Navigating the new world of work
Okay so I’ve been slacking. But I’ve had a busy May and I attempt to recount some of the things I’ve been doing very soon. But I had to post about this today because it’s so relevant. I came across the first instance of the implementation of the new Cookie Law today.
Just came across these on Fortune Cookie‘s website to categorise contact information at their different offices:
Literally the cutest thing ever. Whoever came up with that is genius.
This post is a little late in the day since the hype is already over, but I feel like I had to make some sort of comment on it since it is very much at the heart of customer experience. And I hadn’t time to write anything until today.
So Starbucks have decided to try and call you by name and write it on a cup so they can call it out when your skinny mocha frappuccino is done. I say try because they can’t possibly remember all of them.
I remember the first time this happened to me. I was at a Cafe called Gusto, on Coogee Beach in Sydney, Australia. All I wanted was a Green Tea if I remember correctly, and the barista confidently says to me ‘Name…?’. I was half inclined to ask her to repeat herself since I couldn’t understand what on earth she would need that for, until I glanced behind her at the blackboard covered in a Sarah and a Charlotte. So I gave her my name and waited for her to put it next to Sarah and a Green Tea afterwards.
As it happened my housemate ended up waitressing there and she said it made customers happy when they memorised their names and orders so they could make them before they’d even paid for them. Which by all accounts has to be good service. But it’s a very personal service, used be independent coffee shop baristas to make their customers happy. There are many perils with this sort of behaviour – if I were a barista I’m not sure I’d like the pressure. Imagine trying to spell ‘Bartholomew’ without causing offense, or detect the humorous undertones of ‘Gail Force’ and ‘Amanda HugandKiss’. And then of course there’s the problem with all the accents and the dialects. It’s an articulatory minefield. There are lots of comments from coffee shoppers.
“Don’t know why everyone is so bothered by this… it’s standard practice across the pond as well as all over europe. who says you have to give them your real name anyway? besides, it’s fairly unlikely they’ll remember it next time…”
But isn’t that, indeed, the whole point? At least it was in Oz, they were so good at remembering order after order because everyone that turned up was a regular that it actually worked. And gave you a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside.
“What is the big deal?” says someone else. “There’s plenty of other things to moan about.” Yes certainly, but someone else outlines what bothers me the most:
“If a waitress asks my name & chats because she wants to thats lovely. If she does it according to her corporate script I’d rather she didn’t bother.”
You know full well that the contents of their nicely rehearsed message was relayed to them on a script on Monday morning’s meeting, and they don’t give a flying coffee bean what you think of it. They’re doing it ‘cos if the supervisor notices they’re not then they might have to clean the toilets that evening. And that’s not the sort of employee pressure I want to contribute to.
Besides all this, I’m well aware that it works in other countries quite well and many people appreciate the familiarity of having someone remember your name and your beverage of choice. However, I can’t help thinking that the American giant that Starbucks is, has rather underestimated the British somewhat. We are a reserved breed, and we like our privacy and can’t really make the connection between giving our name away for an Espresso. As someone outwardly expressed
“Someone stuck behind a counter doesn’t need to know your name to serve you. They are not your friends, unless of course you wish to make friends with them.”
Quite right, indeed. No need to get all ‘chummy’ as it were. What are they going to do when there are queues out the door, as there usually are at 9am in central London? As many others have commented, they would prefer Starbucks to get their drink order right first and not take 20 minutes about it, before trying their luck with names.
If they are going to persist with this behaviour I suppose we might as well all have some fun with it. What about saying your name was Robocop. Or Lord Voldemort.
Or:
“I started to go by the name Fonzy. At least when they called it out i could go ayyyyyy. Never got tired of doing it.”
Or you could always try:
“My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius; father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife; and I will have my skinny latte with an extra shot, in this life or the next!”
(All comments shamelessly stolen from some comment box or other)
I always forget. It’s been a life saver so many times.
While creating a slide in PowerPoint a few months ago I came across something a little bit awesome. I apologise if you’ve seen this before, but I showed it to a few people at work and they weren’t aware of it so, it’s always good to share. I was arranging pictures so that they layered on top of one another, and needed to change the arrangement.
