Human Factors

Remember the Wellington Flash Platform Code Camp from last year and 2009? We’re doing it again!

This time under a new name and with more tracks – catering for design oriented people as well (previously the focus was heavily on developers).

Here are the details:

• Pre-camp workshops on Friday, 28 October: “Adobe InDesign CS 5.5 – Beyond Print” with April Clark & “Enlightenment – a Zen Agile workshop” with Matthew Hodgson
• Main camp on Saturday, 29 October
• Three parallel tracks with awesome speakers
• Location: Natcoll Design & Technology
• Presented by your local Adobe user groups – from the community, for the community

Go and register now, early bird pricing ends 31 July.

Make sure you follow @fpcodecampnz on Twitter for further infos.

I do love talking about positive customer experience, have you noticed? And I just had a great experience, so I feel the urge to share it. Here it comes:

A few days ago we got our renewal notice for our contents insurance. With the invoice for 2011 in our hands, we realised in panic: “oh-gosh-we’re-soooooo-under-insured”. So we created a list of all items we own, took photos of everything in our house, stored the pictures in the cloud for obvious reasons, and eventually I popped into my preferred ASB branch to deal with the upgrade. I was told to call an 0800-number to speak with an insurance specialist and did so when I came home from working in town today. Without going into any detail here, the phone call was less than useless and I was quite frustrated when the call was over.

Then I remembered the ASB Virtual Branch on Facebook. I went to the page and clicked through to the customer service people available for chat. There’s someone available seven days a week, 8am – 9pm. When I went online, there were two young ladies around for a chat – I chose the one in the top row (see image below). Her name is Elysa, and within a couple of minutes she became my personal customer service heroine of the day. After a few lines of chat it became clear that she wouldn’t be able to help with insurance issues via the Facebook application, so she called me back. Since our insurance is already queued for renewal, she wasn’t able to upgrade it or give me an exact quote, but she did everything possible to help me with what I needed. She was in no position to increase my insurance on a Friday night, but she made a note in our file that I had tried to increase cover, in case anything happened to our house in the next two days. When I hang up, I felt like being in good hands, and that she’ll sort it all out on Monday.

But she didn’t rest. She hunted down a representative of the insurance company ASB are working with, and when she called me again she was able to confirm that our insurance cover had been increased and that we’ll receive a confirmation letter and new invoice next week.

She didn’t have to do any of this. She could have confirmed what the guy on the phone hotline had told me before, because it was the truth. She could have said she can’t do anything for me on a Friday night. She didn’t have to add a note to my file, after all being under-insured legally means being under-insured, and if I try to change this on a Friday night, you would be right say “bad luck”. And she didn’t have to try to get hold of someone at the insurance company, especially not after we had agreed on leaving it until monday morning. But she did.

Sure, this is in no way a sign that the virtual branch on Facebook works as intended. I could have gotten lucky with someone from the call centre who might have gone the extra mile, too. But on Facebook I was able to chose who I wanted to interact with. To be fair, all the people on the virtual branch look friendly, helpful and professional. But still, I had a choice. And ASB offered me interaction via a medium that I’m familiar with. After establishing the initial contact, talking on the phone didn’t feel as weird as it often does when you talk to some random stranger, who may or may not even be based in some low-wage country far away from New Zealand.

From now on I will certainly prefer the Facebook virtual branch for all matters I would like to discuss with someone at ASB. Even if they can’t help immediately, they seem to have picked great people to represent the bank in the online world, so I’m sure that every problem will be solved in the end.

This year I wasn’t able to attend MAX, Adobe’s huge conference that attracts thousands of attendees each year. But luckily both keynotes and all sessions have been recorded and can be watched at http://2010.max.adobe.com/online/ – what a perfect thing to do on a grey and rainy weekend! :-)

As a more or less loyal Lush customer I’ve recently joined their email  list to get informed about the latest products and occasional discounts. Today I got the first email from them, and it was a great fail in many ways. First of all, the sender of the email was “nzmailorder”, nothing that indicated it could be anything I had subscribed to voluntarily. Normally I would have marked this as spam just because of the unknown and slightly dodgy sounding sender. But for some reason the subject line caught my eye, which read: “Lush New Zealand – Thanks for taking the time to s”. What did they want to thank me for? Two fails before I had even opened the email made me curios, especially because I couldn’t remember any action they could want to thank me for.

After reading the email a couple of times, I can only assume that what they wanted to say was something along the lines of “Thanks for subscribing to our email list”, but I can’t be sure, since the word “thanks” doesn’t appear anywhere in the email. But it lists all the advantages of being a loyal customer, so I guess that’s what they wanted to say. Maybe they got victims of a length limit in the subject line? How did they not notice?

But it gets even better. As a reward for “becoming part of the wonderful world of Lush” they attached a discount voucher. To redeem I have to print it and take it into the store. Fair enough. But what if I want to redeem it in the online store? Well, although they provide a Promotion Code to be used on the website, they expect me to still print the voucher and mail it to them in Auckland, including my name and order reference number on the back. They must be kidding, right?

(difficulties reading the text? please click on the image for a lager view)

How can they make this process more inconvenient for the customer? And what’s a 10% discount if you have to pay for paper, envelope and postage (and time to get to the next letter box)? This clearly is a perfect example of someone not thinking through the customer experience, it seems almost kind of funny that they call themselves a “fabulous team” (at the very end of the text).

