Entries Tagged 'business 2.0' ↓

Recently I’ve been noticing TD Canada Trust pushing a marketing campaign that they are the superior bank because they have the longest hours. They are open “8 until late”, which is apparently open 50% longer than any other bank. I’m sure this sort of campaign might be very useful for a company like Wendy’s (ughh), with their “Eat Great, Even Late” campaign, but I fail to see the relevance for a bank in 2007.

When is the last time you actually had to see a teller? The fact is, more and more people are doing all of their banking online, or through a bank machine, neither of which depend on a branch’s hours. One of the only reasons to see a person at a bank, is for opening an account. Oh wait, you can apply for that online now too. I think their marketing dollars would be best used elsewhere, such as continuing to promote clients to use online banking. Not to mention, TD Canada Trust has one of the worst fee structures of any Canadian bank. Even students are paying $3.45/mo. if they can’t keep a minimum balance of $1,000. How many students do you know with that kind of money?

Considering they are one of the most popular banks around, it’s hard to believe they aren’t adapting as well as they should be. We don’t want longer hours, we want cheaper banking! Everyone knows that bankers work from 12:00pm-1pm every day.

The Results Only Work Environment is a system implemented by BestBuy’s corporate offices. It is fairly self explanatory, but in short, employees are just expected to produce good quality work on time, they are not expected to be at work for a set amount of time.

For the longest time, working 7.5 hour days was expected of you. This is becoming optional in a lot of businesses as of late. BestBuy’s experiments with this system has shown about a 35% increase in productivity, and a decrease in turnover rates. Some employees at BestBuy are even working from home, and only go into the office for meetings, which are also optional.

Face it, meetings for the most part are a gigantic waste of time, and usually can be resolved by a simple e-mail, phone call, or a short face-to-face conversation. I suggest reading Kill Meetings to Get More Done at Lifehack.org.

I personally think that this is a system that we are going to see more and more in the workplace. This system empowers employees, and allows them to manage their own time without the feeling that someone is always checking up on them. I hope that I have some of this flexibility when I move into the workforce permanently because I personally work more productively in the morning. By 3pm I’m usually in the mindset to call it quits for the day.

Has your workplace adopted anything like this yet? Is this something you would want to do?

Last night I was reading Business 2.0 magazine, and there was an article about an upcoming search engine called ChaCha. The idea of the search engine is that you type in what you’re looking for, and a live guide will do the search for you in order to get the best results. They said that eventually they wanted to enable you to phone a voice-automated system in order to conduct your searches, and that this would essentially replace 411.

I think that this idea is absolutely terrible. It’s one of those things that you try once or twice, but eventually they lose their novelty. I remember trying a similar phone service located in Toronto called VoiceGenie. I ended up just being on the phone yelling into it for 20 minutes to get one stock quote.

“N…..T…..”
“NC… is that right?”
“NO! N….T….”
“I think you said NC … is that right?”

The technology is just not advanced enough right now to make this idea useful. With pretty much every cell phone offering internet service right on the phone, this has become a better alternative.

In the article, it was mentioned that “This was going to be the next Google”, or something to that extent. Once again, this is false. Google is successful because it provides a useful service and makes it extremely easy to use. If you compare the Google and Yahoo websites, Google is 100 times more simple and clean cut. That is the sort of website you want to see when you open up your web browser. Not Yahoo, and definitely not ChaCha.