Over the weekend, I was very nearly forced to hand out an "Unhappy Voucher"  after a foray into Mobile madness.


Not quite in Norse saga territory, but after getting my daughter's mobile phone replaced three times (cracked keys, random turning-off, etc., etc..), I finally gave in, consigned the not so old phone to Silicon Heaven, bought a new model on some cute subsidised deal, put the SIM in the Box of Many Identities, and handed over the new toy.  

So imagine my surprise, when,  a week later, I was ambushed whilst staggering to the kettle for the first coffee of the day: "My phone's dead, the display has gone"..... I said "Hnnh"

So there I was, standing in the shop, bristling..........it had all kicked off after the Sales Slug had rejected  my reasonable replacement request, and I asked to see the Manager, and  Dismal turned up...

Me: ....phone broken.....screen blank......Slug......packaging......not necessary.....in the bin.  Please could you replace it for me?
Dismal: Sorry,  we can't replace the phone without all the original packaging
Me: ...gone in the bin ...
Dismal: Well we can't replace the phone without the original packaging
Me: Yes, you can
Dismal: No we can't
Me: Yes you can
..
Dismal: We could go on like this all day.  You're not listening to me
Me: Yes, I am, I just think you're wrong
Dismal: Are you calling me a liar?  - Great customer service, this, I thought
Me: No, just mistaken

(Dismal taps on keyboard)

Dismal: I've typed here - advised customer of policy, blah, blah, .no packaging, need to order a handset and battery - OK so they can replace the phone without the packaging, but he's going to make me wait a long  time

(Tapping, more tapping, grunt, much more tapping, visit to the stockroom, more tapping, another visit to the stockroom - comes back with new phone in box looking unhappy)

Dismal: We haven't any handsets and batteries in stock, so I will have to take a new phone out of its box and send back the old one...

Yesssss!

Humanity - 1, Forces of Customer Service Evil - Nil

In an idle moment in a place I cannot recall, but may have been the local takeaway, I read the Daily Express, an unusual event.  And I read an article entitled "CANCER RISK OF JUST TWO GLASSES OF WINE A DAY"  which demonstrated exactly why not the read the Daily Express if you wish to retain your sanity.

This is how the Express sensitively rendered the story...


The particular issue raised by this non-news story has been rolling around the back of my brain for a while, however the creative forces have been battling with perfectionist tendencies, fending off a full research project on the many different life risks, probabilities thereof, and the mechanisms of converting annual probabilities into life-time ones, and all manner of analytical delights.

So to break the log-jam (and get a life in between), I have crayoned  the issue, rather than the full Powerpoint...



You can find all sorts of stats around the web about the probability of different life risks if you look - here and here, for example, and tease out interesting, contrarian nuggets.  Such as,  drowning is much more likely than a fatal dog attack, yet  there are many strait-jacketing laws on dangerous dogs, but no UK inland rescue force to save people who fall in the water, which paradox seems to defy common-sense.

The issue in the case of the Australian report is that the risk that is being increased by 75% is diddly-squat to start with, and (Diddly-Squat * 1.75) = Sweet FA (in the Maths of Pointless Numbers).  It is undoubtedly bad if it actually happens, but the probability is not something you can, or should, let dictate your life.

I suppose headlines like "Medicos issue report about irrelevant statistical findings that don't matter" don't sell papers, so  there must be people who enjoy a little frisson of fear, panic and anxiety over their breakfast corn flakes, and prepared to read the Express to get it....

The human brain is constructed so that it is very good at seeing patterns (even where there are none), and so "coincidentally" after my previous spat on the same topic, I have been suffering my own version of Call Centre hell this week - just trying to book an engineer to come and mend our ailing tumble-drier.

Last year, just about this time, I fell for the pitch of Domestic & General who sold me a three-in-one policy for kitchen equipment breakdowns. And so it came to pass that the Tumble Drier started thrashing itself to pieces, just after the renewal letter came through.

All should have been smooth: "direct debit", "you need to do nothing", "renew automatically" were the comforting phrases in the letter. Tchah!

