mutterings and rants

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http://lymingtonmarinersrfc.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/today-is-the-day/

After months of hard work and training the Lymington Mariners are all set for their first game. Kick off at 2pm at Woodside Park followed by drinks at the Chequers. Come down and show your support.

See you all there.

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Rajan Sodhi thanks for your comments. Some coverage in BIG Marketing for small business of a piece by Steph Welstead of Growing Business.

The most inexpensive yet impacting way for small businesses to compete with the big boys is to lead with remarkable customer service. I know you’ve heard this before, and I’m almost certain you’ve made a similar claim – “We have great service” or “Our service is why people buy from us” – and yet more often than not, the service isn’t that remarkable. In fact, it’s fairly ordinary. Many mistake providing friendly, attentive service as exceptional when it’s actually the simple expectation or norm. So, what does remarkable service look like?

In an article titled Service-Led Battle Plan by Growing Business, business operator and customer service evangelist, Dominic Monkhouse reveals his approach to taking on his former Internet company (and industry leader) with a commitment to delivering remarkable service. He outlines his philosophy that every instance of human interaction is a moment of truth for a business – something he learned during his early days at retail giant Marks & Spencer.

Read full article

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For the past two years, around Movember each year, health professionals across the UK have started to notice a spike in cases of what is commonly known as Moustache Envy.

Sufferers of Moustache Envy are often riddled with feelings of regret for not having grown a Mo, stuck with the smell of shaving cream under their nose because they didn’t make an effort for the cause, and a niggling sense of professional inadequacy because their Mo Bro colleagues seem to be getting the largest slice of cake on Fridays.

Socially it’s no better. Sufferers of Moustache Envy are forced to stand by while their Mo Bro mates are showered with attention on the streets and they endure long lonely nights while Mo Bro mates hang at cool parties and compare their new Mo styles.

None of these sufferers have Mo’s. All of them had the chance.

Avoid Moustache Envy this Movember http://uk.movember.com/register/

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Amazingly simple and interesting viral idea. At itlab we gave all new employees £5 and ask them to go forth and commit random acts of kindness, part of helping them see how to live the core values and learn to deliver on Service Obsession^TM.They then shared their daring dos; some bought chocolates and tried to give them away to very suspicious passersby, others donated to the homeless or bought multiple copies of the Big Issue, some acted solo whilst others teamed up and pooled their money – whatever, it didn’t matter it was the doing something that counted. So I was intrigued to read about a scheme to spread random acts of kindness even further. KIND sells healthy snacks through a host of stores in the USA including Starbucks and their rational is that happy people are healthier and kindness causes happiness so KINDED is a brand extension and fits with their core values. Well done to you! Oh and they also donate at least 5% of their profits to fostering global kindness.

In case you cant picture it this is the sort of behaviour they inspire; “someone held three sets of doors for me as i was rushing to the train”, “someone sent a tart to my table at le pain quotidien”, “a total stranger paid for my sandwich”, good on them.

WordPress Tags: random kindness,BEKIND,KINDED,KIND,Service Obsession

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Why oh why does Microsoft call touch screen phones Pocket PC and non-touch phones Smart Phones. They are the only ones to use these descriptions; I have downloaded the wrong version of software more than once.

Anyway, I have had time to notice other things that work better now I have been playing with the phone for a day or so now. Battery life is better and this may be because system resources are being used less than under 6.1. Used to have issues using the Bluetooth connecting in the car if I hadn’t remembered to disable the Wi-Fi – that all works now. Text messaging is improved with conversation mode, I can now use the native views and not rely on HTC TouchFLO. It used to drive me mad when I sent a txt and it didn’t manage to send right away that it just got stuck in drafts, this is fixed. On the screen shot (above) you can see the windows button – this is now on every screen and makes it much easier to navigate and lock the phone. Remaining battery charge is now a percentage rather than bars – this is more accurate and gives you a better understanding of remaining handset life. Rotate screen now allows you to run any application in landscape mode. The new lock screen is a huge improvement and handling incoming calls when locked is a breeze.

Much has been written about the windows mobile market place – blah blah blah. Perhaps this will turn out to be a place to visit to get access to the app you can’t live without, today is not yet that day.

Piece from gigaom on the launch of Windows Mobile 6.5 http://gigaom.com/2009/10/11/microsoft-mobiles-worst-week-ever/

Skyfire – sometimes you will want to view sites running flash elements and so than you need Skyfire as your optional browser.

