Category: User Innovation

For a while I had a working Blackberry, then my Blackberry got broken and it took some weeks to replace it. I was shocked at the impact.

I spend a lot of time working on two monitors. When I only work on my laptop I am shocked at the impact.

Why shock?

When I was given or invested in these technologies I would have put a relatively low value on them, in the case of the Blackberry I would have put a negative value. Now that I have them I am surprised at the impact when you take them away.

I’m not a crazed crackberry addict who can’t survive for 30 seconds without looking at it, I have my Attention Deficit Trait (ADT) and Disconnect Anxiety reasonably under control. I’m talking here about all of the things that I had integrated into my day-today working that I hadn’t even noticed until they were taken away.

When I am working on two monitors I naturally start and use applications on the different monitors without too much rational thought. When I am working on a single monitor the switching time between applications becomes so noticeable that it gnaws away at me.

I suspect that if you took my iPod away (also a relatively recent addition) I would also be annoyed at the impact.

Much of my career has been spent convincing enterprise customers of the value of some piece of technology. This discussion goes all the way back to arguments about 20MB hard disks. Over all this time it has been a recurring them that IT has had little understanding of the value of the technology that the end user is wanting, IT is normally focused on cost containment.

End users sit outside wanting value, and IT is just worried about the cost of the new value.

There are a lot of technologies, probably as many as at any time in the history of IT, that give end users value, but have a cost impact upon the IT organisation. the problem with many of these technologies is that the value is not clear cut although it is potentially massive. Within this context it is often difficult to get organisations to move forward.

• Tablets – another type of device for IT to manage, but what’s the real tangible value?
• RSS – another set of tools to manage and loads of data all over the place, but what’s the real tangible value?
• Web 2.0 – stuff that IT can’t even control, but what’s the real tangible value?
• iPhone – far to sexy for corporate IT, but what’s the real tangible value?

So, why don’t we ask the question the other way? Why don’t we see what the value is by giving it to someone, and then take it away. If you can take it away with little impact then the value wasn’t that high anyway. Take it away and get a big push back then you have found something of true value.

For some time I’ve wanted to create an internal free market in an organisation for IT capability and technology. This would work by giving people a set of credits and a choice of technology. They would then trade in the technology in a free market manner, buying and selling at the credit value they chose without reference to the physical cost. If the supply and demand (credits) were properly constrained so people had to make choices you would start to see the true value of the technology to the end user.

It would be interesting to see the value of an iPhone v the value of a Tablet PC, a second monitor v an RSS reader.

I’ve always been uncomfortable just giving people technology to evaluate without any clear link to value, but it’s often difficult to define what the value might be. Rather than just giving new technology to people to evaluate the internal market would allow the evaluation to be undertaken within the context of perceived value. Perceived value is probably a lot closer to real value than people think, especially in a knowledge worker type environment. The things that have little value are the things you should give back. The things of high value are the ones that you should invest in.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all of the little things that make life simpler in tiny little ways, and also all of the things that do the reverse.

A few weeks back my employer changed the default policy for attachment forwarding. In the past email was forwarded with attachments by default, now it’s forwarded with the attachment stripped out. It was a really simple change, I even read about it in the communication material. The business justification was quite simple – save on some storage. I’m sure we were using lots of storage that we didn’t need to use because of redundant attachments floating around the place.

A nice sound direct cost reduction opportunity, who could argue with that.

I’ve been using (and support) email systems since they weren’t capable of handling attachments. All of that time attachments have been forwarded by default. If someone sends me something and I know that someone else needs to see it – I forward it, all of it. It’s obvious.

And there in lies that challenge – a direct cost reduction opportunity v my expectation.

I have already lost count of the number of times I have had to resend something that I forgot to send “with attachment”. I know that the default has changed – but I can’t make the change in my working practice. The cost of these mistakes is huge, it’s not just my time resending the item, it’s the time of the people who receive the denuded email. They have the thankless task of trying to get back in contact with me so I can send them something that they can use.

