Understanding Nothing

I wanted to link to this just because of the title. But it’s actually quite interesting:

As implemented, there is a single number and customer service center that customers use to get answers to all their city questions and help with any problems.

Most Government things in Belfast require you to phone about 4 different numbers before you get the wrong people. I’ve a hideous story about a speeding ticket that I’ll tell once it’s finished. I keep wanting to write it up, but it keeps getting more and more insane…

Recently I rejoined Queen’s University Library. No bookshop in this country seems to carry a decent selection of books, so I spend a fortune buying books online that I’ve never even had the chance to skim through first. So, as the university does a special rate for graduates, I figured that it might save me buying some books that turn out to be useless (I’ll still buy all the ones I borrow and like – I prefer having my own copy). It also gives me access to a good selection of books that are out of print, and a great archive of journals.

The library is spread around the city at about 5 or 6 locations, but so far I’ve only really been using the Main Library on the main university campus. It has most of the business books, and most of the theology and philosophy books, and I’ve had a lot of fun working my way through some of business journals that aren’t available online.

Today I decided I’d investigate the Science Library, about a mile away from the Main Library, which houses the computer books. Mainly I was trying to get a copy of Jerry Weinberg’s “Quality Software Management” series. I used the catalog to find the location (QA76.76.D47 for any library geeks amongst you), and walked down to where that location should be. I managed to find the first volume (Systems Thinking), but not vols 2 and 3, which have the same shelfmark. I scanned the surrounding shelves, in case they’d been mis-shelved, but to no avail. It’s out of term so there was only one person that I could see sitting around, and she didn’t seem to have the books, so I was stumped. The catalog had said they weren’t on loan, so where were they?

I returned the catalog just to double check, and discovered that, yes, they books were available, and yes I had the correct shelfmark, but no, I didn’t have the correct library – volumes 2 and 3 both lived in the Main Library!

I spent 5 years at QUB as an undergrad, 3 as a postgrad, and worked in both the Main Library and the Science Library for about 3 months, and never once knew that the Main Library also held computer books! I knew that some lived in the David Bates Library (a building that seems to be modelled after an Escher painting, or designed by someone on bad drugs), but it turns out that there’s a small selection (maybe about 5% of the computing books?) in the Main Library as well.

However, there seems to be no sensible reasoning behind which books go where. As well the bizarre split of the Weinberg books, the Science Library has Tom DeMarco’s Why Does Software Cost So Much? (a book I’ve been trying to get hold of for quite some time), but Peopleware lives in the Main Library. The Science Library seems to hold all the Python books (in fact, most of the specific language books), whilst the Main Library holds the Perl books! (including, interestingly, Dave Cross’s Data Munging With Perl)

As I wanted all 3 volumes of “Quality Software Management” (actually, I wanted all 4 volumes, but they only have the first 3), I had to visit both libraries. I asked at the issue desk of both how it was decided which library got which book. At the Science Library they were totally stumped. Their first answer “depending on subject matter” instantly crumbled when I explained how 3 books in the same series, by the same author, with the same shelf-mark, were in 2 different libraries. In the Main Library however, they seemed to have a more plausible answer: “it depends on which department orders them”.

I can almost see how this makes sense. Students tend to mainly use only one of the libraries, depending on their course, so if a certain department orders books for its students, it’s plausible that they’d want those books to be in the library that those students frequent (if students actually frequent libraries …)

This is fine for required reading texts (although most of those are usually held in departmental libraries), but gets really confusing really quickly for general books.

And don’t get me started on how unfriendly their on-line catalog is!

I did discover The Little MLer though, which I’ve never even heard of before. I’ve recently read The
Little Lisper and The Seasoned Schemer, and really enjoyed the Q&A style of them, so I decided to borrow this one, which is written in the same style.

And I discovered that the Science Library has an almost complete back catalog of Byte, Joop, Proceedings of the ACM to browse at a later date…

New Architect shows (with examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly), why contingency design is important, and what you should do – including some nice tips I haven’t come across before (like ww.amazon.com [sic]).

This is another one of those areas where people seem to be paralyzed by their inability to create a 100% solution, and so never even get a 20% solution never mind an 80% one. You don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a state of the art search engine. A simple solution is to just log all the searches that fail, work out what they should have matched (usually it’s a simple mis-spelling – particularly if your search engine is picky about punctuation), and then add something that automatically maps all future searches for that term to the ‘correct’ version. 20 minutes a day working your way down the most popular mis-searches will catch 80% of your problem cases in 6 months …

[via Tomalak]

More braindead software alert.

