eBay - totally amusing video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYokLWfqbaU&mode=related&search=

You gotta try this one, its hilarious about eBay set to music.

Steak or Sizzle?

I loved the sign, held up at the Belgian Grand Prix: "Want to borrow a tenner, Ron?".

An offer of help to McLaren fined $100m last week for using (or not) information from a disgruntled designer at rivals Ferrrari. That's what happens I suppose when you're offered a Fiat as a company car instead of a 360!

The weekend news was full of people taking their own tenners out of the confidence shaken Northern Rock. Or Northern Crock as they are now colloquially known. These tenners add up.

For once I had time this weekend to read the papers rather than skim them. Both these stories, and the unfortunate missing Maddie McCann, got me thinking about the truth vs the PR - the steak vs the sizzle as one of my Aussie colleagues calls it.

By the weekend, it seems that far from being sweet and innocent as first claimed, the Mclaren team had 5 trillion emails and texts flying back and forth between test driver De La Rosa and the Fiat driving engineer with answers to various useful questions.

By the weekend, a Portuguese senior policeman, who illegally leaks daily by the sounds of it, is under investigation for covering up a confession under torture in some other kidnap case.

By the weekend, the root cause of Northern Rock's crash in confidence was starting to be debated. Was it Northern Rock's business model of borrowing from banks, rather than savers, to lend to borrowers? How many others face the same risk eg Alliance and Leicester? The business model didn't sound very risky to them, the FSA or the Bank of England. After all that's what the banking system does.

Or was it the big banks who parcelled up the US sub prime loans, who say they don't know their exposure (or at least they're not going to quantify it in front of the newspapers), who have sufficiently little confidence in each other to lend to each other, who just might benefit in a fire sale of some of these upstarts.

Or was it the Government for not letting Lloyds buy Northern Rock just before the crisis, for not getting the BofE to "kick ass" and make bankers lend to each other to keep the wholesale banking system running?

I read the headlines of "no need to panic" whilst in the business pages the end of Norther Rock is only a matter of time, with collapsing confidence in the stock market.

The final blow to confidence, if needed, was a completely lack lustre performance by our Darling chancellor on Radio 4 this morning..... he seemed more interested in staying on message that the UK economy has been wonderfully managed. And of course 100% reasurance that there's no risk, and no, the insurance scheme wasn't going to take up that cast iron risk. Surely its as safe as money in the bank?? How short he must feel the public's memory is of government reassurances about Rail and Equitable Life.

So in these stories, which is steak and which sizzle?

I was left with the overwhelming feeling that I couldn't tell anymore from reading the papers, nor did it matter. I wasn't going to get the truth in the headlines given the barrage of PR from one side vs another. In very few pages was there an analysis of the whole problem, the root causes, the possible outcomes. I didnt feel I was getting the story behind the story. Whatever happened to independent journalists researching and writing their own stories rather than repeating salicious gossip, top and tailing PR copy, making sure they include a bold statement from government without evidence just so they don't get hassle later (sadly, the BBC's the worst at that!)

Maybe its time that a new channel be started - heh maybe its there on the internet - TrueGoogle.com or some such. The stories behind the stories, from people who have no axe to grind, who quote sources rather than government leaks. Save me looking please - my weekends are only so long - what are your favourite sites for this kind of analysis? Meanwhile I'll start reading the Economist again despite swearing I wouldn't because they spammed my letter box so hard.

So back to Ron Dennis' tenner......

Pavarotti arrives at the pearly gates.

St Peter opens them and says, "Oh, it's you, Luciano, come on in. Squeeze through."

Pavarotti says, "Hold on, I've got an envelope for you. It's from the Pope."

St Peter opens it up and reads it. "HERE'S THAT TENOR I OWE YOU."

Who's killing the high street?

I walked into a high street store electrical store today and search for a while before deciding it was badly laid out and I should cut my losses and brave the world of 'The Shop Assistant'. I approached a guy who was busy recounting his exploits of a night out to his mate and got his attention.

"I'm looking for a lead..." I said before being cut off.

"Leads are over there mate" he said pointing across the store.

"No", I said. Seeing he was pointing to audio lead section. "I want a TV..."

"They're here mate. TV leads. Yes, that's the one you want", gently ushering me to the leads in another part of the shop. "Here you go" he said, picking up a white ariel lead. And before I had time to say anything he had thrust the packet into my hand and gone - just like the shopkeeper in "Mr Ben", but in many ways, not at all. (Sorry if you're not a product of 1970's UK children's TV)

So after a moment's deliberation I put the lead back on the hook and walked out. It wasn't the lead I wanted and clearly, he had many other more important things to sell somewhere else. Flatscreen TVs, DVDs...

I went on line when I got to the office and bought the lead I wanted.

We accuse call centres (especially offshore) of not listening properly to customer issues and delivering below standard service as a result, but this is common across all of the service industry. This guy thought he'd done just what was asked for and done it really fast. Nobody quality checking the interaction as they do in most call centres. Nobody stopped me to ask if "there was anything else they could help me with today?" or "did I find everything I was looking for?". This is simple stuff!!

