Spanish upselling lessons

I think Spanish bar and tavern tenders have a good lesson in customer relationship management to teach the world. They do two things which are just great.

The first concept is the tapa (analog to a push service). You order a beer or a wine at any bar where food is also served and always get something small to nibble on, usually on bread. This “tapa” is a perfect upselling scheme. If you like it, your tendency will be to order “raciones“ of this same or similar foods on sale at the establishment. After a few wines (this bar side drinking is normally before lunch or diner) you might probably want to sit to diner with your friends. One of the most ancient and best upselling schemes I know.

The second is offering the last shot of digestive liquor on the house. “El orujito se lo da la casa“. You had a great and not inexpensive lunch on tapas and raciones and end it with some pacharán, orujo blanco or some such concoction. Then when you ask for the bill a smiling waiter tells you: “this one is on the house” (refering to the liquor shot). The costs of this are truly marginal to the establishment, and yet it will probably entice you to leave a larger tip before exiting and generate a lot of gratitude. So, more cash to the tip pool and a subjectively (and probably tipsy) happier customer. Win-win was invented in Madrid.

Tapas photo courtesy of wholefoodsmarket

Looking for something…?

According to Wikipedia, enterprise search is “the practice of identifying and enabling specific content across the enterprise to be indexed, searched, and displayed to authorized users”. There is large amounts of ink on the topic now and a world summit devoted to this critical knowledge management tool.

I was thinking about it because it seems the long tail of company information (over 80%) and therefore know-how and knowledge, is stored in disconnected systems (mail in-boxes and folders, private files…). This accounts for a lot of lost value as well as a lot of inefficiently spent time looking for things outside a total system.

It reminded me of the similarities between the pursuits of the many companies dedicated to ES and classifieds: in online classifieds we try to organise information, make it accessible and classify it in the most efficient manner possible. We want to build value into information by making it easier to get to it, enhancing/enriching it, use it, re-distribute it and act upon it.

Just some thoughts from the ICMA General Meeting in Brussels. Have to run to Bibliotheque Solvay for diner, but surely will hit back on this issue in more detail soon (and ES 2.0)

In the image water-garden in Ile Maurice’s Jardin de Pamplemousse

Entropy and disorder (rated sexually explicit)

Everyone is trying to persuade me that decline in newspaper readership is making society at large more dis-informed. I don’t think so. Perhaps if you are not a proficient user of available tools (and I am not) you may find yourself wasting important amounts of time trying to retrieve information from irrelevant sources. But it’s fair to say that in the information age we are all struggling with relevance.

I try to find the explanation to this, rather, in the principles of entropy. Entropy assumes that nature tends from order to disorder in isolated systems. Let’s say your throw a pile of books on the ground, disorder is more likely to occur.

A more precise way to characterize entropy is to say that it is a measure of the “multiplicity” associated with the state of the objects. If a given state can be accomplished in many more ways, then it is more probable than one which can be accomplished in only a few ways

The above is a time-arrow vision of entropy. But here is another take on it as disorder, illustration included, thanks to hyper-physics

For a glass of water the number of molecules is astronomical. The jumble of ice chips may look more disordered in comparison to the glass of water which looks uniform and homogeneous. But the ice chips place limits on the number of ways the molecules can be arranged. The water molecules in the glass of water can be arranged in many more ways; they have greater “multiplicity” and therefore greater entropy

More on sister topic information entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, a key to grasping entropy