04.12.2019

PROVIDE AMAZING CUSTOMER CARE OR PERISH FOREVER

A lesson yet to be learned by (too) many…

In the past 6 months I have made 2 drastic changes in the company I manage.

I closed 2 accounts with companies we’d partnered with for years on different fronts (IT and financial) and switched to a competitor.

What was the driving factor?

COMMUNICATION. HUMANITY. SPEED OF RESPONSE.

Was it about money?

Sure that too, but it was NOT the real driving factor. These days pricing if often similar between competitors because it’s difficult to compete in a market where competitors pop up like mushrooms in a dump forest. Hello globalisation… nice to see you. 

When the barriers of distance disappear, inevitably the pool of choice becomes immense and often difficult to deal with. So what drives the decision on who to partner with?

For me it was the good old human side of things. When you’re constantly too busy to deal with life, what becomes of enormous value is real customer support. By support I mean the ability of a partner to stand by you when you have a problem, to understand you like a father and nurture you like a mother, because that’s what we all inadvertently seek as humans. So when for the 3rd time in 3 months I got a call from my team manager saying “can you please contact “X Company” because I’ve been waiting on a reply for 8 days and we just keep getting sent manuals to read” my blood boiled from within the darkest corners of my essence and the not-so-patient-and-tender side of me popped out like Strokkur (google the name and you’ll get what I mean).

I went medieval on the X Company and explained why we badly needed better support.

They promised but didn’t deliver.

That was 6 months ago. We’re now with a new company, we’ve spent a lot of staff time (which means money) to do this, but I no longer get frustrated calls from my team manager.

Same thing happened with a “payment processing” company recently. The costs of the old provider seemed too high so I contacted them for a contract revision and at the same time I contacted 2 competitors. The existing partner sent us a guy to speak to us who probably still had no pubic hair, had no clue on the history of our account or our needs; within 15 minutes he managed to say “I believe I need to get in touch with a senior manager to discuss your account”, only he should have known that from our email (or maybe his boss should have spent less time playing scrabble and more time reading important emails from key customers…).

After this pointless visit we got 2 standard emails from their support asking us to go and read infinite manuals on their website for their T&C and renewals options.

Meanwhile one of the two competing companies I had contacted (let’s call them Company Y) got in touch with us, put someone who understood our problem, gave use direct phone numbers and ability to remote connect with their team to understand our needs.

Two weeks later we were with Company Y. Even now, after 3 months from opening the account I know that if I don’t understand something or my manager needs a revision of anything we will get a reply within 48 hours and a phone call or online meeting within the week. I have never looked back since and I thank the pubic hairless kid for making me understand it was time for us to move on.

 

Lastly, I booked a long haul flight myself last week for a business trip and ended up using a large worldwide service provider. When it came to paying (the same money I would have paid buying directly from the flight company) I got asked if I wanted to pay an extra €45 for premium support. I didn’t because when you spend €1.500 on a flight you should get a fair support anyway right? I contacted them after the booking to add vegetarian meal option to my flights. There was no way of emailing them, so I was forced to chat online, which was crap and took an hour to get done. In the end I was told they’d deal with the request. It’s been 9 days and I have no news. So what?

Simple. They just lost one of their new customers… for LIFE.

And what I found hilarious was that after automatising everything on their website and making it impossible for me to contact anybody they sent another automated email with a short survey to ask me how they did because they “cared” about me!

Guess what, care is not shown with words but with facts. We’re in a fast era where you just want your stuff done, where you don’t want to accept new T&C’s every 2 weeks (yes Apple and Google.. how about we give it a rest for a while?), we’re tired of bad automation and people trying to steal money from you hidden in the form of the word “premium” (which normally means get the same you already did but it will look prettier so we can take twice the money from your c-card or get shafted with option 1 so you’re forced to upgrade to option 2… erm, no thanks!).

Today human support and qualitative care is essential. Period.

We want people to understand our culture (e.g. through communication style) and our needs. And it doesn’t matter if I am speaking with a Nicaraguan or Spanish support person, as long as we understand each other, as long as I am being looked after, and as long as he/she is not reading from a script!

Qualitative customer care is expensive, but, at least from what I can see in my field, it PAYS OFF in the long run.

You just need one person to have a really good customer support experience and they will stick with you. In exactly the same way, you give them a poor support service and the likelihood is that (as happened to me) they will leave you as a provider and speak negatively of you for the rest of their existence.

23.01.2018

BOOKS, WRITING AND THE AGEING SCHOOLING SYSTEM

Are books and writing destined to disappear?

This ironic question came to me as I was thinking about my own relationship to writing and reading.

