Posts by: marc

How to loose your customers

  • Monday, 9 July, 2007
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Last year, Barclays offered a fairly compelling home insurance proposition. They beat your current deal by £50. A friend took advantage of this offer. A year later they sent the renewal documents through. Being a reasonably busy and disorganised guy, he never got round to renewing the insurance until six weeks after it had expired. He rang the call centre explaining that he wanted to renew; yes, he had been without insurance for the past six weeks, but wanted to take advantage of the premium they had quoted. But Barclays refused to honour the renewal quotation. They told him that as the policy was not continuous he would be treated as a new customer. The policy he was now being quoted was significantly more than on the renewal letter. He asked to speak to a manager and was again told the renewal quote was no longer available.

So he went to Money Supermarket and got a competitive deal from Halifax. Indeed it was much more competitive; five times cheaper than the Barclays call centre was offering.

So despite all the cost of acquisition, Barclays were quite happy to loose an otherwise loyal customer who was prepared to pay their original quotation. They then gave him good reason to shop around and have now lost him for good.

If there is a moral in this story, it is when developing new products, propositions or supporting technology, play out all potential scenarios. Customers are not always rational beings, they don’t always behave in the way you assume they will. Don’t just design for the “happy path”, but challenge your thinking with “what if” scenarios for what happens in the real world outside your idealised customer model.

Buy my bus to learn about community!

  • Thursday, 5 July, 2007
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When VW beetles, kombi vans, or any Volkswagen air-cooled motor pass each other, their owner’s wave. There’s an unofficial community around the product. How cool is that to have people passionate about product?

Do your customers wave each other? Do your products inspire a bond, knowingness amongst their owners, a community?

Maybe you’d like to experience that VW passion. Look no further than the baddest bus in town; my head-turning 15 window is for sale on ebay!

VW 15 window Split Screen camper for sale

Banking hasn’t moved on

  • Monday, 2 July, 2007
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My Great grandfather worked in a bank. He probably witnessed the introduction of the adding machine. Even then his work life would have revolved around the quill and ink; double entry book keeping, maintaining the accounts in journals and ledgers. In those days they were real journals and ledgers. And in balancing the books he would be reconciling data from one paper record to another.

Almost 100 years later and I recently found myself working for a bank… And I’m talking to people whose work lives, like my Great Grandfather’s, revolve around journals and ledgers. Only now their adding machines and the books have been replaced by systems.

Yet 100 years later their jobs remain similar to my Great Grandfathers. They are still reconciling data from one paper record to another. But it is no longer the journals themselves they are reconciling; now they are reconciling printouts of excel spreadsheets.

If IT was supposed to automate banking processes, take away “human error” and do away with reconciliation differences, IT professionals have failed to deliver on the promise. Indeed they’ve made things worse. The books may balance in one system, but add a few more systems, across the globe then things go a bit 1910. Manual reconciliation is still someone’s day job. It’s a sad fact that banking hasn’t really moved on in all that time.

It’s how you ask it…

  • Thursday, 28 June, 2007
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Prioritising requirements

You’re running a workshop and the group have come up with a bunch of new propositions. You want them to vote on which ones to take forward to the next stage. Or maybe you’ve identified a bunch of functionality and features and you want the group to prioritise what they’d like to see built first. What question you ask the group next is critical to the answer you will get.

You need to frame the question appropriately and make it clear to the group the criteria by which they are making their vote…

Do they need to be thinking about “do-ability”, the ease to implement, or do they need to be focussed upon the innovation and the idea itself. Should they be considering the cost to implement, time to market, return on investment, or should they be thinking about the art of the possible; the “blue sky”; the destination, regardless of the journey to get there.

Which line of thinking they should use will depend upon where you are in the process. Get them thinking about practicalities of implementation too early and you are likely to dilute the vision. Too late in the process and you will have candidate propositions or features that by their complexity or uncertainty will never the light of day.

So two tips. Before you ask the group to vote, or to prioritise, clarify the objectives and the critiera by which they are to decide. Maybe ask them to assume a ‘persona’ and vote in the way they’d expect the persona to vote, for example a customer will have different priorities to a developer.  Whose vote is it anyway?
And after they have made their vote make sure you manage the group’s expectations. Don’t let them leave the room thinking what they’ve decided upon is final and binding. It rarely is.

Forty five grand to line your trolleys up?