Like last year I was part of the organising committee for Wellington’s Flashcamp this Saturday. It’s a community event from and for developers and designers, organised by the Wellington Chapter of the Flash Platform User Group and the Wellington Creative Suite User Group.

Organising the event was great fun. Approaching sponsors, finding a venue, inviting amazing speaker, ensuring awesome coffee supply, choosing a great conference bag, finding the best caterer, tweeting from @fpcodecampnz and buying lots of little goodies to make people happy during the day – all these tasks were a great team effort. Big thanks to Kai and Ross for being awesome organisers, and to all the helpers who lend a hand on Saturday!

Now that the event is over, I can say that most things went exactly as planned. Feedback is coming in via the survey we sent out the day after the camp, and most people really enjoyed being at the Flashcamp.

Unfortunately I missed most of the sessions myself. I did manage to see the keynote – Jack Yan on “The Evolution of Display Type” – and enjoyed Brenda Leeuwenberg and David Buck from NZOnScreen talking about Flash vs. HTML 5.

My own presentation was about embedding video with Acrobat, and I talked the audience through the process of adding a video to a PDF (including some potential pitfalls and how to make it a less out-of-the-box experience for the user). I had all of the Adobe and ex-Adobe people who came to the Flashcamp sitting in my session, which was great towards the end when a question was asked that I couldn’t answer, but overall it made me quite nervous – I’m sure that this was not my best performance ever. But anyway, I enjoyed sharing my knowledge, no one has complained so far, and overall we had a very awesome day. Have a look at my presentation (PDF, 50 MB – sorry for the file size, but it contains embedded videos), although it might not make much sense without context. But it’s worth having a look at the embedded videos – the are made by Wellingtonian Simon Burgin from CubicStudio and are pretty awesome.

Overall, all I can say: I hope we’ll do it again next year!

When it’s raining in Wellington, people just get wet. They usually don’t bother using an umbrella, the strong winds would probably destroy them within a short time anyway. In other parts of New Zealand and in Germany (well, probably in most countries of the world, but I know for NZ and Germany for sure) people use umbrellas. And when they go into a shop or a supermarket, they try to get rid of some of the raindrops on it by waving it around and getting other people wet. Inside then the umbrellas drip on the floor, building up slippery puddles of rain water which can cause people to fall. Not to speak of wet pants, when people accidentally touch their legs with the umbrella.

The Japanese have a different system for dealing with wet umbrellas. To keep the water outside when the weather is crappy, all shops have a plastic cover dispenser for umbrellas at their entrance. You put your umbrella in from the top and when you take it out towards the front it’s covered in a condom like wrapper. This is how the shop floors stay dry and people don’t slip. And you don’t need to fear that anyone will get you completely wet when they wave their umbrella around in order to get it dry before they enter the shop. Awesome idea!

It would be great to see a more reusable solution, using a plastic cover once and then throwing it into the rubbish bin doesn’t sound right to me. But it’s a start and certainly limits some risks associated with wet floors.

But when you want to go to a museum or a restaurant, you’re usually not keen to carry your umbrella around, regardless if it’s placed in a cover or not. That’s why such places often have a lockable umbrella holder at the entrance of the building. Put the head of the umbrella in, close the lock, remove the metal plate to lock and your umbrella will be waiting securely locked up until you return. That’s how Tokyo stays nice clean and tidy even in nasty weather conditions.

I have just returned from a short holiday in Tokyo. I had already heard about the impressively high level of service people usually experience in Japan, and now that I’ve been there I can only confirm, that being a customer in Japan feels absolutely great.

I can only talk for the Tokyo region, since I didn’t travel anywhere outside of the big city, but I assume it’s the same anywhere in Japan – whatever you do, wherever you go, whoever you encounter: people are always nice and go the extra mile to fulfil the wishes you didn’t even know you had. There was the shower head in our hotel for example, which had a little leak. Not a big problem and I certainly wouldn’t have complained about it, but when we used the shower again the next morning, it had been fixed. Without us saying a word. Not only had the cleaning staff seen the problem, they had even organised the repair. Great service!

There were lots of little things where I though “Wow, that’s great, I didn’t really expect this”, but one of the best things happened to us at Junkudo. Junkudo is a huge book store in Ikebukuro, one of the must-see parts of Tokyo. The store has nine stories, with level nine hosting foreign books. Since neither Kai nor I speak Japanese, we went straight up to the top floor to look for a book we had seen advertised in a newspaper. When we couldn’t find it, I approached the information desk and asked for it. Luckily I had the newspaper clipping with me, so it was easy for the person I asked to look it up in their computer and locate it within the shop. For some reason they had it one level below, and they sent me down to get it from there. Now, in both Germany and New Zealand “Go to level xyz” means that you have to find the item you’re looking for at that location for yourself. At Junkudo it meant, that someone on level eight was informed via phone that we were looking for the book, and while we took the escalator down, which probably took us less than two minutes, this person grabbed the book and placed it at the information desk for us. When we arrived to ask for it again, it was already waiting for us. Great service, again!

I got really excited about the high level of service, and when we met a friend for lunch at our last day in Tokyo I got an explanation as to why the Japanese are so service oriented. It has to do with the custom of “omotenashi”, the atmosphere of hospitality and welcome. It’s the thought of creating a nice, welcoming experience for guests – with an attention to details – that got transferred into the whole service industry. It’s a great custom and it certainly makes Japan a great experience for visitors.