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May 22, 2013
Thoughts

Essential Services vs. Essential Services

Post by admin

Swiss Ticket Machine

Image via flickr user eti.

You can talk about “Essential Services” in one of two ways:

The first way is as a commodity, as a necessity of society or as a basic provision of life. More often than not, these essential services take the form of monopolies and organized cartels. They’re necessary and useful, but rarely ever pleasant.

The second form of essential services are seemingly unnecessary services that go so far above and beyond the call of duty, that improve your well-being so greatly, that raise the bar so high; they become necessary accoutrements—they become an essential part of your life.

An emergency room, a public transit system and the police are essential services in the first sense that they are some of the bare minimum of services any responsible society needs to function.

Dropbox, on the other hand is an essential service in the second sense—it makes our lives infinitely easier, better and more pleasant to the extent that it becomes a regular part of our world; that it becomes essential.

Too often, public transit is the former, and not the latter.

That occurred to me on a recent business trip. As regular readers know, I spend a fair amount of time in Switzerland for personal and professional reasons. And when there, I use a prepaid cell phone.

On a recent morning sprint to the train station, I realized that—owing to a long weekend where all the stores were closed—I hadn’t topped up my phone and was desperately short of credit. As a foreigner, my provider’s online web portal doesn’t accept my credit card, so I was used to going to the supermarket to top it up.

Now normally that wouldn’t be a problem, except I was travelling to a city I had only been to once (three years ago) and had no idea what my train connections were and had not time to go to the ticket counter to request a schedule.

How wonderful, then, to learn that the train ticket vending machine also allowed me the option to purchase credits for my cell phone on the network of my choosing. And here’s the kicker: Instead of issuing a confusing receipt with a seemingly endless code to add credit to the phone, I instead received a simple text message informing me that my phone had been credited as per my request and the balance would be charged to my credit card.

In other words, the train station method of buying cell phone “guthaben” (as the locals call it) was a more pleasant, convenient and intuitive method than other more traditional means. It’s also a heck of a lot more convenient than standing in line at the grocery store.

There’s nothing “essential” about a train station ticket vending machine that allows you to buy cell phone “guthaben.” Life goes on without it and I’m sure I could’ve managed enough mangled German to figure out how to get where I was going. But here’s the thing:

The service was so good, so useful and so surprisingly intuitive that it became, for me, essential in the time it took to complete the transaction (roughly 15 seconds). That’s an Essential Service of the second variety.

Public transit needs to stop thinking of themselves as essential services of the first variety (read: monopolies) and instead start reimagining themselves as Essential Services of the second.

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1 Comment

  • Mark Townend says:

    Thats a useful combination of services, the only downside being if extended phone credit purchases cause delay for people queueing behind to purchase travel tickets. In UK phone credit top-up is also widely available at ATMs.

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