Would somebody from PC World change the incorrect voice mail that tells you they are open at 10am on Sunday mornings? Having wasted my Sunday morning travelling from Liffey Valley to Blanchardstown in an attempt to buy a new computer, and having called them to check hours, I eventually gave up at 11.30am and gave my money to another retailer. Nobody answers the phones at PC World...but maybe they are one of a growing breed of businesses that neither need nor want new business? We're only into the second week in January and already I've maxed out on lousy customer service (all pre Christmas optimism seems like a distant memory now).
I'll save the other story for another time..>
Customer service is a recurring theme (not only for me!) in blog land and Damien had his own experience recently with Insure.ie. Thankfully, in his case, someone from the company reads his blog and he was contacted and the issue somewhat resolved. Paul Cullen had a piece in Saturday's Irish Times (subscription required) in which he said:
For consumers are the new powerless in our affluent society. Although wealthier than ever, their resources drain away thanks to high prices, a lack of real choice and illusory competition. Most of us are running faster than ever just to stand still and we don't understand why. Too often, instead of good service, we get lip service or, worse, disservice; instead of clarity we get obfuscation.
How true - but what's to be done? I for one would like to see a dedicated portal for customer service in Ireland where bloggers could post their experiences (good and bad) of customer service and try and impact on this whole area. I'd be really interested in stories of excellence as well as the horror ones because until customers raise their expectations of what is acceptable then our benchmarks will hover around the bottom of the scale. I also think that those organisations who have the contempt for customers that Cullen refers to need to see their service compared to similar comapnies who treat customers with a bit more respect.
I'll admit up front that I'm simply not computer literate enough to organise this myself (the technical bits of this blog function through the kindness of strangers) but I'd be happy to throw in any other know how I've got if there are others out there who might do the technical stuff? What do you think?
Damien has picked up on my post about some kind of dedicated blog/space for customer service stories and there is aan interesting discussion going on in the comments section there. I am reposting my contribution to the conversation here
I was prompted to do that post because of a couple of really good customer experiences recently and many, many terrible ones….and let me issue a disclaimer here that I’m not technically literate enough to really understand the practicalities of what I’m suggesting however, I think there are a couple of important starting points:
What ever mechanism might be constructed – people need to take responsibility for their own content. On a simple level – you have no way of validating my experience of a particular company and I have no way of validating yours.
At the moment if I am CEO of Company X and have consistently good (or bad) customer service I can punch my company’s name into Google and realistically I will only get the well known bloggers or those with considerable traffic. This won’t be the whole picture of the conversation regarding my company. More importantly it disadvantages bloggers who are early in their blogging careers and who have a really great story of their experience because they don’t have the rankings to qualify for the first few Google pages.
So I guess I would like to see something that would collate original content (I guess this would mean a common tagging system? See, I told you I am illiterate about this stuff:) so that when Company X punches their name in (or one of their customers is checking them out) up comes a site which is driven by the collective experience of blogging community. I think this offers other media outlets the opportunity to pick up on issues using individual posts or posters etc etc. I am less interested in going the route of a new mechanism with all the attendant legal stuff and more interested in how we can highlight content that is already out there and convince bloggers to write more.
I've long been an advocate of the art of re-framing
Re-framing is one of the most useful interventions I can make as a consultant and if a client is willing to look at their situation differently – well, that means change is already a reality and the work has already begun.
But this intervention from the US Postal Service is taking things a step too far. The Postal Service is apparently addressing the issue of long waits by removing clocks from post offices.
"We want people to focus on postal service and not the clock," said Stephen Seewoester, Dallas spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service. The USPS has removed clocks from 37,000 post offices as part of a "retail standardization program."
Brilliant in its simplicity don't you think (apply ironic tone in reading that statement).
Hat tip to Consumerist for this one
Congratulations to the Arts Council of Ireland for being the first of the National Cultural Institutions to install an RSS feed on its re-designed website. The feed doesn't appear to be working at present but hopefully that's a minor technical hitch. I hope it's not going to be too long before the rest of the members of the CNCI follow suit - some of the websites of these major institutions are very poorly designed and I gave up trying to navigate through the National Library's site in an effort to find out more about their series of talks (I saw a printed brochure about them) but there's nothing on the site for an interested ticket buyer or if there is, it's buried somewhere very secret. Look instead at the New York Public Library's site with 8 different feeds for various areas of its activities...A quick scan of many of the websites of smaller Irish arts and cultural organisations reveals the same thing ... all this great activity going on, in secret, buried in the bowels of dusty websites ... let's not make it so difficult for interested people to spend their money on what you have to offer!
And for those of you who aren't sure what I'm talking about here's a brilliant explanation of RSS in Simple English from Common Craft.
There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.
There's a transcript of the video here
Pic credit
Damien flew on SAS and his bags took a different route. He blogged his frustrating experience of dealing with Sky Handling Partners who were less than courteous in their dealings with him check out the original post here. But this morning's developments are truly scary
This morning I noticed someone snooping around my website after coming to the site with the search “sky handling partners”.
Just before lunch I started getting email confirmations from dating sites, including gay ones saying my account for their site has now been created. Seems someone was creating profiles saying I was looking to meet men and had rather interesting profile descriptions. One of the emails disclosed the IP address where the person submitted the details from:
62.77.175.251
A quick reverse DNS shows that the IP allocation of this eircom customer is:
inetnum: 62.77.175.248 - 62.77.175.255
netname: CITYJETHLING
descr: City Jet Handling Dublin.
City Jet Handling is the former name of Sky Handling Partners.
