Understanding Nothing

The most distinctive characteristic of a wiki is that anyone in the group can edit, modify or even delete material on the pages. Such a free-form collaborative process can be messy and chaotic, and it requires a commitment to the group that may not sit well with some egos. But over time, wiki advocates say, a group voice or consensus emerges into what some enthusiasts call “emergent intelligence.”

The creative anarchy of the wiki is the philosophical inverse of conventional corporate groupware software. Groupware’s highly structured rules and processes do not always reflect the way people really work. Employees often ignore costly corporate-sanctioned software and revert to informal social networks – whether simply e-mail or impromptu water-cooler discussions.

— New York Times [via Chris Winters]

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I am delighted that the noble Lord has asked me a Question about corned beef cans. I have been answering questions about them all my life and I regard them as one of my real areas of expertise.

Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes: My Lords, does the Minister agree, as the noble Baroness has demonstrated, that most home accidents are avoidable, arising out of carelessness, and that therefore paying attention is one of the best cures?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: There are an estimated 55 accidents a year from putty, while toothpaste accounts for 73. I agree with the noble Baroness that it would be helpful if people paid careful attention.

Baroness Strange: My Lords, does the Minister agree that sardine tins and anchovy tins are also very difficult to open with their tin-openers?

Lord Mitchell asked Her Majesty’s Government: What are their plans to reduce the growth in spam?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I hope noble Lords will appreciate how I move seamlessly from corned beef to spam.

Lord Renton: My Lords, will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food that lasted for ever and was supplied to those on active service can become an unsolicited e-mail, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an e-mail?

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I can help the Minister with the origin of the word. It comes from aficionados of Monty Python, and the famous song, “Spam, spam, spam, spam”. It has been picked up by the Internet community and is used as a description of rubbish on the Internet. More seriously, is the Minister aware that up to 85,000 pieces of unsolicited e-mail are received by the Parliamentary Communications Directorate each month?

— Hansard text for 6 May

In the UK, if a speed camera records a speeding car, the owner of the car will be sent a formal request, under s172 of the Road Traffic Act, asking for details of who was driving the car at that time. In the usual case of the owner being the driver, and admitting to driving at the time, he will then be prosecuted for speeding.

This has, of course, been the subject of much controversy, as it appears to go against the right of an individual not to incriminate himself. For a while there was a ruling by the Scottish courts that this was in breach of EC law, but this was later overruled at appeal.

For several years, more savvy solicitors have been advising clients faced with s172 requests to return the form stating they were the driver, but do not sign it.

Under rules of evidence, an unsigned admission cannot be used as evidence – and thus the form cannot be used as part of the prosecution for speeding. But, by returning the form, the law regarding s172 has been complied with fully: although the registered keeper is under a duty to identify the driver he is not required to make a witness statement to that effect.

This strategy worked in many cases, but had not been proven to do so, until last December, when the Court of Appeal overturned the conviction of John Pickford, on exactly these grounds, stating that whatever distaste the courts may have for such a lacuna, it is not the court’s place to remedy the problem, but parliament’s…

Students from the University of Plymouth managed to get a grant of £2000 from the Arts Council to test the hypothesis that an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite amount of time could reproduce the works of Shakespeare.

However, they seemed to lack the resources to attain an infinite supply of monkeys, and with a lack of patience to wait for an infinite amount of time, they instead had to make do with six monkeys for a month. Unfortunately the monkeys “failed to come up with anything that remotely resembled a word”.

The “scientific officer” at the zoo, has somehow decided that this manages “to show that the ‘infinite monkey’ theory is flawed.”

An interesting take on the age old debate, found over on the c2 wiki, in response to the suggestion that teaching computer science should pay much more attention to its applications in the real world:

I disagree. That’s SoftwareEngineering. CompSci should be about the theory and the limits of what’s possible at least as much as it is about coding. If we adopted that view about mathematics, for instance, we’d spend all our time on loan calculations, completing your tax return, and basic statistics

At the Emerging Technology Conference I heard Amazon staff say several times that Amazon is (or is striving to be) the most customer centric company on Earth. Every time I hear this it irks me more and more because I know that my dealings with Amazon have generally been pretty poor.

I don’t doubt Amazon’s sincerity in this regard, but I think they’ve got their terminology slightly wrong. I think they’re actually striving to be the most “customers centric” company rather than “customer centric”. Of course this doesn’t sound as good – in fact it just sounds wrong – but I think it’s closer to the truth.

From talking to lots of other Amazon customers, and from some of my experience with them, for the most part Amazon “Just Works”. They’ve put a lot of effort in to making sure that the general customer experience is right. But if you happen to fall through the cracks somewhere, everything falls apart and they really can’t cope.

Their customer care staff are notorious for not reading your email carefully and latching on to the first phrase in it that they have a stock answer for. I’ve had cases where this happened 3 or 4 times about the same matter before finally finding someone prepared to actually take the time to understand the problem.

When their systems work (and that’s probably 99.9% of the time now), they’re great – but it’s when they don’t that the customer relationship is at the most risk – and Amazon are terrible at handling this.

When we built BlackStar we decided to take a different approach. Because we didn’t really have a lot of money or time to make our systems work quite as well, we aimed for making 90% of orders flow smoothly – and made sure that our Customer Care staff were able to deal with all the cases that fell through the cracks. Most of the effort went into dealing with individual customers one by one rather than the abstract concept of all customers.

A few interesting things happened from this:

Firstly, we got to see which areas we were spending the most time dealing with, and so had a clear indication of where to spend our development resources.

Secondly, we found that customers actually seemed to like this approach. I’ve heard it said that a customer whose complaint is handled well ends up being more loyal than a customer with no complaints – and this definitely seemed to be the case. Our customers seemed impressed with the level of individual attention they received, and that paid off for us.

Thirdly, we found that this was even more true for our “power users”. The customers who tended to buy the most from us, tended to have the most problems, but by dealing well with them, we actually got to know them. It turned out that most of them had previously shopped with competitors, and when they’d managed to fall through the cracks there they’d received terrible service and promptly started shopping elsewhere. These customers were even more impressed with how we handled such cases as they were able to compare it with what they’d experienced elsewhere, and many of them remained customers for a very long time.

It’s seems that there’s two approaches you can take to dealing with problem cases. You can either put your efforts into ensuring they never happen (as Amazon seem to do), or accept that they will happen and put your efforts into being able to handle them well when they do (as we did at BlackStar). In reality you need to work at both, but I maintain that the payoffs are much greater from the second approach.

Whether you can ever attain that if you don’t treat Customer Care as a core competency, and outsource it, as Amazon do, is an interesting question …