travel

Thank you. Gutted.

Thank you. Gutted.

I went for a short run last night, the last before the big race. After ten minutes I pulled up in agony. My ankle, which I’d previously strained but thought I could run through, (it’s had physio and was strapped up), got the better of me.  This morning when I woke up it was inflamed, swollen, still painful and tender.

I’m stubbon. The thought of not running the London Marathon fills me with loathing. I’ve trained so hard for it. To be taken away from me, the day before is hard to take. Even more so given how much people have sponsored me.  For the sponsorship I’m truly grateful. I never expected such generosity.  Thank-you. I feel that I’ve let you down.

To go out tomorrow would be folly; I could probably slowly jog/ walk around but that’s not the point. What started as a mission to complete it has now become an obsession. I’ve a time to beat. So here’s the plan. I’ve withdrawn from the London Marathon this year; my entry has been deferred to next year.  I’m going to match the donations that have been given to date when I run it next year. And I’m entering the Amsterdam marathon in October. I can’t give up this running bug, waiting a year is too long.  Thank you for your support. This morning I’m gutted. But it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Picture credit 

Do you modify your approach according to context?

I look in the rearview mirror.  Blue lights flashing. Maybe he’s been called out to respond to a call and will overtake me.  No, he’s flashing me.  Instinctly I’ve slowed down, I look at the speedo, it is in KM/H and I’ve not been paying attention to the roadsigns, but it is clear that I’ve been going too fast.  So I pull over.

The question in my mind is what to do next.  I’m in Australia, driving an awesome road, the Great Ocean Road that just asks for a car to be driven (OK, it’s hardly an Grand Tourer, it is a compact Hyundai Getz).  The brain is racing, pumped by adrenaline and fear.   In the UK I would get out of the car, go to the back of it and talk to the officer.  You’ll be asked to do this anyway “Would you kindly step out of the car sir”…  The last time I hired a car overseas was in the US in Atlanta.  Driving through the deep south I got pulled over and I jumped out of the car. Bad move.  “You’re makin’ me kinda nervous’ the cop drawled with his thick southern accent.  He spread me over the ‘hood’ to search me and ended up taking me down to the station, something that was straight out of the Dukes of Hazard, and handed me a huge fine to pay.

So I’m slowing down and thinking do I do the UK thing and jump out, or do the US thing and stay in the car?

I decide to stay in the car.  The right move.

So that’s an interesting story, but what does it have to do with the themes that I usually blog about?  Adapting your approach based upon context.

A while ago I met with the CIO of a company whose core business is in complex instrumentation hardware.  They were looking to diversify their offering, take some of their products out of the hands of specialist practitioners and into the broader marketplace.  Core to the success of these new offerings was usability; their devices required complex set-up and calibration.  Their question; how do you redesign an expert system for novices?

Seeking an answer they hired a customer experience consultancy to gather insights, understand the new segment needs and create wireframes for the new application interface.  But the consultancy couldn’t fit with the way the company worked.  They would run a workshop with the client for a couple of hours then go ‘back to base’ to do the thinking and designing and return to present their designs, well thought out and well polished.  Yet every time they would come back they had got something wrong.  That approach may have worked for a website, but for this complex product they were getting it wrong.

We were asked for our advice.  I started by saying that I thought they should stick with the incumbant,  whilst we would love the business, both parties had invested a lot and learned a lot in the past few months and it would be a folly for us to come in and have to start from scratch.  The answer was to get both sides into the same room, a war room, and thrash out the designs.  Forget about their formal methodology and way of doing things.  If you they were both in the same building they didn’t need that formal staccato present  – review – sign-off process.  They could continually innovate.  That is certainly the way we would do it, yet the CIO thought the incumbent would be resistant to changing their ways.
The theme that joins these two stories?  It’s about reading the situation, knowing the culture and context you are in and adapting your approach and behaviour accordingly.   And that applies as much to agile practitioners as Big Methodology people.  know your audience, understand the context then pick your battles; think big, start small scale fast, remember that change won’t occur overnight.

Does this train go to Bangor?

