Digital Face of a Business

It all started on November 7, 2000 with the publication of "How Digital Is Your Business?" by Adrian J. Slywotzky, David J. Morrison and Karl Weber. It was revolutionary then and is bread and butter now. Since then the digital business models have dwarfed the analog ones.

But as humans are analog (have flesh, built of atoms), there will always be great analog businesses. The catch is, though, most of these analog businesses need digital faces. And the survival rate will be closely related to how good and quickly they adapt to the new digital normal. Some will share the fate with dinosaurs, for sure.

Last week I was in San Francisco for a few days, moving on to Montreal. My Montreal flight was scheduled for Saturday morning and I was expecting a USPS package to arrive (according to their tracking info) on Friday by the end of the day. Anticipating things may go wrong on the last mile (they sometimes do), I decided to redirect the package to the SFO Post Office and intercept it there. My logic was the package will arrive to SFO anyway, so instead going to downtown SF, it will be held at the airport.

Unfortunately the package did not arrive on Friday and I decided to give it a chance on Saturday, rescheduling for an evening flight.

During the night the tracking information was updated saying "the package has been intercepted by a post office for the destination". On Saturday I was at the SFO Post door at 12:30 (the hour they opened). But there was no package for me. The clerk told me it had been intercepted by the post office for the original destination. This is how this system works... This is not exactly an interception, but rather a bounce. "Which post office ?" - I asked. "The one for 94103" was the answer. Not very helpful. A quick Google search showed two possible candidates. One already closing at 1p, the other open until 2p. I took an Uber an went to the 2nd one. It was a miss. "No sir, it is the Townsend post office, but they have already closed.". Realizing it was just a 15 minutes walk, I decided to try. Maybe there are still some people there. And there were. Long story short I was able to pick the package and catch my evening flight.

Unfortunately my overall impression has been low. The tracking system - the digital face of the USPS (that is an analog business by nature) - s**ks. It was unable to estimate the delivery. It was unable to explain me where to go (I had plenty of time in the morning to go to Townsend, but was sure the package would be waiting at the airport). The clerks could not even tell me which P.O to go to and I had to do my own guess work.

Analog businesses can make a night-and-day difference on implementation of their digital faces. The cost of that is probably tiny compared to overall potential benefits. But some of them simply do not understand that or don't care. Next time I will use a courier service.