How informative… Thanks very much National Rail, most useful.
Page 5 of 5
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.
Off to the Branch
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.
Don’t Make More Work For The Customer
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.
After wondering about the best time to start blogging, I thought perhaps the death of Steve Jobs might be a good starting point since I actually have something to say. I woke up yesterday morning to my iPhone and scrolled through Facebook to pick up the collective-sentiment of the day, or rather, the night before. Still half asleep I wondered if what I was reading was correct, and flicked on the news to see it confirmed. He had died.
It’s hard to put my finger on why someone I’ve never met has made me think so hard about life. I was never really in to celebrities, even when I was young I couldn’t tell you the members of Boyzone or N’Sync. I’ve never turned up anywhere to get a glimpse of someone famous, apart from accidentally being in Loch Fyne while Gok Wan came in to use the loo. I don’t read the glossy magazines and I only follow Stephen Fry on Twitter.
But today was different. Maybe it’s because I use so many Apple products. I’m a certified convert and I’d avoid Windows all my life if it were possible. Maybe it’s because I’ve just been reading about him while reading about Interaction Design, and how the iPod changed the world. Maybe it’s because my Dad is the same age as he was.
I’m not really inclined to like someone who goes round putting items in front of a user without asking them want they want. It seems counter-intuitive, and Apple aren’t known for their user research – something I think is of paramount importance when it comes to new technology. He was right though, almost every time it seems. Although I don’t see that many people using FaceTime (perhaps they don’t have that many people to FaceTime with?), I do see ‘just three clicks’ to get to any song implemented in a lot of mp3 players, and I’d never switch from my iPod.
I read through the BBC’s article on Jobs and scroll to the comments. Although most of them are nice there are a few people trolling as usual. ‘He was just a CEO, he had no impact on design’, ‘he was a genius for all the fools he fooled’. Perhaps he was, but like any indoctrination – I’m pretty happy to be brainwashed. There is a reason I’ve heard many people say they’ve switched to mac and won’t go back, but never the other way around…’The British are always jealous of successful people’ says one woman in retaliation to some of the negative comments. I think she might be right.
As tributes flood in, people changing their desktop wallpapers to Apple’s new minimalist homepage, leaving flowers and once bitten apples outside Apple stores and compiling celebratory infographics and montages all over the Internet; you are left wondering… When was the last time a co-founder of any company made this kind of impact on people? More people drink coke than own an iPhone but do you think people would bat an eye-lid if the CEO of Coca-cola died? Would they even know about it?
There’s no doubt about it. Jobs had the midas touch, when he was at Apple and when he wasn’t. I guess I’m wondering the same as everyone else. Will Apple ever be the same again? Should I get an iPhone 4S because it’s the last product he touched…? There won’t be another.
If you’re not convinced, you should watch this.
Bella Slade
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.