Is this your internet security system?
My wife and I went to dinner this evening with her daughter and grandson. Over dessert Brian, who works at Best Buy, started explaining to me how he watches TV shows through the Internet without a cable, land-line telephone, or satellite connection. Virtually everything he does is Internet related. For anyone under fifty this may not seem so extraordinary. For the more senior of us, it is. And for those of you under fifty it may be hard to comprehend how the Internet is changing hearing health care.
It seems the Internet has quickly become the heart and soul of our business. We order supplies, communicate with our suppliers and organizations, go to school, and are “shopped” by our customers and competitors. Programming instruments via an internet connection holds great promise, especially for rural offices. Our scheduling and invoicing are chores left to someone else in some distant place. I have read that soon, when you buy a computer, it won’t come with software, just an internet connection to a “cloud” computer that will download everything to you – but only for as long as your cloud membership is current. If you don’t have an Internet connection you’ll be cut off from society – you will be “unconnected.”
As we have traveled around the country in our RV, It’s hard to remember how difficult it was to conduct our personal business BWF (before WiFi). We recently bought a house without ever physically meeting the previous owners, their agent, our agent, our bank, or the title company that handled the transaction. It was all done over the internet.
It seems that in a person to person – hands-on business, reducing the personal contact between customers and suppliers – Audiologist or Dispenser with their manufacturers, or employees with upper management, could result in some unintended consequences unless the pros and cons are carefully considered. As in the laws of physics, each action could have, and probably will have an equal and opposite reaction.
On one side of the argument is all of the time saved, travel costs reduced, forests saved, etcetera, versus all of the time wasted by receiving too much, incomplete or inaccurate information and being micro-managed by far off supervisors. Although ordering something from home may be convenient, it often takes longer to go through the routines demanded by a store’s software than to drive to one of its competitors in your home town and buy it for almost the same price. On a business level, one professional told me that the simple 1 -2 minute task of filling out a paper order form from a supplier for a custom ITE product now takes almost fifteen minutes to complete on-line, and the company still requires him to send in a paper copy of the order form with the impression.
I do not argue for the elimination of the internet. On the contrary, I only ask for people in our industry to think of those on the other end. Think of the people using these new tools and whether it makes their lives easier, or are you adding another level of frustration for your customer to work through so you can save a couple of dollars? And are those few dollars saved, more valuable than the good-will you would have earned through direct customer contact? After all, isn’t direct contact what we are all about?