To cut a long story short I lost a few precious hours of my life listening to on-hold music and all that other stuff, and then when I got through it was "that fine, just call blah on this number, oh, thats strange the policy has been renewed but the equipment shows it is lapsed, let me put you on hold"...

So clearly the renewal process had gone all agly, creating an insurance curate's egg, in fact.

But the cherry on the cake was when I received a very cheerful automated email from D&G below...



Renew for a penny? Hmmm, aha, the light dawns, something has gone wrong with their arithmetic. Last years price was £119.88, nicely divisible by 36 (3 boxes x 12 months), this years price (up, of course) is £131.88 - oh dear, divide that by 36 and you get lots of 33333333333333333333333333s on the end. Add in a bit of truncation and you have a nice little problem building up. If they had charged me £131.76, maybe things would have turned out differently.

Nothing as serious as the Patriot missile failure, or crash of Mars Climate orbiter (Imperial/Metric System confusion), or others of that ilk , but my very own personalised, computerised, automated rounding error.

Aside: Spreading the cost of the £0.01 by direct debit. I laughed so much I nearly died....

I clicked on the button, of course, I had to, in for a penny in for a penny, so to speak; to see if I could make the whole problem go away, but a "technical error" on the web-site prevented me from completing the transaction!

So here is a little sign for the D&G development team to hang from their office wall to act as a reminder as they ply their daily toil...

We've all been through it and know how it goes...

[Dial 0870 ..........]

((((ringing))))

Welcome to British Tap.  Please listen carefully as the following options have changed,

Subtext: You've not called us before so you wouldn't know that and it makes no difference to you, and all we are doing is wasting your time whilst the call routing system finds somebody who might be able to answer your call

.  
Please note that calls may be recorded for training and quality purposes

Subtext: Because we really don't trust our agents or our customers for that matter and we need to be able to go back and find out what you said and then tell you that you were wrong and that you didn't say what you know you said.

Please select from the following options.
Please dial 1 to buy a new widget, please dial 2 if you would like us to  try and cross-sell you some insurance for the widget you bought from us last week, Please dial 3 to report a fault with your widget

[Dial 3]

Your call is being held in a queue and will be answered shortly.  
Our agents are busy answering other customers calls

Subtext: The people in front of you who are more important than you and were given a better phone number to call.  

Your call is being held in a queue and will be answered shortly.  
We value your call.and would love to answer it as soon as we can

Subtext: but we have not  staffed our call centre properly and things are getting a bit out of hand because we are operating on the cheap.

Your call is being held in a queue and (click)

(((((ringing)))))))

कॉल करने के लिए धन्यवाद British Tap . मेरा नाम Nigel है . मैं आज की मदद से आप कैसे हो सकता है ?

Eh? Oh? My boiler is leaking.

我很抱歉，您所谓的Whistle的热线电话，我会转移你向锅炉热线。请稍等

Sorry, what did you say?

(((((ringing)))))

[thoughts start to wander]

Yes, of course, that old cost-cutting gambit of the offshore call-centre.  

Indeed, whilst the overseas call centre pendulum has been swinging back  on-shore in the last year or so, now with cost crunch following credit crunch we can expect that trend to reverse somewhat.

Call centres and the customer experience that go with it are not the only things to get crunched when belts are tightened, discretionary project spending is one of the first things to be reduced,with projects either being deferred or cancelled.  Whilst this is a very hand tap to close, by turning off spending on projects willy-nilly, as snuffing boring, run-of-the-mill sustaining projects, genuinely innovative activities also usually get the chop.  

Conceptually, the unfettered application of cost-cutting measures looks something like this...



... with good stuff getting damaged at the same time as cutting off all the bad, spendthrift behaviours.

In particular, undiscriminating simplistic cost-cutting can be quite short-sighted and have unforeseen effects down the line.  Indeed,  this process of cost-cutting can accelerate an overall competitive cycle of pain...