I used to read and write more on paper. These days I rarely pick up a pen. During the last Christmas holidays (yes they are not just called holidays! If it’s Ramadan I’ll say happy Ramadan, so how about we drop the idiocy and call it what it is?) my fingers were angry at me after handwriting about 10 Xmas cards, probably because it really had been a while since the last time I used a pen for that long (and I do write pretty long Xmas cards! There’s normally no white left inside by the time I’m done).

So why do I write less?

Well A: I write everyday but either on my phone or on my laptop and B: I tend to focus more on videos. Yes I am a millennial. Since the birth of YouTube I am far more likely to go there if I need to see how to do something quickly rather than looking it up on black and white tainted tree skin. This I feel is also because I have far less free time than I used to. Applications like YouTube help me for a quick fix. If I have only 15 spare minutes I am unlikely to pick up a book.

And if it’s not the g’d olde Tube, the alternative is often – sadly but truthfully – Facebook or Instagram.

But how did I change?

At the start of my teens we weren’t that mobile phone addicted, it was just the beginning… I remember my dad owning his first mobile phone in the late 80’s because he was a doctor on call, it was one of those army style A-Team (another hint of my age there) phones attached to a battery that weighed more than a baby. If you show one of those to kids now they won’t even know what it is, and yet it’s not that long ago. Scary, right?

So does it mean that I have changed with the same pace of phone technology?

Has society changed me? Am I another slave of mass marketing? (Dah-dah-daaah… hold your breath in suspense).

Perhaps the answer is slightly different. Perhaps these giant corporations understood the value of multi sensory learning. It is now common knowledge that we learn more when more of our senses are fully engaged (hence why learning in school sat 8 hours on a chair can be hard.. but more on this later). It’s not that we hate books, it’s simply that books only involve our eyes while new forms of learning (including some on the net) involve a higher number of senses, so we are more likely to favour those. That’s why social media and videos are winning the game.

Think about it, how does a child learn to speak a language from birth? Do they learn grammar or do homework? Nope. They watch day and night their parents and people around them. They mimic sounds, gestures, tonalities, until they learn codes by heart. Those codes are the language we speak. Why do you often hear small children say “fank-yew” rather than “thank you”? Probably because that’s the closest sound they can reproduce from hearing their next of kins saying that phrase, together with their early ability to move their jaws (it is physically easier to pronounce “F” and “e” than a “th” or “u”).

I’ve found a lot of connections to this during my NLP studies, and I must say to me they make total sense: how did people learn carpentry in the past? By being apprentices and spending day and night with the master artisans. They learned using as many senses as possible because it was faster (and up to a certain recent era also because the vast majority of people were illiterate).

So am I implying that writing is useless and should be deleted from the planet? No, not at all, you’re reading what I’m writing so that should be enough of an answer I guess; however it is worrying to see how fast we have progressed and changed in the last 30 years only, let alone the last 100. The more we go towards using our senses, the faster any other means of learning that limit their use will fade away.

Here are a few ideas to get the picture:

Is it better to watch a comedian (live or on a video) or to read comedy?

Is it better to read instructions to build an Ikea wardrobe or to watch a video showing you how to do it? (Actually having been there I’d rather pay extra and have someone do it for me. If you don’t know what I’m talking about you’re either too young, too old or too rich to have gone through the blinding madness of that experience yourself.. or you work for Ikea!).

While you think about how to answer the above questions and somehow prove me wrong, I came to the conclusion that it’s difficult to compare the two approaches mentioned, because when I read I use my imagination whereas when I watch a video or live performance there is very little space for that imagination to do anything. Regardless of this, what are my habits?

These days I’ll be more likely to watch fifteen minutes of comedy on YouTube rather than going to search for a comedy book in the library. Why would the world of motion pictures have gotten so huge otherwise? People love emotions, people love to live experiences through others. A book will do this, but when you experience something that forces your senses and emotions to react, it’s simply more impactful (would reading about a theme park or being in a theme park be more impactful?). Ah and also, we are a bunch of lazy muppets as a race, so I think the average person would favour a 1.5 hour movie over reading or writing for the same amount of time simply because it’s “less hustle”.

“So you’re a book hater! You have no books home, shame on you!” You May be thinking right now. No, that’s not the case at all, but the question here is not whether we love or hate books, it’s about realistic habits which may lead to trends on a global level. These trends are the results of the lives we live, which as you all know are changing and have so far changed incredibly fast.

