Some would say the answer is obvious. But it’s always worth remembering that processes seemingly designed to frustrate the customer are not limited by sector or organisation. Here’s a tale of convoluted customer service with rather a surprising punchline. Though here is another, more seasonal, story which shows another approach altogether.
We are not the customers of our own services. And even if we think we are, we are still not: we know too much, we cannot stop thinking as provider or designer. Sometimes we are the customers of other people’s services and that holds up a mirror – sometimes a very distorting mirror – to [...]
Many years ago, I used to work with somebody who in a previous life had been a restaurant manager. One of the lessons she had taken from that experience was how to say goodbye. At the beginning of a restaurant meal, people are where they want to be. They are there for an experience, and [...]
Paul Clarke had been on a journey. Well two, actually. The first was to get a bit of routine business done with government, updating the photograph on his driving licence. He has written a blow by blow account of how that didn’t work the way it should have done. Follow the link and read it [...]
As I was getting money out of a cash machine, I saw a proud boast in the window of the bank, highlighting one of the commitments in their customer charter: We will aim to serve the majority of customers within 5 minutes in our branches Pause, if you will, to savour that masterpiece of wording. [...]
Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat – what will make people happy – is to ask them. And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit all you people [...]
As services improve, merge and become virtual, they disappear into the cloud. Which is fine when it’s fine, but sometimes the cloud bursts. We are, we hope, creating better ways of getting things done, but we are also unintentionally and perhaps unavoidably creating new ways for systems and services to fail. Those potential failures need [...]
Yesterday, as I was going down the stairs on the bus, it jerked to a halt and I nearly lost my balance. It often happens and, as usual, it wasn’t a sudden and necessary reaction to traffic: we had simply arrived at the bus stop. There are some bus drivers whose driving style is calculated [...]
Every person and every organisation has some form of reality distortion field. Some are more severe than others, and according to Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft has a particularly severe version of the problem: The Redmond Reality Distortion Field: The field that influences Microsoft employees and product designers to make wildly incorrect assumptions on the use of [...]
The links below have two things in common. They don’t work. And they should. http://hmrc.gov.uk http://met.police.uk http://parliament.uk http://civilservice.gov.uk http://hmg.gov.uk/ (though for so grand an address, the results to be found are sadly inconsequential) Distinguishing a web server from gopher, telnet and the host of other application protocols which jostled for supremacy as they emerged from [...]