Over the loudspeaker comes a garbled message “…this train divides at Chester.  Customers for Bangor must travel in the front four coaches of the train”.
There was a group of women behind me talking loudly, one of them picked out part of the message and was worried.  The train guard (sorry, Customer Revenue Protection Officer) walked by.
One of the women got his attention, “Excuse me, we’re going to Bangor?” she said.
“Oh” said the guard.  “You need to get out at Milton Keynes and walk to the front of the train”.
“What? We need to change trains?” the woman replied.
“No, it is the same train, just the front part of it.”
“Is it on the same platform?” Asked the woman.
“Yes, just walk up a little” replied the guard.
“We don’t need to cross over to another platform then?”
“No, it is the same platform, the same train”
“So why can’t we stay on this train then”
“Because this part of the train divides at Chester?”
“But we’re not going to Chester, we’re going to Bangor”
The guard was getting frustrated, “when the train stops at the next station, you just need to get out and walk up the platform, in fact to the next carraige and get on the train there”
“So why can’t we walk through the train to the next carraige?”
“Because it is a different train”
“but this train is going to Bangor isn’t it?  We are on the right train aren’t we?”

And so on until a fellow passenger jumped in “when we get to Milton Keynes, I’ll show you where to go” and at Milton Keynes he led them all off the train to walk past the train divide on the platform and I’ll assume they made it to Bangor in one peice.

The point of this narative is that not everybody “gets it”.  Just because you think something is straight forward or obvious doesn’t mean that your customers will.  You are not your customer, be wary of making assumptions on how people will use your Great New Product.

Musical call tones and my mental model

Musical call tones when you are waiting to be connected to the person you are calling are great from a marketing and technical point of view, but they are inconsistent with (many) user expectations.  Does this mean they are wrong? Is there a cultural or demographic dimension to this?

I have a mental model for the way that phones work.  I dial a number and get a mechanical ‘brrrr-brrrr’ tone.  In some countries it is a simple sine wave tone, but it is a recognisable feedback mechanism that lets me know that the call is waiting for the person (or machine) at the other end of the line to answer it.  If I get a single tone it means the line is engaged or can’t be connected.

I’ve another mental model about music being played to me on the phone.  It means that I’ve been connected to the other person and have been put on hold.  If I have initiated the call, and it is not a free number, it is costing me to listen to the music.

In China, Hong Kong and Singapore musical call tones are becoming increasingly popular.  Instead of the mechanical brrr-brrr you get a song that the person you are calling has selected.  The first time I got this I was calling a colleague in China and I immediately put the phone down.  Was I being charged for this? I associated the music with being on hold, and I didn’t want that on an international call.  The musical call tone broke my long established mental model of how a phone works. That caused cognitive dissonance and I didn’t like that.

To my knowledge, none of the UK telco providers offer this service.  Could this be because consumers would find it hard to accept it?  If so, why is it so popular in China?  Ubiquitous phone ownership is relatively new in China, could it be true that they don’t have such an ingrained mental model of what a waiting call tone should sound like?  Or is it (more likely) an age thing.  I’m just too too conditioned with my ‘brrr-brrr’ and youth the world over will cast it away in favour of whatever is top of the download chart. (Eeugch, I’m sounding old!).

If software was an airline

All airlines are the same.  They fly the same planes to the same airports for (roughly) the same prices. What differentiates them?  Attention to detail.  It’s not just the functional detail – it’s the experiential detail that really makes the difference.

It’s the same with software.  If the application you are building was an airline, which airline would it be?  All to often developers focus on the plane, building something to fulfil the utility of getting people from A to B.  Yet the customer doesn’t care about whether it’s an Airbus A330 or a Boeing 777, what they care about, and what they remember is the experience they have.

(This can be a useful exercise at the outset of a new project, ask stakeholders to imagine their finished applciation was an airline, what brand would it be?  This helps anchor expectations; are you building a full service Singapore Airlines or a no-frills EasyJet?)

Behaviour, intentions, interactions and corner cases

According to an article on eMarketer the method customers book travel depends upon their needs. Nothing revolutionary there; what is interesting is that fewer travelers are booking their trips online overall.

“This is not due to personal financial concerns—online travel bookers are an affluent demographic,” Mr. Grau [senior analyst at eMarketer] said. “Rather, it is caused by frustrations related to the planning and booking capabilities of OTAs (on-line travel agents). This, in turn, is spurring a renewed appreciation for the expertise and personalized services offered by traditional travel agents.”