I often read on holiday, at times before going to bed, or if I have to wait on something for a while (a queue, the train… each with their own). Almost any other time I am free I will be checking things out on YouTube social media or I’ll be writing things like these (remember I’m still talking of small amounts of time, of course I am not mentioning sport or other main hobbies in someone’s life. If your main hobby is writing you got me). Kerouac always carried paper and pencil with him and collected all the bits over time to eventually write On The Road. Very cool, he lived for his writing, but how many of us do?

Yes, perhaps writing will eventually disappear. Printing will be diminished or if not totally disappear, it will retreat to give space to video and audio forms of learning and listening. It will become like artisan products are becoming. Bespoke, expensive and not as common as mass production products. It’s already happened to me 2-3 times this year that I went to the library to get a book and they guy told me it was out of print so I could only get the ebook. Paper has a different feel to it. Owning a book is different from having an ebook on a tablet for sure. But reality hit me in that sense after the 3rd time I couldn’t buy a paper book I wanted. I’d given for granted that me wanting it was enough for it to exist in physical print, and boy was I wrong.

In 100 years time will people just buy books so they can fill up libraries in their homes because it will give a “touch of retro” (I fear that for some people that’s already the case)?

You agree with me right?

Right?

But of course!

Noooooooooot.

To my surprise I discovered that ebooks sales have been decreasing while physical books are on the rise, and especially thanks to the new generations (https://www.google.it/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/14/ebook-sales-continue-to-fall-nielsen-survey-uk-book-sales). This is happening at least in the UK, and it’s not just surprising to me, it’s damn good news. When ebooks started taking off I really thought it’d be the end for printed stuff. Looks like I was wrong and I’m very pleased about it. Perhaps one of the reason could be linked with NLP again. Earlier I was talking about our senses, and in many ways owning-smelling-touching-creasing-staining-living-through a real book is much more of an experience than having an electronic version of it.

Could some of this also be to do with how the new generations are being brought up? I don’t know, but as promised earlier I do also feel the need to bring up the schooling system in this article:

What are we doing with education worldwide?

I’m not the first to talk about it, it’s nothing new. Many already know that the basis of the current schooling system is something created over a century ago with the purpose of bringing up little robots fit to work in factories. Also back then we didn’t have the technology and widespread knowledge we have now. Kids are the future. So what are we doing about it?

“Well we got interactive white boards in schools now” I heard someone say to me while speaking about this not long ago, and rather than replying I felt the need to punch him in the face just enough to wake him up (but of course I didn’t, I just imagined doing it, that’s the British in me). We need to dig deeper than this. It’s about how kids are being taught, and partially about the use of paper and ink. It shouldn’t be put aside for sure, but real learning isn’t just about memorising a history lesson by heart, and the schooling system is catching up far too slowly.

We need to look at how our brain functions and apply those rules to education. It’s common knowledge that Einstein failed an exam of maths and Richard Branson (owner of Virgin) is dyslexic. Yet they were/are both great men. Did they perform well in school? No. Were they successful in life? Yup. So is school bad? I don’t think so, but it certainly needs to cater for all types of intelligence in an ever changing modern society.

I read this article about Finnish schools and it seems they got the idea https://www.google.it/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2012/apr/09/finish-school-system

Why do we always have to get there last? By We I intend Britain and Italy along with most of the westernised world. I’ve lived and learned in both countries and both countries have ruled the globe in the past, so have they become very tired cash cows and just lagging behind?

In a way this is also normal, when you do well you relax, when you need to excel you clench your jaws and go forward until you reach your goals. Furthermore I imagine that modernising a school system might be easier to do in smaller countries with less embedded schooling systems (thinking back at Finland). Yet difficult for us should not mean impossible…

Are the old rulers of the world failing to catch up? I reckon so, and it’s going to hit us harder than we think if we don’t start waking up to the idea that this Victorian education structure is useful but no longer enough. We need to teach children to use their brain, to think outside the box and to have tangible tools to get out there and improve our world for the benefit of all. Anything else should be secondary.

So what about paperless and ink-less future worlds? Rather than disappearing I feel like saying evolving. It’s happening fast, so let’s keep a close eye and buy some popcorn.

Meanwhile you might want to keep a stash of your biro’s in case they become collectible items by 2080.

