It's the putting right that matters

I decided to try the much-more-expensive-but-ostensibly-better-for-me EcoStore anti dandruff shampoo recently.

It wasn't so good. Gave me more dandruff.

So I rang up, left a message asking for next steps to get a refund.

Got a call from Angie, who was really great. She explained their back story, that their previous formulation never had any complaints, but their current formula had a few complaints similar to mine.

She then asked if I'd be interested in trying the old formulation. Worth a try!

Great customer service is leadership. Angie led me towards a different solution that might just be of more value to me than a cash refund.

The customer can also help. I was my usual friendly self, even though I was making a complaint.

Being nice to people really does make life easier, 90% of the time. And the nicer you are the 90% of the time, the more effective is the 10% when you bring out the big guns :)

Podcasts: Blogging marketers, bad lawyers, spiritual entrepreneurs and smart airlines

Great podcast listening this morning. Good to hear Joseph Jaffe back after just a week since his last one! And better still to hear of a groundswell (not to be confused with the Groundswell) of blogs written by actual marketers and agency folks, not just consultants like us who recommend people write blogs.

Then there was chapter 17 of David Maister's podcast/book Strategy and the Fat Smoker, What's wrong with Lawyers. Not being a lawyer, I didn't have to listen to this and found it interesting. Particularly since most politicians are former lawyers. Almost as harmful to innovation and collaboration as journalism!

Then there was Mitch Joel's excellent interview with E-Myth author Michael Gerber. Absolutely inspiring. My gem of the day: "Being an Entrepreneur is a truly spiritual thing. Spirituality is more pragmatic than we thought, and pragmatism is more spiritual than we thought."

Finally, HBR's Ideacast looked at how Singapore Airlines is zagging when everyone else is zigging in the airline industry. Very good bits and pieces!

Some random thoughts:

• It is sooo good to get some exercise in today, not just for the exercise but also because I get to listen to podcasts
• It will be so weird when I finally meet the likes of Mitch Joel and Joseph Jaffe, because my mind mixes up where I am when I hear them, and makes those into shared experiences. Eg I associate the opening music of Foreword Thinking with walking around my street in Titirangi, yet Mitch himself has never been there. It's different from video, where you see the face behind the voice, in their setting, not yours.
  

37Signals still sucks, but at least they have an exit survey

I've found that in the web 2.0 world I expect companies to listen to me, even though only a few actually do.

A while back I blogged about how 37Signals makes it nearly impossible to downgrade your account once you've signed up to a paid one. I got no response from that post, or from the email I sent them, so today I cancelled my account.

They have one redeeming feature: an exit survey. When I have cancelled is exactly when I want to give you a piece of my mind. So hopefully 37Signals really reads and takes action based on these exit surveys.

But it does beg the question - why couldn't they listen before?

How easy do you make it to downgrade? (Aka 37Signals, you suck)

"Everyone" knows customer experience is really important, that negative word of mouth spreads faster than positive, that happy customers stay longer and spend more. So companies make it easy to do business with them.

How about the other way around? When you want to downgrade or leave a company, how easy is it? I recently tried to downgrade my accounts with LinkedIn and Highrise HQ.

With LinkedIn, it was a breeze once I emailed support asking "how do I downgrade?". To some that might be good enough, but I'm used to automation here ... this is web 2.0, right? The great usability that helps me upgrade smoothly should also be there to help me downgrade smoothly.

It's slightly more complicated with Highrise HQ, the CRM application from 37Signals. It's a powerful product, and on the face of it, it's easy to both upgrade and downgrade.

Trouble is, I want to downgrade but I have file attachments. If there's files in my account, I can't downgrade. So I emailed support:

Hi guys,

I'd like to downgrade my account to a free one but I can't because there are files. But I don't need those files. However I can't find how to delete all those attachments so I can revert to free.

Can you help?

Their reply:

Hi Simon,

There is no central file location, so you'll need to delete them from
the contacts and cases you've uploaded file to.

You've got to be kidding me. Because Highrise HQ can't handle HTML email, every email that has automatically forwarded to HighriseHQ has come through as a MIME attachment.

That means I could probably spend all day deleting files one by one, and still not be finished.

That's no fun. C'mon 37Signals, you guys do great software, how about making this task a little easier for me - and other customers who want to downgrade now (perhaps to upgrade later, you never know!)

---
Update: At last night's Ecademy Auckland group I heard that Google AdWords is another service that doesn't let you downgrade once you upgrade. Bad, naughty, evil Google!

Maxnet, you suck - or why I got interested in management

I'm writing to you from the Booklovers B&B where the internet is slow but the atmosphere is faanntastic. (And, of course, interesting books line the shelves)

Wellington is groovy as always, and my presentation this morning was another step in finding my best presentation style. More on that later.