Apart from the utter stupidity of doing such a thing from a company website - the fact that anyone would respond to a legitimate complaint about shoddy customer service by using a person's personal data and their sexual orientation to plan revenge is simply beyond belief. Omani asks a question over at his blog
Imagine you’re an employee of a big company. Your boss comes to you and asks you to do this. What would you do?
Which assumes that this is someone low down in the food chain but I wonder, I really wonder about this. Supposing this act was undertaken by someone further up the food chain? What is to be done in this case.
Sky Handling Partners picked the wrong person to mess with (Damien's original post is number 2 in a Google search for them) - and a cursory search on Google would have revealed that Mr Mulley wouldn't take this lying down - but what if you are not as connected? and what if you don't have an online presence as a way of highlighting something like this? If this teaches us anything it's the importance of knowing what your digital footprint looks like even if you don't think you have one. Just because you don't blog or hang out on various web forums doesn't mean you aren't out there by default or through the actions of someone else.
I will watch Damien's progress with interest and more pertinently, the response from Sky Handling Partners...As an aside, I'm flying with SAS Airlines on Monday next...if my bags don't arrive on the same flight as me I may just have to brandish my blogging credentials as well. Good luck with this one Damien.
I am Northern Rock customer - I'm not sure whether to be scared, bemused or angry right now. With all the media hype about bail outs and share prices plunging you'd think that somebody, somewhere would think about communicating with customers. 
Northern Rock's website is no doubt under siege and their home page assures us that there are a few delays but no problems. Attempts to log into accounts are then met with this announcement which is effectively blocking access to my account and my money. Phones are ringing out and there seems to be nothing that resembles a customer service or communications strategy to deal with the rising level of anxiety about where our money is, whether it's safe and how we go about getting access to it.
As Johnnie rightly points out
Good grief. Here's a bank who's shares have plummeted 30%, with customers lining up at branches this morning. Do they have no clue about damage limitation? Do they not get that by not really acknowledging what's happening and talking to customers about it, they make the situation worse?
Now if they'd had a corporate blog, they might have had someone in there with the wit to write something in plain English that could have been reassuring. But no, it's the stony silence of denial. That just adds to my sense of their incompetence.
and I'm in total agreement with him. With all of the banking scandals we've had in this country over the past 10 years you'd think that Northern Rock would see an opportunity here do do things differently - Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Update 16 September
The following was posted on the Northern Rock website when I tried to log in today: and here's a link to a Q and A posted on the site.
Dear Customer
May I begin by offering you my sincere apologies for any inconvenience you have suffered in dealing with Northern Rock during the last few days. Customer service is of paramount importance to us and due to the circumstances that surround us, you have been let down. Thank you so much for your patience, particularly when using our website which has been running very slowly due to the number of people working online.
Let me now reassure you. Your money is safe with us and if you want some, or all of it back, then you are perfectly entitled to it. Whilst you may have to wait a little longer than usual to receive it, you will get it. However, your savings are secure and there is no need for you to withdraw your money based on our recent announcement, and the widespread media coverage that has ensued. The Bank of England has agreed to provide a funding facility to enable us to manage through the current global liquidity crisis. They would not have done so, if we were not a solvent, adequately capitalised, well run bank. I hope this helps to reassure you.
Your custom is very important to us and I sincerely hope you choose to stay with us along with the vast majority of our customer base.
Yours sincerely
Adam J Applegarth
Chief Executive
16 September 2007
In 40 years as a highly regarded cancer surgeon, Dr. Tapas K. Das Gupta had never made a mistake like this. When an electrode was left inside Maria Del Rosario Valdez after her son was delivered by Caesarean section, she was gratified that the hospital quickly acknowledged its mistake and corrected it without charge. As with any doctor, there had been occasional errors in diagnosis or judgment. But never, he said, had he opened up a patient and removed the wrong sliver of tissue, in this case a segment of the eighth rib instead of the ninth.
Instead of hiring a lawyer, the doctor in question did something unimaginable.
He apologised
After all these years, I cannot give you any excuse whatsoever,” Dr. Das Gupta, now 76, said he told the woman and her husband. “It is just one of those things that occurred. I have to some extent harmed you.
Sunday's New York Times carries the story of what's happening in some US hospitals when doctors admit to being human, to making mistakes and what happens when those mistakes are followed up with an apology.
In Dr. Das Gupta’s case in 2006, the patient retained a lawyer but decided not to sue, and, after a brief negotiation, accepted $74,000 from the hospital, said her lawyer, David J. Pritchard.
and from the hospital's perspective
“Improving patient safety and patient communication is more likely to cure the malpractice crisis than defensiveness and denial,” Mr. Boothman said.
Mr. Boothman emphasized that he could not know whether the decline was due to disclosure or safer medicine, or both. But the hospital’s legal defense costs and the money it must set aside to pay claims have each been cut by two-thirds, he said. The time taken to dispose of cases has been halved.
The number of malpractice filings against the University of Illinois has dropped by half since it started its program just over two years ago, said Dr. Timothy B. McDonald, the hospital’s chief safety and risk officer. In the 37 cases where the hospital acknowledged a preventable error and apologized, only one patient has filed suit. Only six settlements have exceeded the hospital’s medical and related expenses.
Can you imagine? The professions admitting to their humanity? to being imperfect and infallible? It seems like such a long way from where we are in this country where at the first sign of imperfection we call the spin doctors, legal profession and attempt to maintain the facade of the idealised system that can in no way let us down. I'd prefer the disappointment - or in other words, the reality rather than the fantasy. But I wonder how comfortable any of us are admitting to not having answers? to making mistakes and to managing the anxiety of wondering if our clients could accept us if we presented as our imperfect selves?