Right click > Reorder Overlapping Objects
And this is what you get, full screen 3D object manipulation:
This is called ‘dynamic ordering’ and is Microsoft’s doing. It’s a really good way of matching the interaction with the user’s model of how to move objects by basic dragging and I have to say it’s the most pleasing thing I’ve experienced in Powerpoint since I learnt how to animate text and images and implement transitions at the age of about 11 or 12. Stroke of genius, I wish there were more.
Apologies for the blurred graphics in advance…! Between all those tweets about Justin Beiber and One Direction (Who? …Exactly.) there is a powerful force at work, and it’s one that can help you find out what people think of your brand. Are you going to use this power for good? Or for evil?
Collecting public sentiment has been around for a long time in the form of surveys and forums, but has only recently began to take up any traction in the realm of social media. Although companies such as BrandWatch are already doing it for a fee, there is a feeling that some brands are going to have to do a lot of catching up before they really understand their customer base. There is not standard etiquette for how brands should behave on this platform, and it’s possible that this could depend on the customers and market segment.
In particular, I love interesting trends. Or Twends. But restauranteurs, make sure you don’t show up on this one:
This lovely lady echoes my sentiments exactly:
Of course, it’s not all negativity. You can certainly use your branding powers for good and reach out to consumers that are after something that you have. That would be pretty good customer service.
Especially if you’re prepared to take on advice from your customers, and acknowledge that they’ve been heard. Although this restaurant is no global brand, with only a few restaurants, they’re already on Twitter and engaging with their customers. They reply really quickly and in a friendly tone that not only makes you feel comfortable talking to them, but also reinforces your positive relationship with the restaurant. There is no question if I will be going back.
Recently I’ve noticed a trend with some of my accounts. When they’re trying to tell me something they’re increasingly using more emotive language, in an effort to get me to feel something and therefore complete a call to action. Here is an example from Dropbox:
Of course I’ve seen it been done before, here’s a familiar image from Twitter, with a cute robot type thing that’s lost his hand. Which is for some reason a lot bigger than the other one.
I’ve also recently come across this one from yfrog. Why is he incased in ice? I have no idea.
This one genuinely made me smile, with no picture required.
Moo is a sticker printing company and I sent an order for company stickers a few months ago, and this is the response I got. It’s written from first person perspective which makes it sound like it’s a more personal email, even though I’m well aware that it’s an automatic confirmation email after confirming the purchase.
Anthropomorphic technology is an interesting concept. With the addition of the ‘talking’ computer Siri on the iPhone 4S, is Apple paving the way for the introduction of the feeling of normality when talking to your phone? We know from history that people can be easily fooled with examples such as Eliza and even automated telemarketing on the home phone can still confuse some people…Some others also prefer to talk to someone when searching for something online, such as those avatars on Ikea’s website that act a bit liked a glorified search engine and are completely automated, they just have a friendly face slapped on them. A lot of people are saying now that technology needs to be more ‘personal’ more ‘soft’ and some would even say more human. And there are exhibitions such as the current one at the Science Museum, the proving that Artificial Intelligence is becoming ever more human-like, or at least attempting to allow robots to respond to humans in a more natural way.
But where do you draw the line? Is further blurring of the line between computer and animal a welcome direction for technology to take? Or do we want to keep what’s human… human?
I’ve been going to my hairdressers for a number of years. I say that, but generally I only get round to going to them perhaps twice, three times a year. Nevertheless the amount of times I’ve been to my current hairdresser probably goes into double figures. Recently, they’ve been sending confirmation texts, reminding you of when your next appointment is.
I’m not sure how people respond to these confirmations. Whether they like them, or find them them annoying? I received one yesterday, and couldn’t for the life of me work out whether I was supposed to reply or not. Although I’d been there before, the woman on the other end couldn’t find my name. So she booked me in, as she couldn’t tell whether I’d had any colour (dye) before because she couldn’t see my record, I assume that’s why the text asks me about colour testing. But what, exactly, am I supposed to be replying to?
I take it I’m not needed to confirm that I need the appointment… So this is just the colour patch test. She didn’t mention any of this on the phone, and I already told her that I’ve been there numerous times for colour so why I would need a colour patch test is anyone’s guess. But what if you’d never had colour and didn’t know what it was? Not exactly the most helpful text in the world. I suppose you could always call them up and ask but they don’t always pick up. So I’m not going to reply.