Last night I was at a friend’s house and we decided to order pizza from Domino’s. I very rarely order from them, so I can never remember which pizza it is I like – it’s either the “Hot and Spicy” or the “Tandoori Hot”, but I never know which. So, as we didn’t have a menu, I decided to look it up online.

The Dominos web site is one of the most dysfunctional sites I’ve come across in quite some time:

1. They don’t have a menu on-line.

I couldn’t believe this, and still can’t. I still think there must be something I’m just missing. But I just can’t find the menu. I can find out how many calories etc are in each type of pizza in their “Food Guide”, but nowhere actually tells me what toppings are on each pizza!

2. You can’t look at the list of products until you register

You can get a list of products in the on-line ordering section – but not until you give them your postcode, house number, name and phone number (each on a separate page). [Note, as I write this I can't even get to this section as my nearest store is closed - even though you can schedule deliveries for later!]

3. You can’t see what you’re ordering

I was impressed that you can order a half-and-half pizza, each with a different set of toppings. I was much less impressed that once it goes in your ‘basket’ it appears solely as a half and half pizza and doesn’t show you your toppings. If you trust the site this sort of thing probably isn’t a problem, but when I don’t, I’m always worried that the order will just be placed like this and the store will have to ring me and ask what was on each half!

4. There’s no way to give special instructions

I don’t like onions on my pizza. I thought that the one I was ordering had onions – but wasn’t sure (see point 1!). I wanted to write in a little box somewhere: “Please don’t put onions on the Tandoori Hot side!”. But there was no such little box, and as far as I could see, no way at all to let them know this short of ringing the store after placing the order – which would pretty much defeat the point of online ordering

4b. There’s no way to give delivery instructions

Similarly there was no way to say something like, “When you deliver, don’t go the front door as we’re not in the house, but are sitting round the back in the garden”.

5. They don’t take credit cards

One of the things about ordering online is not having to worry about always having cash. Not in Domino’s case. You can say that you’ll pay the delivery guy. Or you can pay by debit card. But not credit card. Even though the store takes credit cards if you walk in or phone them.

6. The store ignores your order

One hour later, and considerably hungrier, I rang the store to say “our pizza hasn’t arrived yet”. They took my details and said they couldn’t see the order and was I sure I didn’t order it from another store. When I explained I ordered on line she went silent for a moment and then said “Oh yes, there it is. No one saw that!” Then there was some muffled mumbling and another voice came on, saying “Good evening. This is the manager, how many I help you?”

6b. They don’t know how to handle problems

I hate it when people pass you to their manager without telling you they’re going to, and seemingly without telling their manager what’s going on either. I don’t want to have to repeat myself to several people without knowing why. I hate it even more when the manager then lies to you because they don’t realise that the original person has already told you the truth. In this case the manager attempted to explain that they were having “technical difficulties” and the order had only just come through. And so she did probably the only thing that she’d been trained to do, and offered the food for free. At least I got to give my “no onions” instruction!

They may know how to do delivery on-time, but Domino’s certainly haven’t got to grips with this whole e-business thing.

There was an interesting article in April’s issue of Management Science (the paper linked to has a 2000 date, but seems to be the same paper), on how customers behave in invisible queues (such as when they email on-line retailers, or have to wait for a call-center call to be answered).

The authors note research that show that customers adapt their behaviour to their perceptions of what the wait time should be, formed through accumulated expecience, offset by how important their query is to them.

Contrary to common belief, they show that customers can and do change their expectations and accepted delay time based on perceived system performance – in one study of abandoned calls to a call center, they discovered that 38% of calls were abandoned across all delays at peak times between 100 seconds and 240 seconds.

And so they spend a lot of time with graphs and formulae (and circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one…) showing how to model customers’ patience levels.

This is all well and good of course, but seems to miss the more important question of how to actually set customers’ expectations properly in the first place.

At BlackStar we implemented an auto-response system to incoming emails that said something like “Your email is 24th in our queue, and so we should be able to answer it within 50 minutes.”

It was a fairly simple approximation, with no complex predictive behaviour at all – it merely averaged the time taken to answer each of the last 10 emails. But it was good enough. At peak times, or when we were flooded with emails, the time people were told they’d have to wait rose, and we got a lot less customers deciding we hadn’t answered quickly enough and sending another email, or even telephoning (setting off a terrible vicious cycle that could sometimes take days to work our way back out from).

Loads of customers commented on how wonderful it was, several competitors approached us asking how they could buy the technology, and it was mentioned in at least 3 or 4 press reviews as a sign of how customer friendly we were.

We didn’t need or do any fancy impatience modelling – we just knew that the best way to keep the customers happy was to tell them what you were going to do, and then do it.