Online travel bookers are an affluent demographic” and yet we continue to let them down with poor customer experiences and an inability to let them do what they want to do. As an e-marketeer, your sales numbers may be satisfactory, but how much more traction could you get if your customer interactions were more realistically modeled around their behaviours and their intentions. You may point to your personalization engine, but that is probably doing little more than offering up pages and offers based upon information the customer has told you, or prior pages they have visited. It is not going to be a challenge to “the expertise and personalized services offered by traditional [insert domain here] agents“.

Customer frustrations with the web are more often than not due to usability and restrictive Web 1.0 interaction paradigms. It need not be like this. Interactivity can be more human. Some sites such as Kayak.com are introducing web 2.0 interactivity to introduce more fuzzy searching to find what you want. Forms can be more like their real-world brethren. Rather than the “command and control” approach of imperative programming that drives a sequential, rule driven flow, the declarative approach to programming enables greater flexibility and puts the user in control.

So we can do something about the technology to provide a better customer experience, but that won’t be enough. The perfect customer experience will not fit in business rules your IT analysts have determined. In the real world, corner cases and ‘exceptions to the rule’ are abound. In the real world sales people, customer service reps (or their supervisors) have ‘management discretion’. They can listen to the customer, understand their story, recognise them as a loyal customer who made a mistake, and override the business rules to satisfy/ delight the customer in a way the cold logic of the business rules never considered. True personalization will focus upon the corner-case long-tail.

The next generation of eCommerce will be declarative, forgiving and understanding. Rather than being based upon a paradigm that is the result of the technical constraints of the channels early days, it will be something that more closely mirrors the real world. Getting there however will be difficult. As a first step Marketing departments need to address the shortcomings of their existing digital channel before their IT organisation embarks on new channels such as mobile and TV.

Let common sense prevail

Me: “Hello, I’d like to book a flight back to London on Thursday please”.

BA: “Certainly. BA 28. Midnight Thirty Five.”

And that was it. No friendly warning, so close to doing this again.

If I ask for a flight on Thursday, common sense suggests that the fact that the plane is scheduled to depart 35 minutes into Thursday, and I need to be at the airport at 10pm on Wednesday, then it really isn’t a Thursday flight. Not being explicit and clear with this is rude business.

I am not a target in a campaign

Marketing may be a touchy-feely occupation, but the language that marketeers use is far from it. Campaigns, strategy, tactics, targets… all out of the military handbook. That might be OK within the organisation, but it shouldn’t be exposed to your customers. An email sent by BA inviting customers to register to a special deal results in a page informing the customer; “Thank You, [name] Your pre-registration for this campaign has been successful”. Now what is that all about? They’ve spent so much time creating the campaign, how it fits into their overall strategy that they’ve overlooked the details around what really matters – fullfillment, wording and how the customer feels about BA at the end of the process. I feel a little cooler than when I clicked on the promotion.

BA pre-registration page

Chinese immigration – how did I do today?

Today is one of those days. A meeting in Zhuhai at 11am. Take the 08:40 ferry from Hong Kong, no problem. I’d researched the ferry times, got to the ferry port with loads of time to spare and went up to the ticket counter. “Ticket to Zhuhai please”. Suddenly there was an earlier 8am ferry leaving in five minutes, if I run I could catch it. “You’re sure this goes to Zhu…” I started to ask, but the man behind the counter cut me off. “Yes it goes to zhunzen, now hurry!” but I didn’t hear him correctly, I was focussed on a boat leaving earlier than expected, and that would definitely get me to my meeting on time. Communication Breakdown. It was only as the ferry left Hong Kong and turned right rather than left I realised my mistake. I was on the boat to Shenzen.

But that is not the purpose of this post. Arriving in China, when going through passport control, under the glass window there is a little box with three buttons on it, inviting you to rate your experience – green for perfect, yellow for satisfactory and red for unsatisfactory. Capturing customer feedback at the time of the experience. Howe much more valuable is that than asking customers to complete a lengthy questionnaire some time later, after the event. I think that websites could learn from this. Rather than a pop-up inviting customers to complete a questionnaire of a number of pages (often this appears just as you start your experience at the site), why not get customers to “rate this page” or “rate your experience” as a simple thumbs up or down (as you might Digg comments). This will provide instant feedback, maybe not qualitative, but quick and simple quantative data.

And if I had the ability to rate today? Right now, as I sit in a dingy cafe waiting the two hours for the next ferry back to Hong Kong, with a rapidly flattening laptop battery, I’d have to press the thumbs down, unsatisfactory red light on my current experience.

Buy my bus to learn about community!

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

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