Hasta La Ideas

“Wired to Care“, a recent book by Jump’s Dev Patnaik, is the response that came to a young grad student’s lips after she heard my answer to her question yesterday on how I was liking being in Finland. Her explanation was that the book talked about small companies that grew around really really wanting to meet and exceed their customer’s expectations but facing the challenge of holding on to this quality after growing beyond a particular size. Yes, that can be a problem but the topic on hand was the Finnish bureaucracy.

Let me explain: My answer to her question led me to expound on the biggest difference I’ve found here in Helsinki compared to living in a few ‘hotspots’ around the world (San Francisco, Singapore, Bangalore etc) What stands above and beyond any experience I’ve had elsewhere has been my interactions with the local government or public services. Call it service design, customer or user experience, the fact remains that the Finns have somehow managed to find an answer that works when it comes to leaving the end user feeling on top of the world. Yes, I may digress into hyperbole here but as any of you who have faced the experience of dealing with customer service that’s so regimented according to prescripted interactions that if you miss some required paper or information you’re instantly incapable of being assisted would recognize, the opposite is bound to be a pleasure.

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