But for now, a constructive grumble.

It was on my fifth support call to Maxnet that I realised why I'd become interested in management all those years ago.

I started in advertising. If you think a little bit about advertising, you want to learn about marketing. Marketing is about making promises. If you make promises, you want to keep them. If you want to keep them systematically, you have to have a system in place. Hence, management.

Maxnet is experiencing systematic problems right now that are preventing it from fulfilling its potential.

Since Saturday night I've been trying to switch my domain to a new registrar before launching our new SimonYoungWriters' site (I won't link because there's nothing there at the moment!).

I could bore you with a long story, but I'll summarise what's up with Maxnet, and how they (and every business) could do a better job:

• Do the thinking for me. When I phoned late on Saturday night, and then again on Sunday morning, I got the same recorded message: "Unfortunately our operators can't take your call at this time". I didn't have the presence of mind to check their hours of operation, or I would've saved myself a lot of stress. But why don't they put their hours of business in their answerphone message?
• Get the staff you need. My righteous indignation hit a high when I waited on hold for 10 minutes, only to get automatically put onto an answerphone. Not what I want as a customer!
• Give staff the tools to help. When I finally talked to someone it was using my cellphone, calling from Auckland airport. It was a relief to talk to someone, but they couldn't help. The webmaster's in tomorrow, he said. Great.
• Don't be so frickin' cheap. And that's another thing. I had to pay for the call, even though it was Maxnet's system that wasn't delivering the results I needed. They have an 0800 number, but you can't call it from a cellphone or from within Auckland.

I think that's all, and it looks a lot less when I see it in bullet point. But each of these bullet points caused me a lot of grief, and it got worse, the less responsive Maxnet appeared.

Tonight I spoke with a helpdesk guy named Stephen. From him I discovered that my issue was a priority, that several members of the team were aware of it, and that there had been other, similar issues on rare occasions before.

That's great, but why didn't anyone email me or phone me? I want to know something, even if that something is "we're working on it".

Even then, I had to prod and poke Stephen. He would've been quite happy to let me wait until morning to talk to an expert. This is my business, I told him. Is there anyone who can help me right now, because right now is when I need help.

Then the helpfulness came. Stephen plumbed all the knowledge he had on the subject, and shared possible scenarios, used his creativity and imagination. We didn't get there, but we got further than we had been.

Why is it so hard to get people to be completely present to help you in these service situations? Why do I have to be more assertive than I feel comfortable with to get what is simply my due as a customer?

All questions to ponder. And I don't completely blame Stephen or his colleagues for the bad service they've given me. It's a systemic problem that must be dealt with in a systemic way. Not a mechanical system, but a growing, learning organic system that gets better over time.

I am a shameless Xero fanboy

Switched our accounting to Xero last night. Wooo!

It's good. It seems to do all the same things our old package did, but it does them cooler. And that is surprisingly very important, even for something like accounting.

What's so cool? The fact that there's a dashboard, the fact that I can click on just about anything for more information, and the fact that the "feedback" button is on every single page, and actually goes to someone who gives me an answer!

Well done, Drury, Morgan et al. Here's to all the success you deserve.

Fisher and Paykel: Making the best of a bad situation

Here in New Zealand, we've been rocked by the news that Fisher and Paykel is moving part of its manufacturing to Thailand.

Many words have been written by minds smarter than mine about why the move happened, and what now. I'd like to write about how it was done.

My mate David works at Fisher and Paykel (matter of fact, two of my mates, and they're both called David - strange, huh?). He's in the division where they make fridge doors, so his job is safe - for now.

But when I quizzed him about the feeling on the ground at F&P, he said many of the 350 who have now lost their jobs are relatively happy. They've received a good payout, and they can now try and find other work. Clean and simple.

Compare that with Brigid, another friend who works for Air New Zealand's ground staff. Since about October last year she's had the spectre of redundancy over her. Once Brigid had accepted her fate, the stakes changed. February 8th was to be her last day, then March sometime, and then ... let's call the whole thing off.

Can you imagine what the working environment was for those Air New Zealand ground staff? Negative, grinding, uncertain, demotivating.

Air New Zealand has done a fantastic job of rebranding itself a couple of years back - but they really threaten to flush all that hard work down the pooper if they treat their staff this way. There is no intrinsic or positive motivation for a ground services worker to treat a passenger well. Just the hope that someday, maybe, there will be a nice big redundancy payout to make it all worthwhile. It is deeply dysfunctional.

Air New Zealand, learn a few lessons from F&P. Yes, they couldn't save the jobs. That's a macro issue. But at least they got the micro issues sorted out.