Thanks to the power of creative innovation, brands across the globe are shifting to meet the evolving needs of both consumers and communities in crisis. Planet Fitness is offering at home work-ins, Little Caesars developed contactless pizza portals, and Dyson is moving from vacuums to ventilators.
Another brand merging utility with innovation is Delta Faucet—an industry leader in its category that’s hacking hand-washing after research showed most people don’t wash their hands long enough to combat COVID-19. I spoke with Susan Fisher, Vice-President of Brand, Innovation and Growth for Delta Faucet, to find out how they adapted their Voice IQ technology to change the very way consumers approach their sinks.
Jeff Fromm: You've used technology in your process and how were you thinking about Voice IQ before the crisis and how are you thinking about Voice IQ now?
Susan Fisher: Yeah. It's an interesting question because Voice IQ is fairly new to us. We launched Voice IQ in early fall of 2019. We're really in that learning process around how people use their faucets and how much water they use and really that connected ability to get data from connectivity. When all this craziness started with COVID-19, we had a moment of inspiration that really came, and it's kind of a fun story but let me first start by saying that all of Delta's, our innovation process is rooted in two fundamentals.
The first one is design based on human insights, and then once you've got a design, prove out that design through rapid experimentation. That's just the simple way we try to operate. The human insight for us is that, in this case, is that very few people really wash their hands for that full 20 seconds that the CDC recommends, every single time they wash their hands.
Fromm: Guilty as charged. Guilty as charged.
Fisher: Absolutely. I mean we are told to sing the happy birthday song two times through, and so test yourself on that. If you sing it as fast as most people sing it, it's more like 12 seconds. It's not 20. When the CDC came out with that hand washing guideline saying that you need to lather and scrub your hands for a full 20 seconds to really adequately kill that virus, it became obvious to us that people's habits wouldn't really conform to those guidelines.
Let me tell you about that real aha moment. It's a perfect example of how human insight really drives innovation. Imagine the timing of what was happening. COVID was just starting to really spread in the US about three weeks ago or so, and we're learning, all of a sudden learning what social distancing means and we're told to wash our hands after literally if we touched anything, go wash your hands.
The wife of one of our brilliant innovators is who we need to credit with this. She's literally fretting over how she's going to ensure her three-year-old and her five-year-old who have very short attention span, how are they not only going to know how long to wash 30 hands, but also ensure that they scrub up for every single time the right way. She's thinking about things like, "I don't want them to touch, continue to touch that faucet. I want to make sure they get the soap on their hands before they actually do the rinse and I need a timer and..."
You can imagine all these things that are going through her head, and so she says to her husband, "I've got this Voice IQ faucet that's connected that I can talk to, is there some way you can use that voice enablement to put some consistency into to the hand washing process, a totally touch less and not waste water?" Of course, that got the gears rolling and within 36 hours time, we brainstormed the idea, iterated it, tested it, approved it through Amazon and Google, and got that pushed out to all Voice IQ owners. It was that inspiration that said, "We think we can make a pretty cool innovation and do something incredibly useful at the right time."