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12.11.2017

GENERATION HOLD

Emotional Gratification, Social Media, Marriage and Tenacious D

AC/DC’s Nick Of Time busting my ears, on the train from Turin whizzing down the leg of the country at 300km per hour. Everybody sat in their comfy train seats, all humans acting like emotionless robots. Most people have headphones on and are staring at a screen, sleeping or reading. I guess it was my Mac taking more than 7 minutes to start up that made me think about how much of my time, of our time, we waste waiting for things to happen. I wonder how many days’ worth of time we’ll have spent in a lifetime staring at an hour glass or a colourful disc spinning waiting for things to happen. That’s it, things don’t always happen. We expect them to but they don’t. We’re ever more used to receiving, we give for granted the idea of things like a warm plate ready for us 3 times a day (unless you’re into yoghurt, in which case that’s one cold plate and two warm ones, unless you feel guilty about your weight or fancy pretending you’re a healthy person, in which case your lunches are normally salads of all sorts, which would make it 2 cold meals a day and a warm one, unless you have no shelter so you’ll just eat whatever you can whenever you can, in which case none of this matters to you because your goal is survival unlike the many lucky people like me or you who can afford wasting time writing on a train home or reading this).

Yes. That’s it. What about all the time spent doing things that aren’t on Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs? Is such time really wasted?

Well, next time you’re staring at that terrible Microsoft hour glass or the annoying colourful Apple spinning disc, do pay attention to what your mind is processing as you wait for things to happen. I’ve started doing it and it’s at the very least intriguing. I began thinking about work and the email I had to write (I wanted to write it just to tick it off my list and forget about it, basically to have one less weight off my shoulders – or fingers I guess -, not because I fancied working on a Sunday morning). Next thing was about how slow my Mac was, shortly followed by peaking at my phone to see if my brother had replied to a WhatsApp, followed by feeling anxious about my Mac being too slow so maybe something was up (along with a feeling of panic because my entire world is in this piece of metal. If I break it I will be as useful as a snail dancing on salt), followed by frustration because nothing is working but it should – because me and society have decided that it should, followed by my mind searching for anchors because I would like to be running a task which is on hold, and nobody’s brain likes to be on hold.

That’s it. Yes. Being on hold. I think that’s easily the doom of this generation. I hate being on hold. If I’m on hold on the phone for more than 5 minutes I am capable of murder, let’s not even start on traffic jams where the car is still for more than 10 minutes when you know you’ve gotta be somewhere on time and you’ve planned everything to the second… I turn into a rather unpleasant Grizzly.

GETTING IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION AND BEING ON HOLD.

The two dooms of my generation?

Music’s changed in my ears (because I rarely listen to one single album in one go while I work; I used to, now everything is on random, sad? But I don’t feel guilty about it) and “English Teacher” by Tenacious D has just come on. Starts off by saying “I want to be the best fucking band in the world. There’s no point doing it if we’re not the best”. This goes back to the instant gratification thing, and I see our new generations getting worse and worse by the day because of this. I agree with phrase, every band I have started or been part of has given me equal amounts of joy and frustration, because getting anywhere with music these days is as easy as winning the lottery; it’s not about how good you are, it’s luck mate. You will still do your absolute best to get somewhere with it, and when you don’t it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating spending a year mixing an album and having it not sounding like you wanted (because you’re a high achiever and you’re used to hearing albums produced with a budget around 20 times what you could afford), it’s frustrating to have to fight your way to have even just your mates listen to 2 years of work and then have them say ”ah yeh it’s cool bud nice one” knowing they most likely skipped through the entire thing. It’s frustrating to only get 2 badly paid gigs after having regularly written to about 100 venues for over 8 months. But it’s equally rewarding when a stranger comes to you and tells you how amazing the gig was, or when another strangers runs up at the end to buy your album, or when you go from 10 average monthly listeners on Spotify to 11… waaaahey! You have to stick in there and keep going, knowing that you’re a very but very tiny little drop in an ocean. We all wanna be rock stars, but most of us won’t even get marginally close to it. As long as that’s clear in your head then you can go do whatever you like, because the gratification won’t come from the outside, but from you seeing the results of your own efforts for the pleasure of your own existence. And this isn’t just valid for the music biz, but for just about anything in life.

I was reading an article from Sean Parker, founder of Napster (and shareholder of Facebook) who, talking about his contribution to Facebook, was almost apologetic about how this social platform has been created to make someone want to waste most of their day checking out feeds and hoping for likes. He was worried about how this would change behavioural patterns in kids..