  • Wednesday, 27 June, 2007
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Trolleys lined up at Hong Kong MTR station

They’ve thought about the customer at Hong Kong airport. At every MTR station on the express route to the aiport, the trolleys have been lined up so that they are in front of the passengers getting off the train. No hunting for a free trolley – they are waiting for you! Nice!

But stop to think about that. Someone is employed to line up the trolleys. Given the hours the station is open (18 hours) it is going to be more than one person every day, more likely two; three to cover shifts across the whole week. Trains arrive every 15 minutes, so there will be other tasks for this role to do, but if they are offering a consistent customer experience then the focus will be this role.

So let’s work a UK equivalent, we need to employ three additional employees at, say, £8 per hour. Once Employers National Insurance is factored in (and not including sick pay or any benefits) that’s about £15k for each individual, or an optimistic £45,000 pa for the customer experience of having the trolleys lined up.

Justify that to the beancounters…

Code I understand

  • Tuesday, 19 June, 2007
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ThoughtWorker’s blogs are aggregated on Thoughtblogs. At a high level, they can be divided into two categories:

1. The written word, sometimes with photos and illustrations included
2. The (techie) written word, with a few intelligible sentences followed by blocks and blocks of code.

I enjoy the former, but I’ll confess the latter is usually gibberish to me. So what joy it is to read a blog that describes code, that is eminently understandable. Behaviour Driven Design that Dan talks about not only makes sense, it is also understandable to someone like me who is not a code polyglot. My last blog was critical about the Business finding themselves talking the same language as IT… how refreshing it is to see code talking the language of the Business.

What is your business?

  • Monday, 18 June, 2007
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Should “the business” care about IT? Should an investment bank trader know anything about XML, or a marketeer know anything about SQL? Probably not. Even less so should they be talking to their IT colleagues of their requirements in these terms. The business should speak to IT in a language of value driven requirements rather than implementation detail. Yet in many organisations (where IT has historically had a track record of failure), the business has taken a greater interest in IT delivery. They start talking the language of the techie. When this starts to happen business operations no longer see the clarity of their business. They see systems. In an investment bank setting: the trade is booked in Zeus. Settlements are handled by Minotaur, payments by Socrates. Corporate actions are handled in Hades. Depending upon the geographic region, client management might be handled by Tomsys, Dicksys or Harrysys. You ask a business person what do they do and they talk in terms of systems. Getting down to the underlying requirements of what they actually want to do is hard. Innovation and creative thinking are hard because we always return to what the limitations of the current systems are. Why there is a requirement for a Reconciliation System rather than asking why there needs to be any reconciliation in the first place.

So here’s a suggestion. Act dumb. Forget everything you know about the way you do things and go back to first principles. How would things be if we were starting from scratch. How would you describe your business intent (not the what you do now, rather what would you do) if you had to explain it to a novice who was starting a competitive business to put your business out of business. I doubt the word system would come into the description.

Missing planes

  • Friday, 15 June, 2007
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Reminder to get to the airport on the the right date. flight is post-midnight

After a month living out of a suitcase, circumnavigating the globe I’m homeward bound. I’m flying with Oasis… going to be interesting how the words “budget” and “longhaul” reconcile with each other. So far the experience is promising, a nice touch with their e-ticket (the date which I have subsequently changed). The plane flies at 00:50. BA fly back from Hong Kong a little earlier; on their e-ticket they don’t make it clear that the flight is a post-midnight one. Last time I did this trip I arrived at the airport on the Sunday night beleiving my flight was late on Sunday. Only it was a few minutes after midnight… on the Monday morning. I’d missed my flight by 24 hours. An easy, and expensive mistake to make. Oasis have gone out of their way to help me not make this mistake.

The little things really do count

  • Thursday, 14 June, 2007
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Ever since I saw Joe Walnes demonstrate it, every project that I find myself on which has a search requirement, it is never long before I am trying to convince the team that a “find as you type” search mechanism is the way to go. Usually everyone is in agreement, but occaisionally stakeholders try and de-scope it saying it is low priority “gold plating”.

Now look at the way that google finance and yahoo finance handle their stock ticker search. Over time, tell me which one you would prefer to use? Tell me that the Google search is just “gold plating”.
It gets worse for Yahoo; they treat tickers and stock names seperately, requiring different searches. As The Stawart states “the fact that Yahoo has its ticker search and its name search in separate boxes, after all this time, seems downright negligent.“

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