Category: Technology

Social Media, Help Desks, and Keeping Customers

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There are times I really doubt that businesses care about my concerns or praises. I am of the mindset that they are there to provide a service for a cost and as long as I receive that service, they have done their job. Sure, there are times that receiving a service is delayed or the result is not the one desired, but for the most part, things work out in the end. If I am not satisfied with a service provider, I will move to another one. A few recent events have me convinced that companies that focus on service quality along with final result quality deserve to be the winners and should be what all companies strive for.

One of our vehicles needed an oil change and I took it to our usual place. A few minutes after I walked in one of the attendants saw my vehicle, approached me, and very apologetically explained that the type of oil needed for the car was out of stock due to heavy demand over the weekend. He could have left it at that and I probably would have come back another day. Instead, he said, “we have another location, it’s a few miles away, but I can call them and make sure they have the oil in stock if you need it done today”. A phone call later and I was on my way to the other location. It took the attendant a total of five minutes to make my day a little easier. Some people may not want to drive further, but I needed the oil change before going out of town, so it was a welcome extra bit of service.

In an opposite example, a recent experience with Continental Airlines had to be resolved by going through outside channels, rather than having an issue resolved by the agents who created it. I had made a number of bookings for our Christmas trip and since I was not able to find availability to Miami to start it, I decided to focus my energy on refining another booking I had made From Austin to Boston to Munich. I had found better availability through Seattle and onward to Frankfurt and called in to make the change. The agent was helpful but said that there was no availability from Seattle to Frankfurt, even though I could see it. I asked to be transferred to the electronic support desk to see what the issue was.

The agent I was connected to was very helpful and quickly had a Lufthansa representative on the phone, trying to sort out the problem. Eventually, I was told that the Lufthansa representative was going to do some work on the ticket and that the Continental agent would add my new segments into my reservation to hold them while leaving my original segments intact. The helpful Continental agent also took my phone number, telling me she would give me a call on Monday and if I didn’t hear from her, to call back as my record had notations added explaining the issue.

Monday rolled around and I had not heard anything, so that afternoon I called Continental. The agent saw the notations and called Lufthansa again. This time, she assured me that they were working it out and after I convinced her that I did not want to fly business class to Berlin-Tegel and take the train to Dresden, she started to confirm my existing reservation. A few minutes later and my old flights had been removed and replaced with my desired flights, minus the segment that Lufthansa was working on. Again, she assured me that that flight would pop in whenever Lufthansa fixed it and that I was good to go.

Fast forward to Tuesday evening. Nothing had posted from Lufthansa and when I called back to Continental and asked for a supervisor, I was put on hold, then told they were contacting Lufthansa, and eventually hung up on. I called again later and received the same result. The result of all of this was me having a ticket from Austin to Seattle, then from Frankfurt to Dresden and that was it. Panicked, I contacted a corporate representative I know and while driving to meet up with Family on Wednesday I received a call from a Continental agent that my ticket had been fixed.

Why did it have to happen this way? Why was I required to go to a corporate contact, who I know has more important things going on? Why did the agents fail to shoot straight with me and end up leaving me with what amounted to a worthless ticket?

Will I stop flying Continental because of this one incident? No, but the entire incident was unnecessary and could have been avoided, saving me time and Continental resource hours. It came down to agents not wanting to put in the work required to fix the ticket and instead, passing me off to other agents, hoping someone else would figure it out.

I’ll leave you with one more positive example. While in Chicago I have been jumping around to different hotels on each stay. One week, I stayed at the Hyatt Regency. The room was nice and quiet, the only downside was that for some reason, the internet was not working. I tweeted about it and within an hour I had a reply from the Hyatt’s Twitter account. I was at work but when I returned to my room there was a phone message from a hotel manager, asking about my issue and when a good time would be for them to check it out. Needless to say, I will be staying at the Hyatt more often.

Is all of this to say that I want businesses constantly following up with each Twitter complaint? I am not even sure that’s feasible. There is only so much a person with a Twitter account can do. Writing in 140 characters is not the most fun, so getting on the phone with the customer or sending an e-mail is definitely a way of escalating an issue. No, what I want is service industries to be more service oriented. Even if delivering bad news, I want businesses to think about how they deliver such news and what they can do to turn a negative into a positive.

Some of these things are training issues, others are tied to the types of personalities your business hires. If you are just trying to put a body in a chair then you may just be doing it wrong. I do not need or require “bow to me” service, I simply desire respect, honesty with candor, and a clearly defined method of escalating issues. If your business nails those things, even without social media, it will be worlds ahead of the competition.