Scott’s back, with a Marketing 101 piece on how Great Customer Service is Great Marketing. I couldn’t agree more.

Back in 1998, when we decided to launch BlackStar, we had $10,000 from our MusicDatabase deal with NTK. I coded the site, Jeremy designed it, and Darryl cut all the deals. We had one salaried staff member – Anni, the best customer care person in the universe. We certainly had no money for advertising for at least 6 months, and even then we could only stretch as far as ads in Empire and Total Film – hardly the media saturation we embarked on when we suddenly found ourselves with millions in VC money a couple of years later. But we maintained a 35% month-on-month growth rate for each of those first 18 months, and I’d have no hesitation in saying that our Customer Care was the number one factor behind that.

What many people seem to miss is that there are two main types of customer service – particularly in a web environment. There’s both the “dealing with customers who contact you”, and the “making it so that customers don’t have to contact you”. Amazon, who have the chutzpah to declare themselves as the most customer focused organisation on the planet, are great at the second, but terrible at the first. If you slip through the cracks of their system, they’re lost. Several times I’ve been engaged in a cycle of emails with service staff who just don’t understand my problems and assume I mean something completely different because they know how to deal with that.

At BlackStar we bootstrapped our entire system, only expecting it to actually work 90% of the time, and so we gave our care staff wide flexibility in what they could do to solve problems. Whilst it might seem that this is a very expensive approach, it actually saved a lot of money. The last 10% of any system always accounts for 90% of the development cost, so we were able to implement things in a rough and ready way, put them live, deal with the cases where they didn’t work, and only bother solving them (well, eliminating 90% of those cases) when they were happening too often. This allowed us to make changes to our site and back-end systems practically in real time, enabling us to actually grow at that 35% per month rate.

In the process we not only built the best systems around (it only ever did what we and out customers actually needed it to do – not lots of ‘cool’ functions that someone had dreamed up and spent a year designing and implementing, only to find that no-one used them), but led to an approach to customer care that led to us winning several major awards, getting tons of press coverage, and having the happiest customers in the industry, who would gladly recommend us to everyone they knew.

The systems never worked “correctly” all the time, so there was never any attempt to hide behind them. Instead everyone was trained to just do whatever it took to sort out the problem. If that meant going down to Virgin or HMV and buying the video off the shelf to send to the customer, then that’s just what we did.

If it meant giving a customer a free video each month until our credit card processing abilities could include American Express, well, then that’s what we’d do. (It cost us about £30, forced us to sort out an obvious deficiency in our system, and turned an irate customer into a fan).

If it meant sorting out a problem that a US visitor had in getting the instruction manual for their home gym that they’d bought from Sears, well, we even did do that too. (The person never became a customer, but we got a nice write up in the Wall Street Journal out of it!)

We actively saw customer care as our major marketing tool. And it worked. I think many small companies know this instinctively. Word of mouth is the only marketing they can get. Big companies seem to forget it though. BlackStar certainly has.

Scott does the math(s) with all the 9s. Reminds me of the If 99% Were Good Enough lists. (I can’t find the one I used to have, but this one is the same idea). Of course, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if every one of the items on this list actually happened; things like “20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written this year” not only sound plausible, but probably understated to me…

The problems of course, are that most people believe that 99% is good enough, and most businesses don’t even strive for anything that good. And that every extra 9 you want usually costs about 10 times as much as the previous one, and most people can’t justify the investment.

At BlackStar, I like to think that the extra 9s easily paid off in customer loyalty, industry awareness, and press coverage.

A wonderful, but horrific, tale of customer service escalation from Dell [make sure to read it, blog-style, from the bottom up]. A customer had been waiting for a part for a year! CS rep, who resolved the issue in 10 minutes, escalated a complaint straight to Michael Dell, as per the customer’s wishes. Michael Dell starts probing what happened from the top, and the chain moves down from VP CS, to assistant, to a Senior Resolution Specialist, to an e-Services Customer Care, to (presumably) supervisor, who balls the CS rep out for daring to escalate directly to the top rather than going through the normal process. Even though the normal process had completely failed and the customer had had to buy a new laptop almost a year ago just to be able to do their job!

I’ve never understood this concept that senior executives don’t have time to listen to customer complaints. In many ways it’s the best way to get a handle on how the business is really doing. Every complaint that comes in to your company is a sign that something that you thought was working actually isn’t. Unfortunately most businesses don’t take their complaints and actively ask “What do we have to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again”. And I’m coming more and more to believe that this simple question is the single most important differentiator between a good company and a bad one.

[via Mike Daisey]