...where declining profitability is met by efforts to increase efficiency through cutting costs, implementing new technology or whatever, which drives greater competition, which leads, to, oh dear, declining profitability, ad absurdum.  [By the by, this cycle was posited by two of my colleagues at Mitchell Madison Group, Mark Carrington and Philip Langguth  in their seminal work "The Banking Revolution: Salvation or Slaughter?"]

However, innovation is one of to primary decelerators of this cycle

So the conundrum is how to go about reducing costs without killing the good stuff, thus...

...to take out cost and building competitive advantage through innovation and better customer experience.

The solution generally lies in being more analytical about the cost-cutting process rather than simple "slash and burn", such as:

• Careful prioritisation of projects, for example, choosing to favour of genuine innovation efforts over the projects that just sustain the existing business;
• Taking a system-level view, e.g, over the customer life cycle, and using joined up thinking to ensure that simplistic, functional cost-cutting does not cut across and destroy customer experience, or in the IT software development arena, taking the whole productivity equation into account (rather than focusing solely on daily rates)
• Keeping a focus on profitability, rather than just the bottom-line, so that the overall financial health of the enterprise is improved

Meanwhile, back to the phone...

(((((ringing)))))
(click)

Благодарим ви за свикване на British Tap бойлер гореща линия. Казвам се Tony. Как мога да ви помогне да днес?

Oh, !$R£W"Q^%$£&^%$£&%$£"%^)*&%)(*^%$%^£!!!!
[Slam]

I have previously talked about the use of my observational superpowers to analyse the geo-cultural variations in traffic lights.  Indeed, with many years experience of driving I would like to regard myself as a sort of professional Gentleman Amateur in the general sphere of traffic management.

You know the sort of thing: new developments are appraised with a cynical eye and a firm grip on the steering wheel,  each new disaster greeted with a reproving glare, a sigh and shake of the head, the all too rare  improvements grudgingly admired, and gone in a flash as you pass down the road (at the prevailing speed limit, naturally).

And so, In my many miles of driving, with sometimes too much time on my hands, I am moved to muse on the solutions to many apparently intractable problems - one such topic  being that of the strange behaviour of  drivers when they reach a sign like this:



For many people, this is a command to form a single orderly queue about 5 miles out from the offending road works, and then fume/gesticulate/weave violently as a small number of other drivers (possibly acolytes of the Bavarian blue and white propeller) exercise a modicum of common sense to save a few minutes by driving up to the lanes towards the red blocks, and try to 'merge in turn', gasp, horror, don't frighten the horses!  

(There are yet other people that think this is a sign for a picnic area at the beach with cheap red plastic tables under  palm trees, but we'll leave tham for another day).

The 'zip merge' is a respected means in other countries to speed the traffic through the taper where the road narrows,  as you can see from the diagram from New Zealand...



..yet it was allegedly considered sufficiently un-British to be excluded from the Highway Code until it finally made it in 2007. 

Of course,  pondering on how best to solve this problem of irrational bahaviour, I came up with what seemed like a useful solution to level the playing field at the Taper's End.  I won't bore you with the details because I discovered the much more bizarre and entertaining fact when researching this topic:  there are web-sites out there where such matters are discussed amongst consenting adults.

You'll find them if you look at places like Pistonheads, DigitalSpy, UK Roads Portal (Society of All British Road Enthusiasts) , Pathetic Motorways - I do have to admit a sneaking affection for this latter site, as it does nicely demonstrate some of the more farcical antics of road planners.

Side bar...

What did the users of these sites do before the Internet?  Hang around the Transport section at WH Smiths or the local Public Library?  Publish grubby Roneo'd  newsletters and  round robins? Hold earnest discussion groups on a Thursday night in the "snug" at the local pub?  Flock with cameras to major road openings?  Wow, what a life!

So having  having discovered that my great idea was not especially original, I have now moved on to a new problem to solve:  the near extinction of  the Chicken Tikka sandwich on the roads of Britain. Thanks to Smffy.com, I found a picture, but at Ginsters, nary a one!  



The truth must be told - why has Britain fallen out of love with the Chicken Tikka sandwich?