The other day I watched Emily struggling with cut and paste. I showed her how to use ctrl+x, ctrl+c and ctrl+v. She can’t get over how much easier it is for her to use. I thought about the amount of time she was wasting and wondered about the people using the 1 million+ desktop devices that we look after as an organisation.

I’ve recently been involved with a customer who was suffering from performance problems. One particular senior person was suffering the worst. An engineer looked at the contents of the device and noticed running software to synchronise to just about every hand-held device that has ever been produced. This person only uses a BlackBerry and don’t synch it with their laptop, they synch over the air.

It’s been an issue in the industry for a very long time – how to make people efficient. We don’t seem to be any further on. I suspect that I could save an organisation millions, and make a lot of people very happy by giving them small amounts of efficiency coaching.

One of the ways that we normally measure efficiency is to measure something and then improve it. But even there we don’t seem to be in a good shape. I’d quite like to be able to measure who long it take an application to start across an organisation – but there are scant tools available. I’d quite like to be able to measure how long it takes a desktop device to start-up and become usable – again, scant help tools available. As we are moving beyond reliability being our biggest issue, perhaps we’ll start to focus our attention on performance, real end user performance.

We definitely need to start assessing changes on the basis of overall end user cost, as a minimum. This should be offset against the direct cost savings.

Over two weeks ago now, I was collected by a taxi at my house, we picked up a couple of colleagues along the way (The taxi driver was slightly late because he believed his satnav when it said he could drive down a dirt track to my house).

We eventually arrived at Manchester Airport.

We took our things along to the check-in desk and started to use the new automated check-in system. This change in procedure was new to me, and came as something of a surprise.

Check-in went quite smoothly until the machine decided that it didn’t like my passport, fortunately there were plenty of humans available to sort it out for me. Only after looking at the tickets afterwards did we realise that we had each been upgraded to Business Class for the main leg of our trip from London over to Seattle. In classically British fashion, no-one made a big deal of this, it was just something that happened.

It wasn’t until we were actually on the flight that we realised that we had the joy of Club World with beds. It was a wonderful surprise.

Customer Service Lesson #1 – Nice surprises are a good thing.

After a few days in Seattle and a trip down to San Francisco it was time to come home. It was a bit of a mad schedule and personally I was getting rather tired. We were already booked into Club World on the way home and I was really pleased that it was going to be a good opportunity to get my body clock back onto UK time.

I slept for nearly 6 hours on the way over from San Francisco, which is not bad going for a 9 hour flight.

Customer Service Lesson #2 – People really appreciate innovations when they add to the quality of their experience.

On arrival in London we had a couple of hours to wait before our flight to Manchester, being Club World travellers we had the use of the lounge.

Having reached the lounge I booked in for a shower and went to get a cup of coffee. I was only a couple of sips into my coffee when my shower slot was announced.

A shower proved to be just what I needed, it was wonderful to get clean for the day ahead, it also helped in convincing my body that it really was morning already.

Back from the shower I sat down with another coffee. Everything was well with the world. I was only a short flight from home and time with my nearest and dearest. But things were not going to stay that way for long.

Barely two sips into my coffee and another announcement changed everything. “Due to technical problem flight XX1234 from Manchester to London has been cancelled. Would all passengers please report to the ticket office for re-booking”. My first hope was that the receptionist at the Executive Lounge would simply sort it out for us – but I was wrong. We had to trundle off to the ticket office along with everyone else.

At the ticket office we stood and queued to see what our options were. The person at the front of the queue was clearly very upset and was not getting any resolution to the issues that they were facing. Things didn’t look good. People kept arriving at the back of the ticket office, but still only a single till was open and the person at the front of the queue wasn’t going anywhere.

The air was becoming thick with tension.

After several minutes of little progress it was time for a new announcement. Passengers with bags that had been checked in would need to go and retrieve them from international arrivals before you could re-book – that was us. But we couldn’t just go and get our bags because we needed someone to escort us. After even more minutes some more staff arrived to escort us to international arrivals. We were desperately putting together contingency plans for the seemingly inevitable disappointment.

All of us saw our hopes of getting a flight out of London on a Friday evening steadily transforming into a dim hope.