My old doctors surgery used to send these out to confirm appointments and then again to remind people about them the day before. I think this was generally seen to be quite helpful and it also reminded patients to cancel if they cant attend, leaving the space open for other people. Do people find these helpful? Or do they just result in confusing people and ironically encourage more contact to make information clear? I’m not sure, but I do know that my current doctors surgery does not do this and I have a sneaking suspicion it’s because the demographic of the patients there are likely to be a lot older and someone has assumed that people of a certain age don’t carry around mobile phones. Poppycock.
After hearing so much about contactless card payments while working in London, I decided to find out what my own bank was doing about it, and whether I could get a card myself. Contactless payment cards have NFC (Near Field Communication) technology, similar to that of an oyster card, allowing payments to be made by just ‘touching in’ at payment terminals. If you live in London, you might have seen some.
After not finding anything on my bank’s website (I later found out there is actually information on there, but it’s not somewhere I would have gone to find it), I called them up. The guy on the other end didn’t know what I was talking about, and put me on hold for 20 minutes while he went to find out. Apparently he’d sorted it all and I’d get a card within the next 3 – 5 days. So when that didn’t happen, I waited an extra 2 weeks and then called them up again. After talking to another adviser who didn’t understand and put me on hold for 20 minutes while he found out, he told me I’d have to go into a branch and ‘opt in’ to the scheme because I don’t live in London. I asked him if there were any notes written on my account from a previous adviser and he said there were but he didn’t know why they’d said they’d sent me one.
So off I went to the branch near my work in London. The person I spoke to on the other side of the desk was convinced that if I just renewed my card I would get the new contactless technology. I tried to explain to her that I don’t live in London and therefore this wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t believe me, but after fiddling with her computer for a while decided to agree with me. She gets a senior member of staff to come over to the computer and do some other things. Then it was all sorted and I could expect a new card within the next week.
When the renewed card came with no contactless technology and my address was wrong(!) I decided it really wasn’t good enough. Back to the branch I went and this time asked to speak to a manager. I explained the story and he took me to his office where he did some more punching of keys on the computer to sort out my problem. He did manage to ‘opt me in’ to the technology and explained that the last lady had opted me out by accident, but couldn’t explain why my address was wrong and spent a good 20 minutes fixing that.
While I appreciate his help, I was surprised that whenever he had an issue he’d click on a question on the screen and then get spoon fed instructions of what to do and what to tell me why he was doing it. Long story short, I used to work in a bank call centre, and it wasn’t a nice work flow where you just enter people’s responses and the computer tells you what to say. You get access to their account so you can see what they see, and that’s all. You have to actually know everything else and go from there. So I ask him if he can see the notes from the previous telephone calls to prove my frustration, and he tells me that the call centres and the branch use different systems and it’s not possible to see notes made on the phone! When the card finally came, it was 6 weeks from my first initial phone call.
Customers view the company as a holistic brand, and have no interest in whether your system works for one node in the network but not in another. This is just unnecessary and unfriendly cognitive load. Additionally, it’s clear that not only do staff not get appropriate training on new technologies that their company is supposed to be advocating, but they don’t use their own systems correctly. Once working in a banking call centre myself, I’m not going leave the fault with them but instead campaign for companies to implement consistency through various touch points. As call centre agents are often a customer’s first port of call, this is the fastest way that you can impress your customers, and also expose flaws in your customer experience – and lose the faith they have in you.
After talking to some other people who use the banking system to process their shop payments, it’s become clear that contactless payment technology may mean that banks will actually lose money through transactions – they might take less a cut of all customer purchases. This means that it might actually benefit them if this technology is slow to adopt, or doesn’t at all. If this is the mindset and they’re deliberately trying to put people off, they’ve made a poor decision. Instead they should take a look at financial services that are investing in the technology and do more research, like Barclays and AMEX. Maybe I’ll switch to them.
Read more about what NFC can do for brands.
All of us have within us the tools required to reach our potential.
Sometimes we need to focus harder on asking the right questions than finding the right answers – even finding new perspectives on what we already know can completely change our actions and behaviour.
This blog is an amalgamation of techniques and reviews of literature designed to help people think about how they think. Much of it is coaching related and it is mainly career oriented, but many could be applied to other pursuits. Knowing ourselves can take a lifetime so there’s no better time to start than now.
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