Guess what buddy? Too freggin’ late now hey! It’s like if Pontious Pilates said 3 years later after crucifying Jesus “aw yeah, I guess that caused a bit of a kerfuffle, I wonder how future generations will be affected, maybe we should have killed that other guy…

So am I anti-facebook? No but perhaps it’s about quality rather than quantity. I’m on Facebook and Instagram pretty often, certainly daily (I’ve given up on Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest etc etc, as I don’t have enough time in my life to update all 79.000 apps these days). I’ll do it to ease off my brain or to update all the “pages” I manage between work and music. That’s what it’s come down to: spending more and more of our time (remember we choose to spend it, it’s up to us) to create content that will please readers in the hope that they will show their gratification by following our page or giving us the MIGHTY thumb up, or eeeeeven better by SHARING our content and COMMENTING! Oh My Gosh! When somebody shares and comments… it’s like a small orgasm right? You’ve been there (don’t lie). Really though, that’s the sadness of it all, an we all know it but we all do it. It’s that Amazon feeling of having bought something and then nervously checking the updates on the shipping 10 times a day knowing full well that it won’t get to you for another 7 days. We crave instant emotional gratification, I guess we always did as humans, but now it’s just been drilled into our amigdala at 10.000 times the normal speed. I don’t think it’s bad to use social media, but perhaps being aware of what it does and choosing the amount we spend on it (and for what real purpose) is more the point.

So are we destined to all fade away into like dependant beings? Are we going to be forever looking for bug fixes and improvements to have the perfect life-replacing software? When will we get to Giga pixels on phones? Such neat photography that you will need a gizmo of some kind to really look at a picture or video, because your naked eye won’t see the difference anyway, but it’s cool so we’ll all spend +1000€ to get a stupid pair of glasses to look at a pic of us drunk from last night, and all of it just so we can say to our mates we’ve done it and it was cool.

No I don’t think that’s what awaits us.

Although it may seem all doom and gloom, my feeling is that eventually (decades?) we’ll be so high on instant gratification and immediate results that we’ll actually give up on extreme consumerism, people will actually realise that the inner search for gratification is not satisfied by an Amazon buy; it’s deeper than that. Much deeper. We have all the answers around, but we’ve overcrowded everything so it’s a little harder to find them. Takes time and effort.

I can compare this to marriage.

I’ve got a lot of friends getting married or who recently married. I’m 33 so that’s decade of your life in which most of this tends to happen. The lead up to the Big Day is a bit like what I was describing above; it’s this chaotic-stressful-but-so-exciting-oh-my-god-I-can’t-believe-it’s-happening-shit-we-forgot-to-buy-fake-moustaches-for-the-party type of experience. We often play as the wedding band for English couples getting married in Italy, and it’s interesting to see the difference between those who are actually having fun and those who make themselves have fun because they know they “have to” enjoy themselves, otherwise what will they tell their kids one day? We all “have to” have a blast on that day, otherwise it’s no good. And then the amazing Honey Moon arrives, the couple spends more money in 2 weeks than they would in a year, they hump like rabbits, drink as if alcohol was hydrating and then get back home. What next? Well that’s the point where things either go very well or not well at all. You’ve focused so much on the Big Day and the holiday that going home makes you feel incredibly empty, you run out of “inputs” to fill your wedded live with, unless you focus on having a baby or buying a house, in which case you’ll be busy for another couple of years (and in debt for the rest of your life.. well done there!). Ok, then? Well luckily I love my wife no end and all of my closest friends seem to be happy in their marriages or relationship.. Guess we’re almost out of the ordinary?

I hear more and more couples who break up within 2 to 3 years of marriage, max 5, and I fear that all of the above is the reason.

B U T

If you have understood the little mind game and you don’t let it get to you (hoping you’ve actually married the right person, but that’s a whole other story), you will find happiness in the smallest things to share with your partner, you will realise that actually there is no need to be passionately in love with one another 24-7 because passion and love are 2 different things. In fact love to me is a multitude of things. It’s like a god of a thousand faces, and that’s why I think poets and writers since the beginning of time have written and still write about it. For me love was as much craving a hug from my mother when coming home from school as it is waking up in the morning these days and seeing my wife next to me. Love is also telling my friend something they don’t want to hear (but which I know they need to hear to face reality and overcome obstacles), it’s cleaning the cat litter regardless of how much it disgusts me because I know that if I don’t do it A. My wife will chop my balls and fry them and B. The cats will smell of piss for the next week (and neither me nor my wife nor my cats will be very happy about that). Love is not giving money to people who you know will use it to make the same mistake again and won’t sort themselves out. Love is much more the time taken to write her a heartfelt birthday card then rushing to the jewellers to get a last minute present (yes I have done it, multiple times!).

All of this to say what exactly?

Am I going off track?

Don’t think so. It’s about realising that the outer world has a necessity of instant gratification that does not exist nor work in our hearts. And if you don’t like the word heart because it’s too cheesy then let’s say your emotional persona, the behavioural part of you which is in constant contact with your inner and outer shell, the (write your name here) inside (re-write your name here) Versus what inputs are perceived outside of (write your name here again) Versus how (write it one last time) stores and analyses these inputs. The faster we get used to that idea, the faster I reckon many of us will start living a happier, healthier and better life.