Have you seen any great tech solutions to improve customer experience in the post-COVID contactless world?
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Agreed!
The innovations are really pervasive. When you look at what tends to happen after a crisis like this, we go into a different phase. And a lot of the technologies that we're bubbling around start to coalesce into something that's usable, because of the contingencies of the emergency. I think that's exactly what we've been doing. The same way that we provisioned work-from-home in two weeks, when it would normally take like two years to do. When I teach my class on innovation, I start the class out and say, "Look, innovation's a fad." And the students get all, "Well, what am I in class for?" And then I put the letters FAD on the board and I say, "Look, most innovations are forced, some are accidental, very few are deliberate.” I think that's the way the world is, that necessity really is the mother of invention.
There's so many things that they said, "Hey, the pandemic has accelerated this.” One was QR codes, which I’ve always just found pointless, but now I actually use them. So, it is funny.
I had to go to India to bring my daughter who I adopted. There was a period, for 15 days I'd be in Delhi to complete all the documentation. At that point we were in strict COVID mode in India. In the last five days before I was going to leave, it opened up. My appointment to the US embassy wasn't until the last day, and I had nothing to do. As they opened up, they said, "Certain heritage monuments are open. And if you want, you can go and see, but the footfall is really restricted." I took my daughter because I said, "Fine, let's go." The way they did this whole thing, was by making sure that you go online and download a barcode, and that's your ticket. And when you get it, you use your mobile device. It's all contactless. You just read the barcode, you enter without touching anything. Every hour they allowed only 20 folks to go in, and they let 20 out. And when you get out of the monument, it's also contactless. Now in case you did reserve, but you did not buy a ticket, no problem. There was a big QR code sitting right in the entrance of the monument. You take your phone, click it, you got your ticket and you were done. I saw it work so amazingly. They were hurting so much, because Delhi apparently builds a lot of business off tourism. And so this is the way they really innovated. I saw that, and I was like, "Wow, this is something really cool with contactless."
Oh, that's awesome. That's a lovely story.
It is interesting how much QR codes are appearing everywhere. And also how much paying with mobile phones is expanding. These are small things but will encourage greater adoption.