SitePoint Podcast at BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2010

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Yep, you are reading that right, this year all four hosts of the SitePoint Podcast will be together in the same room for the first time. Patrick O’Keefe, Brad Williams, Kevin Yank, and myself are all headed to BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada where we’ll hang out with listeners (and non-listeners) and will also record and live broadcast a few shows. This is actually the first time we’ll meet in person since Kevin lives, works, and records the show from Melbourne, Australia.

There are also some other exciting things being planned for the conference which I can’t go into just yet. But be sure and check here and the SitePoint Podcast page for more details. If you are going to be at BlogWorld Expo this year, be sure and stop by, say hello, and stay for a chat.

RIM’s Capitulation to the Saudis

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I have never been a BlackBerry user and if I have my way, I will never be one. The recent pandering to the Saudi government over data monitoring is just one more arrow in my quiver of reasons not to support Research in Motion by buying their products.

Now, I am not naive, I know the U.S. government has policies in place to monitor phone and internet traffic, but I do not see them bullying companies to turn over the data. Instead, they’re sly and probably employ a large number of hackers to help them monitor the airwaves. What bothers me about Saudi Arabia is their need to push the issue of monitoring under the guise of “safety” rather than what they really want, which is to know what their citizens are doing when they are not being watched in public. Sharia is the law of the land and as such, personal freedom takes a back seat to governmental moral “clarity” and cleansing. In plain terms, this ability to monitor BlackBerry traffic is going to be used not just to watch for terrorist activity but to enforce Sharia

Kill Off Comments?

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After my recent post on boycotting BP I received a deluge of comments. Some were well thought out and others were typical troll style postings. The comments got me thinking about turning the feature off though, and oddly enough, there was a big discussion about comments starting at the same time.

It seems that Gruber’s thinking is along the lines of what I had in mind; If you are going to respond to something that someone writes, you should be able to do it in long form instead of short quips after a post. How many times do people go back to a comment they wrote on a blog to see if there has been a reply? Does commenting really generate discussion or allow trolls to interject themselves into worthwhile postings on the internet?

What say you? I am going to leave comments open for this post to see what people think, but in the future, they will probably be turned off.

Boycott BP, Or Not – A Lesson in Distribution

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The BP oil disaster has been on everyone’s mind lately and for good reason. We won’t know the full affect on the region for months or maybe years and the spill is another haphazard mistake from BP, the last one being the Texas City refinery explosion. I know BP will clean up the mess, it’s their responsibility (though the federal government by law has a responsibility as well), what bothers me is the chatter on the internet and television about boycotting British Petroleum.

I saw these two things this morning and decided that something, no matter how little audience I get, needed to be written. There seems to be a large misunderstanding of how the industry operates and how people are able to pump gasoline into their cars each and every day. I aim to clear that up, if only by a little bit.

First, it needs to be known that oil is traded and sold at a very fast pace all day long. Because of this, refineries share crude oil, or feedstock. This type of sharing allows the refineries to be constantly supplied and making end products. Some refineries only make more feedstocks, usually for chemical plants. Others produce gasoline and diesel fuel and chemicals. The gasoline that is produced is moved to terminals that are located all over the country in strategic places. These terminals are privately owned and are essentially holding facilities for gasoline. There is no segregation of brand at these facilities, just stockpiles of fuel.

The local gas stations then send their trucks to the terminal to buy a load of fuel for sale at their station. En-route to the gas station the truck driver may mix an additive to the fuel depending on what brand it is being sold under (Chevron, Shell, etc.) and then pump the fuel into the underground tanks at the station. What you end up with is the exact same gasoline at every station, minus the additives. There is no discernible way to know where your gasoline came from. Even though a gas station has a BP logo, Shell may have been the one to refine the oil.

The same essentially goes for other oil based products.

What is the point in all of this? Well, the idea that one can boycott BP and make it go under is based on the false premise that one can distinguish BP gasoline from any other. In all of this, people are looking for someone to blame, to make pay and they’ve understandably gone after BP. However, at the same time, these same people could actually be making a difference by volunteering to help clean birds or scoop up crude. But, I guess it’s easier to attempt to boycott something that is near impossible to boycott rather than actually doing something.

The Movement Outward

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It’s 6pm, you are just getting home from work. You immediately freshen up and head to a nearby restaurant. You arrive at the restaurant, take out your cell phone and “check in” to Foursquare or Gowalla. You are seated, you order your dinner, take out your phone and tweet something you heard or saw go by. You finish your dinner, tweet how amazing it was, pay the bill, and then tweet again about what bar or establishment you are going to next for after dinner entertainment.

