A help desk ticket came in this afternoon. A staff member at one of our associations needed an active REALTOR® subscription added for a new transfer. She included the invoice and it was marked "URGENT."
The application had been completed just four minutes earlier at 12:42 PM. It normally takes less than three minutes to fully provision an account.
By the time the ticket landed in our queue, the system had already fully provisioned the subscription and MLS access, at 12:46 PM. It had added the subscriptions, applied the payments, generated the access credentials, and emailed the member. The staff member didn't see thisbecause the work happened in the background. A few minutes after our reply went back to them stating that it was already provisioned without any action required on our part, she wrote back. "Sorry, it updated just after."
The Bar Moves Fast
No other AMS does this. Membership applications in organized real estate have historically been a stack of tasks distributed across people. Someone collects the form. Someone reviews it. Someone enters the record. Someone provisions access. Someone sends the welcome. The work is real, and the delay between application and access has, for as long as anyone can remember, been measured in hours or days.
We do it in about three minutes. Sometimes a bit longer when the queues are deep. Almost never longer than ten.
And here is the part that struck me as real: the ticket existed because three minutes felt like a delay.
Everything Is Amazing
In 2009, Louis C.K. told Conan O'Brien in segment dubbed, "Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy." He tells a story about being on a flight with high-speed internet, a brand new capability on an airplane. It broke. The guy next to him said, "This is bull&%$#!" Louis C.K.'s comment was, "How quickly the world owes him something he only knew existed ten seconds ago." It's a hilarious bit.
He ended that part of the exchange with this line: you're sitting in a chair in the sky.
That is partly what happened here. Something that did not exist in this industry until Tangilla created it, happened in four minutes instead of three minutes. And four minutes now felt slow enough to file an urgent help desk ticket. Why? Because the new normal arrives quietly, and the old normal is gone before anyone has time to mark its passing.
What Clients Notice Now
They notice when the queues run long. They notice when a provision step needs a retry. They notice the edge cases, because the center of the system is so quiet it has stopped feeling like a system at all.
That is the goal. The system disappears into the work.
And this is the paradox of building great technology: when it works perfectly, it becomes invisible, and the only time people notice it is when it slows down just enough to become visible again.
But this is worth stating clearly: Today, a person transferred between associations, and four minutes later they had access. No one moved a record. No one ran a report. No one logged in to grant a permission. The work was actually done before the help desk ticket even hit the help desk.
Three minutes used to be three hours, or depending on the time it came in, three days.
Sometimes its hard to remember that we're sitting in a chair in the sky.
