Mini Episode 5 - Why do I get so many notifications about the status of my parcel?

Marcel in Camberwell wants to know why DHL insists on telling him every intricate detail about his new tennis racquet's cross continental journey.

 Dan: 00:18 Hey, and welcome to Bad Decisions Mini Episode Five. I'm your host, Dan Monheit co-founder of Hardhat, and we are doing our best to get through the weird and wonderful questions that have been submitted over the years while Dr. Mel is off raising a young child. What up Dr. Mel? I know you're listening. I hope I'm doing you proud here. Today, we have another super locked out appropriate question. Let's hear what we're in for.

Marcel: 00:41 Hey, Marcel from Camberwell here. I order a lot of things through Amazon and nowadays, even more while in lockdown. I love the ease and convenience, but now I'm inundated with notifications. First, it's your order has been confirmed. Then, my package has been packed. Now, it's been sent. Next, it's in transport. And finally, it's been delivered. Why all of these messages to my email and phone? It's a bit annoying.

Dan: 01:05 I love that your name is Marcel and we are tackling a question about parcels, but I will leave that for some other time. So look, I know we say these things are kind of annoying, but there's also a little bit of us that kind of loves getting the adrenaline hit or the dopamine hit from those little notifications. And it does seem weird that these things turn up so often when you consider number one, how much these big logistics companies need to invest in technology to help them track and trace and share the status of must be millions of parcels around the world. When you consider number two, that conventional CX and UX wisdom tells us that we just need to make everything smooth and we should keep customers as far away from the tangled mess of the inner workings of our organization as possible. And number three, who really cares how many Brazilian distribution centers our six pack of crew socks had to pass through before it made it to our home in Melbourne or Sydney?

Dan: 01:55 So, these are all reasons that would make us wonder why would they even bother? I mean, the other thing to consider is that those notifications don't actually make them come any quicker, but they do have a funny way of reducing our anxiety about I wonder where our package is. And I wonder if they've shipped it and I wonder when it's going to get here and I wonder if it's on track. And there probably is some tangential benefit of less people calling their call centers to just ask where their golf balls are. But behaviorally, I think we've got a far more interesting thing to dive into as we ask ourselves why would global giants like DHL and UPS let us peek behind the curtain of these giant global networks that they are running? What I believe we can pin it down to something called the effort bias and that refers to our tendency to assume that something is worth more, just because more effort has gone into it. And it seems that we are wired to believe that effort is if not a substitute, then at least a leading indicator for the quality of something.

Dan: 02:50 This effort was beautifully showcased by Kruger et al in 2004 in a funny little study that involved poetry. Now what these guys did was they bought subject a room, they randomly split them into two groups, and gave each group an identical set of poems and asked them to evaluate those poems based on the quality of the poem, the overall enjoyment they felt reading the poem, and the amount of money that they believe that a poetry magazine should pay to publish those poems, which I guess was the thing to do in 2004. Not much money getting paid for poetry these days, but anyway, it was simpler times. Now, the only difference here was at one group were told that the poems had taken four hours to write while the other group was told at the exact time poems had taken 18. As you can imagine, the group that had been told upon to take an 18 hours to write considered them of a higher quality, found the more enjoyable, and believed that they were worth far more money than the group who had been told that they'd only taken four hours to write.

Dan: 03:43 Since this study, we've seen similar experiments done with different subject matter, everything from paintings to pottery and wine, we've seen experts and amateurs put through this, and the results are always consistent. We are really, really bad at separating how much effort has gone into something with the actual value that comes out on the other side. Once you switched onto this, you start seeing it everywhere from kitchens, which are now miraculously located in the middle of restaurants when once upon a time they were hidden up the back through to expensive watches that can't be serviced in a period of less than six to eight weeks because they needed to go to some master craftsperson in Switzerland or France all the way through to getting the relentless, but somewhat enjoyable SMS updates about the precise location of a USB powered fan that cannot get here soon enough.

Dan: 04:32 And it is those little notifications that help us appreciate all of the effort that goes in to getting things to our door. With that we value the service a little bit more and we might even be a little more forgiving if things don't go exactly as they were planned. The key takeaway for brands here is not to invent more complexity because the chances are if you are running a successful business there's already insane levels of complexity happening somewhere behind the scenes. Really the key takeaway here is to surface and celebrate whatever it is that makes you great. It might be the logistics process. It might be the ingredients. It might be the origin stories of the company, but if it is not visible, it can be valuable. So make sure people know that it's not all smooth and seamless and you guys really are sweating just a little bit behind the scenes.

Dan: 05:16 So, that's it for today. Marcel, I hope that answers your questions and you can take a little bit more joy next time one of those notifications comes through. If you guys have got more questions about reasons why we do the weird and wonderful things that we do, please shoot them through to me, I'm all over the internet at Dan Monheit or you can email me at askdan@hardhat.com.au. Catch you next time.