This seems to be the evening of a lot of people, as evidenced by browsing Twitter and the location based services I noted. I’ll be the first to admit it has been one of my habits. But, after a great deal of thinking about it, I wonder what these services really add to anything we do in our day to day lives, particularly the location based services.

What’s the Matter With Us?

Twitter has its place, it is a communication tool. Different people use it in different ways that make sense to them. Foursquare and Gowalla do not share the same kind of necessity as Twitter, just a niche novelty that, honestly, is kind of cool. Do we need such tools? My guess is that we don’t; They are just a new form of entertainment. Maybe it is just me, but I feel as though I am pulled in a bunch of directions by these different things. Add on top of them Google Reader for keeping up with news and other blogs, e-mail, Facebook, and whatever else you can think of, and it seems to become more work than it is worth.

The few times I have been incommunicado, the more obvious it has become that I need these tools less and less. Sure, their novelty is nice, but at what cost? What else could I be devoting my time to rather than letting people on Foursquare (some whom I don’t even know) see where I am at?

Is there a bigger trend here? Have we created the beginning of a time when verbal communication is no longer completely necessary? A lot of people think that children who are homeschooled are socially inept, to which I disagree and point out that more kids text today than talk on the phone. Not only do they text, but they have created a subset, shorthand language to do so. Maybe they are not inept but they have certainly begun a move away from “normal” communication, making further moves even easier.

Sure, there are other time wasters out there, there always have been. The difference now is that the time eating opportunities are constantly with us, no matter where we go. For me, this seems to speed daily life up, like fast forwarding an old VCR Cassette. We’re having the information thrown in front of us so fast that we do not have the time to really consume it. In a way, this pushes us apart. We are listening to people, but not really hearing them because we are distracted.

Can We Fix This?

We already have started to try. There are a number of people who have abandoned Twitter, Gowalla, Foursquare, MySpace, and Facebook out of a need to slow down and get back to normal. I am not suggesting the tools are causing the problems, they are simply making it easier for us to go through the motions of less communication and less interaction.

For me, fixing this means moving away from the tools as my entertainment and instead using them when necessary and filtering them often. A mass delete of the applications is not going to help you and it certainly is not the answer. Understanding what kind of time you spend on the services and how it affects your day to day activities is the way to start. From there, it’s up to you on whether it’s too much and how to correct it.

This definitely is not a call to abandon ship, it is me looking at what I have noticed over the past couple of years and asking others to do the same. What are your thoughts? Is this a bad path we are following or am I completely crazy and paranoid?

Why To Avoid Fry’s Opened Box Sale Products

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We all enjoy finding bargains or deals when shopping, especially on more expensive electronics gear. What I experienced last night at Fry’s may change your mind what’s really a bargain and what will cause more headache than money savings.

I bought a router from Fry’s about a month ago and finally had some time to play with it this past weekend. The router in question is a Netgear WNR3500L, a gigabit router with a USB port for an external harddrive. I specifically bought this router because it had the ability to network a USB drive.

After playing with the router, I found that it was not able to actually mount the drive and make it viewable on our home network. I troubleshot it and was still not able to get it to work. The internet worked great on it but the different harddrives I plugged-in just would not show up. I decided to take it back last night, so I packed it up and drove to Fry’s.

The girl who processed my return seemed nice at the beginning of our conversation, but I soon realized that it was too good to be true. She took everything out of the box to make sure it was all there, then compared serial numbers, that’s fine with me. Then it took a turn for the weird. I explained that the networking features worked fine on it but it was unable to mount a harddrive. She proceeded to pick up the router and look at each port on the back. What she was looking for, I’ll never know. Maybe she thought it was an NES and I had tried to blow in the back of it like a game cartridge.

Apparently my explanation for why I was returning it was acceptable and she printed a sticker, an open box/restocked sticker with a new price, $95.99, and stuck it on the box. This confused me, so I inquired as to whether or not Fry’s would flash the operating system of the router to reset it and then test it. The employee looked up at me and with a straight face said, “They will plug it in and make sure it lights up”. Wow. I replied, “But the USB port either doesn’t work or something is wrong with the firmware”. She continued doing her work and did not reply. My receipt was handed to me and I watched as she took the router, halfway in its box into a restocking room, where she dropped the router, then stuffed it back in the box.

The moral of the story is, do not buy restocked items at Fry’s unless there is a well documented return policy for the item. I should also mention that I purchased the router for $99, so the restocking “savings” is really only $3.01. Is it worth $3 to possibly get a non-functioning, dropped, piece of electronics?