I Am An Old Dog!

The first time my friend told me about the site Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/), I thought “that sounds like a colossal bore and a huge waste of my time.” I checked it out, read a few tweets, confirmed my suspicion and moved on. Now, I work in software and I think I’m just about as savvy as the next girl, but I just wasn’t getting the Twitter! A constant stream of random thoughts by random people; what’s the point? (Here’s where the Old Dog part comes in.)

Enter FAVRD (http://www.favrd.com/). This is like a turbo add-in to Twitter that brings you the cream of the crop tweets each day; a veritable gold mine of snarky humor. (Here’s where the New Tricks part comes in.) I was hooked in about 2 minutes and 19 seconds.

We are bombarded with a constant flow of technology designed to help us work, make us laugh, make us cry, make us stare in disbelief, connect us with friends and family, and so on. Thinking of the social networking field alone I can think of a handful of sites in a quick second (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Tribe, Plaxo, LinkedIn…). It’s a lot of change happening and fast. Even my 23 year old son rejects a fair amount of the technology coming at him; thankfully he has developed his time management skills to be wary of time wasters.

This year I made a promise to myself to thoughtfully consider the value of each instance of technology that I’m faced with. What is this technology going to add to my life? Will it help me manage my time so I have more time to spend with my kids? Will it save me money?
I guess what I’m really doing is kind of like a mini WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) analysis every time I’m confronted with a new web gadget. This is a change management tool we use frequently during Service Optimization implementations. When we are rolling out a powerful tool such as ClickSchedule, the stakeholders within an organization may feel that they’ve been handling the current workload well, what is this new tool going to do for them? A common question we hear is “will this add work to my day because I will now have to manage this tool as well as the schedule and the people?”

I’ve been in software for a while, and I can honestly say that I’ve never heard of a company that set out to design a product that would make someone’s job worse. That said, we all know it happens in software implementations that after go-live the end users are less than delighted.
So how do we make sure that people are going to get value out of a new tool? The first place to start is by understanding the pain points they have now (come on … everyone has at least one or two!). Second, design an holistic solution that wraps the functionality of the tool in well thought out business processes. Last but not least, clearly and repeatedly communicate the message to the stakeholders that the holistic solution is designed for them, with their input, in order to help and not hinder.

P.S. Don’t get hooked on FAVRD like I did!

Author: Andrea Bach

'You're my hostage until you fix my washing machine'

Screaming down the telephone, banging your head against a brick wall, shouting at the service engineer, breaking down in tears and vowing never to purchase a product from the company again – these are just some of the typical customer reactions in the face of poor service. But, would you ever consider taking the law into your own hands and kidnapping the engineer?

Well, the vast majority of us would never consider such a course of action (nor would I recommend it) but a lady in the United Kingdom did just that! After surviving without her washing machine for three weeks and a whole host of failed service visits, she decided that enough was enough and declared, “You might as well dial 999 (the Emergency Services) because you’re not leaving until it’s fixed.”

It’s worth reading the story to see the shocking level of service that this ‘customer’ experienced.

The failings on the part of the service provider include broken promises and poor communication. They now need to fix the customer as well as fixing their product (in this case, fixing the customer might not be possible!).

For the sake of its customers and field engineers, let’s hope this service provider has a plan to leverage technology to improve the customer service experience.

Author: Simon Morris

Can the eBay Experience be Applied to Service?

I use eBay from time to time and, apart from the occasional bargain that I can pick up, I like eBay’s “Meet the seller” feature.The “Meet the seller” provides information such as how long the seller has been a member of eBay and a rating that reflects people’s experience with this seller (http://pages.ebay.com/help/feedback/howitworks.html)

As a potential buyer, I can use this information to decide whether this seller is trustworthy and whether I will receive the goods I buy or whether the goods will get “lost in the mail”.

Could this be applied to service?

Pet Peeve – Tradies not arriving on time I recently renovated my kitchen. Therefore, I needed a sparky, a plumber and a cabinet maker. In order to get a good price, I decided to get a few quotes. So using an online directory service I called and organised three sparkys, three plumbers and three cabinet makers to come around to my place and provide me with a quote; how many do you think actually arrived at the time they specified? One sparky, no plumbers and two cabinet makers… what a waste of my time!

This is where feedback would have been great; when the online directory service provided me with a list of sparkys/plumbers/cabinet makers within my area, I would have been able to view the feedback score of each and everyone of them to determine whether they meet appointments, reasonably priced, performed good quality work etc. and based on this feedback I would have been able to make an informed decision rather than leave it up to fate.

Author: George Chondros