Customer Service Lesson #3 – Have a clear plan before a problem occurs, don’t make it up as you go along.

Customer Service Lesson #4 – Give people clear instructions, and keep to them.

So off we trundled to international arrivals for baggage collection, but we didn’t enter through any normal route, we entered through the staff security entrance.

It was chaos. A few hundred angry passengers, mixing with staff trying to get to work funnelled through a single security checkpoint with the most officious security staff that I have ever met. They were clearly put on the staff entrance because they were too rude to be allowed out the front with the real customers. The security staff were absolutely insistent that staff had priority, the paying passengers were treated like sheep, and dirty sheep at that.

At one point the security staff called a halt to it saying that there supervisors were not happy with it, an argument between the airport staff and the airline staff ensued right in front of us passengers. After a few minutes the British Airways representative came out and said that the only thing we could do was to go and book onto a flight without our bags and then to declare them as lost. The cries of “absolutely no way” could not have been stronger if they had suggested that leave our children behind.

Customer Service Lesson #5 – Even in the staff entrance I am still the customer and I expect to be treated as such.

Customer Service Lesson #6 – If multiple organisations are coming together to deliver a service I don’t want to see them working against each other. I want to see them working together for my benefit.

The security staff clearly understood that they had a problem and changed their minds, letting people through in groups of three to collect their bags. But only one member of each family. A mother travelling on her own with four children who was just behind me had to leave her children with a staff member to go and get her bags.

Customer Service Lesson #7 – Just because I am the person with a problem, does not mean that you can treat me as a problem person especially when you created the problem.

Talking to the airline representative she let slip her frustrations. She told us how she used to work in Nigeria before working in London – and how Nigeria was far more organised.

Customer Service Lesson #8 – If you’ve lost the support of your staff things are very bad indeed.

She also let on that bags used to be taken to the domestic lounge for collection but the number of cancellations was so high these days that the baggage handlers refused to do it anymore.

Customer Service Lesson #9 – If your service has a problem – fix the problem, don’t make the customers suffer for it.

Having retrieved our bags we were now out in the main arrivals lounge and had to go to the ticket desk there. Our hopes of achieving a rapid return home were diminishing fast as it was now more than two hours since we had started out on our little adventure. Everyone without bags had already rebooked and we were amongst those at the back of the queue. We were fortunate though, we managed to get a flight out in the early evening – with another airline.

With new tickets in hand we go to check-in at the new airline. That’s when the next snag landed. We are too early to check our bags in for the new flights. We can check-in, but we can’t get rid of our bags. We are all in need of another shower, one of our group has got a bad back which is worsening by the minute and we are all more fed up than we were expecting.

Customer
Service Lesson #10 – Have a plan that covers all of the problems and doesn’t leave people stranded.

We make our way into one of the local eateries and order a burger and chips.

The food arrives and has to be some of the worst food I have eaten in a very long time, absolutely no flavour. I know that there is nice food waiting for me in the lounge, but I can’t get to it for another two hours. We can’t even be bothered to complain.

Eventually time passes and we check-in, walk to the lounge, sit there and wait like scolded school boys for our flight to depart. We are beaten.

Customer Service Lesson #11 – If your customer feels defeated – you have lost.

Eventually our flight departs, almost on time. It had taken us 9 hours to get from San Francisco to London (5400 miles) and a further 9 hours to get from London to Manchester (185 miles).

Customer Service Lesson #12 – It doesn’t matter that you give out a free upgrade on the flight out, people only remember the last time they interacted with your organisation.

Customer Service Lesson #13 – When people are paying premium prices (and they were premium prices) they expect premium service.

Customer Service Lesson #14 – Even when it’s “the companies” money that people are spending they still expect good value for money.

Customer Service Lesson #15 – Everyone has a choice, it will be a long time before I choose to go through that experience again.

Customer Service Lesson #16 – It doesn’t matter that you serve someone well for 99% of the journey, it’s the last 1% that makes all the difference.

How many of these mistakes do we make in the IT Service industry? Most of them I think.