WordPress Tags: HTC,Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5,improvement,Skyfire

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Nice to get hands on with the new version of Windows Mobile. It’s not a great leap forward more a nudge in the right direction. I prefer not to use the stylus and this is now possible (at last). Menu items that before needed a sharp thumb nail, at least, can now be selected with a blunt finger. Oh and not useful but love the rain drops running down the today screen when the local weather is crap (like today), followed by the regular swipe of a windscreen wiper blade – useless but fun.

What applications do I use every day?

Google mobile apps – including Google Maps and search. I use Google Maps ever day. Why call 118 118 when you can find local stuff easily and free. I also have Latitude turned on so when I am meeting people they know where I am, useful when meeting son after school.

MyMobiler – allow me to view the mobile on the PC screen and control the mobile with keyboard and mouse.

Nimbuzz – chat client that supports MSN, jabber, facebook and calls via Skype.

Opera mini 5 beta – best mobile browser available.

WordPress Tags: Windows Mobile 6.5,Google,Latitude,MyMobiler,Nimbuzz,Skype,Opera

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“…universal truths by which all customer service can be measured. This can’t be the case.”
Frankly – that’s just plain wrong. There ARE universal truths about customer service and if the ICS audit seeks them out then it will be a step forward.
For example, I can’t for the life of me see how great customer service can be delivered by staff who hate or even just aren’t enjoying their jobs. So, if the ICS seeks to measure staff engagement this is a great precursor to ensuring client delight. Note – delight! If the objective is to deliver customer satisfaction, you’re wasting your time – and believe me you will attain your goal of delivering a mediocre service if you are a local garage or a global bank.
Firstly, hats off to any firm for going through the audit process. It means they want to improve and are seeking to benchmark their performance – THIS IS A KEY STEP! Without a benchmark you have no idea where you are on the journey. As I am not a journalist, I am not genetically prone to see the world through a more than half empty glass. I take a less cynical view and as 95% of firms don’t do anything serious to improve customer service applause to those that do.
As a consumer it’s a shame more companies don’t try harder to delight, as every day I am subjected to mind-blowingly crap customer service experiences. Only yesterday I called the Orange call centre and in the end lost the will to live after 20 minutes on hold – a great example of denial of service. What did I want to do? I wanted to edit the account name. No reason to force me to do this with a person – I should have been able to do this via the account portal but you can’t because it can’t, nor can I email them my request because this isn’t an option. Result – spectacular Orange failure to understand its customers and the service they really want.
Here we are in 2009 and ten-years since it first re-wrote the rulebook, Amazon is still a guiding light on how to deliver online customer service. Others still can’t see the light or can’t find the will to follow.

WordPress Tags: Customer Service,customer engagement,client satisfaction,benchmark,performance,applause,consumer,Orange

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I love the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and defend it regularly against criticism.  Many of the critics comes from the customer survey industry, who it must be said have a vested interest, a regular single question sort of makes they long annual surveys and expensive analysis redundant. My defence is primarily on the grounds of action – a monthly or quarterly NPS score is easy to understand and galvanises action in the company to improve. My experience is that if used with rigour it can live up to the title Frederick Reichheld gave the article in the Harvard Business Review where he first highlighted his thinking – “The One Number You Need to Grow.” Using the NPS also allows for comparison across competitors and sectors, giving the score much more validity with staff and customers. I use to work at itlab and take some of the credit for starting them off on their NPS journey. When we began, the NPS was below zero and just as I left, the survey returned a score of 55. It is great to see their progress continues. Below is an extract from their quarterly newsletter. Well done people!

The magic number that keeps growing

As you know, we run a very tight ship when it comes to meeting standards and offering great service. That’s why we continue to use Net Promoter to measure our success.

The results from last quarter (53%) put us above software giants, banks and American Express! This time around we’ve managed to hit a truly world class 76%. This puts us right up there with global service leaders like Apple and Google, and leaves the average score across all sectors (37%) in the dust.

WordPress Tags: One Number,Net Promoter Score,Frederick Reichheld,Harvard Business Review,competitors,itlab

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PEER 1 and Rackspace offer UK customers global clouds – V3.co.uk

A range of new cloud services will be made available to UK-based IT departments as US providers Peer 1 and Rackspace expand their services overseas. The companies in question have datacentres located around the globe and said businesses would benefit from not having to use different hosting companies to cover different regions of the world. Peer 1 Network Enterprises, a US online IT business hosting provider, launched its CloudXcelerator programme, which will allow its UK partner ElasticHosts to offer customers cloud applications housed in the Peer 1 infrastructure. ElasticHosts provides flexible server capacity for scalable web hosting. “ElasticHosts” new capacity with Peer 1 will make the company the first cloud infrastructure provider to offer dual redundant availability zones in Europe,” the firm said.

