as you took the time to understand their perspective.

Why I am I writing about this today?  I had to catch myself from jumping to a 98% certain conclusion without considering the 2% chance I don’t get it.  The customer request was this: they wanted to be able to see live POS data alongside the video when they stream live video of their location.  Our service is capable of doing this, but we haven’t rolled out this capability b/c we haven’t had a lot of customers ask for it.  My personal view is that it is a feature that sounds good, but really adds very little value.  What are the odds that you see something interesting on the POS when you are watching live video?  How long did you have to sit there and stare at the video to find something valuable happen live?  Why was it important to see it live when it seems so much more efficient to search for whatever you are looking for in a specific transaction or type of event (even if you are searching as recent as the last 5 minutes) and then pull up only relevant video so you don’t have to sit through irrelevant transactions.

I clearly have a personal view of whether this feature should be high or low on our development priorities.  Problem is, a few of our customers (mostly smaller ones) think this is very important.  My personal view is that this is b/c some of the traditional video providers that don’t do robust POS integration and instead do simple text overlay have made this a selling point in their sales pitch to customers.  Set aside for a second the fact that text overlay is a crude way of integrating with the POS and is incredibly limited in terms of the searching and cross-store exception reporting you can do, the one thing it does do is show the transactions live as they are printed to the receipt printer.

When one of my sales people came to me with this request today, my first was reaction was not very open-minded (or polite).  After I remembered the 2% Rule, I asked the salesperson to go back to the customer and dig deeper into the value proposition that they get from viewing live POS transactions so we could understand what they are trying to accomplish.  Not sure we’ll build that into our service or not in the near future (you could say I’m 98% sure we won’t) but I can guarantee you we’ll understand why they want it.