There are some good stores out on the high street but it seems to me that the high street is not keeping up with service standards that are being set by the best call centres or website. I find myself voting with fingers (on the keypad or keyboard) and my feet (away from the high street) more and more these days.

There are lots of articles out there about the web killing the high street. Here are a couple:

The guardian comment

UK Busines forums

Do you think that the high street is its own worst enemy?

wikis in business

The process for collecting and managing knowledge from customer facing staff is developing fast. Managing knowledge upwards and downwards is giving way to sharing knowledge across frontline staff without management intervention. This improves resolution and handling times, if the best agent’s knowledge is available to all agents and presented in a way that agents can use quickly. Wikis have a major role to play to support front line agents, by replacing static ‘knowledge bases’ with dynamic ‘knowledge sharing’. At their core, Wikis enable collaboration across a “community”, so members can share or build content together. Operating rapidly “many to many”, these social networks create stronger, more relevant content than standalone knowledge bases, or than so-called experts can do.

“A Wiki is a tool to empower agents with a new voice, one that enables them to collaborate with their peers near and far. One company we’ve been working with in the US”, say’s Bill Price, co-founder with Peter Massey of the LimeBridge global alliance, “reports a 15-20% reduction in call handle time, cutting up to 4 minutes from its longer technical support calls.”

Wikis are taking major companies by storm and helping to drive internal efficiencies among employees who can now share knowledge on products and processes across the organization. Leading companies, BT, HP, Motorola, Nokia, Yahoo!, Whole Foods and Walt Disney, to name a few, are finding that non-linear collaboration brings benefits to the enterprise, its agents, and its customers, along with increased buzz and energy for resolving customer issues.

"The challenge for management is to let go of control and trust the agent community to police its own knowledge. Look at what can be created on the web this way without control, e.g., www.wikipedia.com. The real focus for management is now moving on in advanced companies: to be able to detect and listen to the underlying causes of dissatisfaction and remove them, not just resolve the problem. The trouble is there is now so much conflicting or confusing noise coming from customer feedback, analytics and research data that a single view of what needs to be done is hard to develop, let alone focus and work with. This is the real battleground if you want competitive advantage now. Get the basics right first, then get the company to align across the business functions to continually address the top frustrations and opportunities that customers know you have. The management processes we are now implementing are drawn from the 21st century companies who are great at this.”

To read more, visit www.budd.uk.com and download our latest whitepaper: From Knowledge Base to Knowledge Sharing: Wikis in the Contact Center, from our library
(in the ‘Contact Centre and Operations Management’ section)

posted by Marion Howard-Healy 13 Sept 07

Next networking and drinks at Budd 18th Sept

Just a quickie to say that there are drinks on the 18th Sept at 5 in the office. We're going to use some customer (well, client in this case) journey mapping to take a light hearted look at what its like to be consulted ! Followed by drinks - this is an event for people who work at Budd or who want to in future

And by the way we're looking for a brilliant PA and more consultants to join the team !

A brace of birthdays….

Heh its David Naylor birthday in Wednesday(www.budd.uk.com/founderdn.html) . He is still a teenager apparently as it’s his umpteenth birthday today. Which kinda made me notice that it's Budd’s 6th birthday this week too!!

My US colleague Bill Price (http://www.drivasolutions.com/) also mailed about the 6th birthday as he started in the US at the same time having just left Amazon’s customer service with a world beating record. In March you’ll be able to read the book “The Best Service Is No Service” that he’s co-written with our Aussie colleague David Jaffe (http://www.limebridge.com.au/ ). He records that we have now worked for 72 clients in the US with top ones being well known names like Expedia, Dell, McDonald’s, Microsoft, CheckFree and Hyatt.

So how far have we got in the UK? 45 clients and counting – but heh does size matter when Brits last longer? Whoops, better be careful of Anglo-America relations given Bush n Basra.

It’s nice to be able to say thanks to prestigious companies such as Norwich Union, RIAS, HSBC, M&S, RBS, Axa, Nationwide and Pru in retail financial services; 3, Orange, Vodafone and Vertu in telecoms; AOL, Microsoft and Ingenico in technical support, not to mention many others.

So enough of the ads – what about the hindsight – what did we say 6 years ago, more importantly what are we saying about 6 years out?

Well 6 years ago we said the same stuff as we’re saying now. CRM is dead, fancy stuff doesn’t work. Brilliant basics is what customers want: The best service is no service, Fast+Simple experiences.

What’s new today is we’ve developed some sexy ways of getting those brilliant basics in place.

What’s it to be in 6 years time? 2013 – now that sounds spooky. What will be the big thing?

Well of the things being talked about today that I’d bet on, here are my top 6. What’s yours?
1) Most companies will still be thinking about doing good things for their customers rather than doing them
2) India will start offshoring calls to England
3) Self service will become 'community service' and become effective
4) The embedded web will be in most applications we use to work and play with; the idea of looking at the web will die out
5) Your granddad will be dictating software applications, it’ll be that simple; and my software will still crash daily
6) Buying will drive the way we do business, not selling ( ok may be I’m too optimistic – make that 12 years)

Send me your 6 year out bets…..
Happy birthday David
Peter