WordPress Tags: Peer1,Rackspace,cloud,services,provider,CloudXcelerator,ElasticHosts,infrastructure

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• Demand Transparency (cloudave.com)
• 12 Companies Targeting Early Tech Adopters (readwriteweb.com)

Thank you Justin and Gareth! I dropped in on their first Monday session last night at Woodside Park, Lymington. The warm up just about did me in. I realised it’s not just my fitness that is now rubbish but I seem to have become uncoordinated as well, the regulars say it gets easier, which is something. My heart rate never went above 165 so it wasn’t a cardio workout but was a bashing to the whole body. I doubt it looked like it but I did enjoy it and it’s always better to suffer in a group. It was a mixed group of about 12 so come on boys and girls, see you there next week.

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• iPod nano could get a Nike+ heart rate monitor (crunchgear.com)
• Get the Most Out of Your Elliptical Workout (fitsugar.com)
• You Can Soon Track Your Heart Rate With Your iPhone [IPhone Apps] (gizmodo.com)

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Our politicians don’t need any more banana skins, but yesterday’s announcement by North Bristol NHS Trust of its £5 million data centre can only throw more fuel to the flames.

No doubt the project was initiated months ago and timing of the news could have been better; but sadly, I suspect in this case that IT expertise is a rarer skill than the ability to allocate a budget.

Building a data centre is a highly specialist and expensive undertaking and when it’s built it needs to be managed and kept running, whether it is full of racks or empty, waiting for servers and data to be stored in it. It costs a lot to keep the servers in a data centre cool, at great expense financially and environmentally. What’s more, as data accumulates, businesses outgrow data centres. has North Bristol built a data centre that it will outgrow immediately, or is there a lot of space in that £5 million data centre doing nothing for the next five years?

In today’s economy (green shoots, I know), existing data centre space is not hard to find and the argument for build or lease only has one sensible answer. Co-location, multi-tenancy and hosted data centre solutions offer far greater cost flexibility and thereby on-demand scalability than wholly-owned infrastructure ever can. Data centres take time to reach capacity and powering, security and cooling for under-utilised space is at best an environmental challenge, and at worst a sorry waste of public money.

This is exactly why the majority of enterprises large and small rent space in the thousands of data centres across the country. This route avoids capex and provides flexibility that owning your own data centre can’t possibly deliver. What’s more, a professional data centre organisation will be able to, through economies of scale, provide a much more cost-effective solution. Bristol’s decision to build its own Data Centre is as logical as it deciding to build its own Ambulance Manufacturing centre instead of leasing them from specialists.

Public sector technology is for the most part progressive, but ensuring the opportunity to evolve IT efficiency is not delivered alongside a significant opportunity cost is critical.

Check out the full story http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=446258

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I spoke at Internet World (#IWEXPO) in London on the 29th April on my passion for customer service excellence. I stole the title of my brief talk from the book by Bill Price (click here to read review and buy the book) about his experience at Amazon. At Rackspace and itlab I have seen the use of NPS drive huge improvements in customer experience over time. Superior customer experiences are only possible with engaged employees and I mentioned some easy to emulate tips on engagement. Some of the financial models that show the bottom line value of having happy staff delivering world calls customer service get a mention – including the real world impact of NPS on growth from existing customers. In 1 example I discuss the introduction of some self service tools that have a huge impact on service and show how it is possible for all firms to emulate Amazon in quadrupling revenue without adding support head count or in the case of Pipex Hosting deliver better service with fewer staff. Finally I used itlab as a case study to show how this firm was transformed in a 2 year period from loss making also ran into a financially stable great place to work delivering awesome customer support.

view the video of the presentation

download the slides

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Pictured here in sunny Soho, outside Quo Vadis, PEER 1’s Terry Connor decided to celebrate the rise in the share price of a San Antonio based hosting company he had a punt on by lighting a cigarette with a fresh new £20 note. Terry wishes it to be known that the strip club in the background was only coincidental.

Agency from down under with a sense of humour mocks London adland. Are they bitter – hard to tell.