Olympics…..We’re Dooooooomed!!!! Jubilee….We’re Dooooooomder!!!!

The Delivery Demon isn’t really much of a spectator so she didn’t bother tying up her credit card limit in the fiasco of Olympic ticket sales. Why put all that effort into a lottery level probability of seeing an event that might be of some slight interest? She stood back from that, leaving the remote chance of getting a ticket to those who really wanted to watch. As the chaos was delivered, she felt a few pangs of sympathy to those sportspeople who, even if they managed to get tickets, had very little opportunity of getting tickets to see the sports they actually participate in. The whole setup seemed pretty half-baked.

Beyond some vague plans to avoid the areas of transport mayhem during the Olympics, the DeliveryDemon has tended to ignore the media hype, but a recurring theme has been carping for her attention in news reports. There seems to be a developing assumption that the Olympics, like the equally-hyped Jubilee, will damage the economy. The DeliveryDemon recollects some reference to think tanks in those reports but a cursory web search hasn’t provided any hard evidence, so perhaps the reporters concerned are inventing or misinterpreting. Whatever the case, the DeliveryDemon has become interested in what those reports imply.

The general theme is that workers will be taking holidays and days off, will be surreptitiously following the events on their mobiles and their work PCs, will be spending long lunches in pubs, watching events unfold. Transport chaos will make people late for work. Workers will be tired and hungover from late night TV watching and alcoholic celebrations. Production will plummet, customer service will suffer, the economy will drag its way into another recession. Two big events in a single year? We’re all doooooomed!!!

So what are the facts behind the scaremongering?

• Yes, people will want time off – they usually do in the summer. But it may be easier to achieve a spread of holiday dates as a significant number of people may choose to avoid holidaying during the Olympic peak times – much as many people avoid taking their break during school holidays.
• Transport chaos? Commuters are used to this but it’s likely to have a worse than usual impact on venue access routes and the air and rail hubs which serve them. That’s not the whole country, and the areas concerned have a relatively high concentration of work which can be carried out remotely with a little bit of forethought.
• People will spend more than they plan then cut back after the event? Pretty normal for any holiday type event, except that the spend will be in the UK.

So far, so normal. No reason to predict a recessive impact from normal human behaviour. So what might these pundits be suggesting?

• All that well-paid Olympics work will disappear in the aftermath, true. Why should that be a surprise to anyone?
• In some – but not all – businesses, less work will be done during the various events and celebrations. Really?
• There will be a fairly heavy demand for time off during the peak period. A bit like Christmas and the school holidays. After all, people work to live, not the other way round.

Either the reporters who come up with these doom-laden headlines lack the most elementary understanding of business planning, or they are trying to deliver the message that UK management is so lacking in basic business skills that the entire country went down the plughole years ago.

The DeliveryDemon wishes that those recruiting for media positions would realise that those jobs have a need for basic commonsense and the ability to use data sensibly.

Delivering Poor Banking Security

The DeliveryDemon has the rather naive expectation that banks who are entrusted with our money should operate reasonably secure procedures. Hang your heads in shame RBS and Barclays.

The DeliveryDemon has had cause to complain to both banks recently. In each case the complaint was about their processes, not anything specific to the account. In both cases an idiot from their customer ‘service’ team phoned up and demanded to know secure account access details before they would consider listening to the complaint. Do they really think it is sensible for someone to give out account password information to a random caller?

RBS, there is no need to access my account in order to hear that it does not constitute ‘faster payment’ if you take details of a payment on Friday and can’t process it till Tuesday unless the I ring again on Monday.

In fact there is no need for your customer ‘service’ to access my account at all. The default action should NEVER be to access the customer account. Basic security is that this should only be done if the customer raises a matter specific to the account, i.e. if there is a genuine need to access the account.

Banks are piling on nuisance value processes to make it more difficult for the customer to access their own money, all in the name of security. It’s about time they got their own house in order, introduced secure internal processes and gave their customer contact staff some basic security training.

Not Delivering Faster Payments

Since the bureaucrats took over RBS, the service has been going rapidly downhill, to the point that now they cannot even operate the faster payments system which banks should have been signed up to for several years.

The online service was never good, a classic example of security completely overwhelming usability. With public ownership, the phone service was drastically reduced. Then the ability to set up advance payments was cut back. The commonest requirement for advance payments is the ten month council tax cycle. It was once possible to set up 6 months worth of payments at a time, but that has been cut back to 3. Instead of 1 oppportunity to forget a payment, RBS has created 3.

The latest service cutback is the faster payments system, to which all banks are nominally committed. This system should, within certain limits, transfer money to the payee’s account within 2 hours. Not with RBS. The latest unintelligent development to their system cannot cope with a payment being set up on a Friday evening. It won’t do anything with it till the Tuesday. If the customer wants a payment to arrive on the Monday, they have to phone again on the Monday. In other words, RBS’s system cannot cope effectively with faster payments for nearly 3 days out of 7. The DeliveryDemon is seriously unimpressed with this constant erosion of customer service.

The gulf between the words ‘public’ and ‘service’ has never been wider. And it’s growing.

A Very Silly KPI

Shop in a typical UK supermarket and you’ll see how little priority is given to customer service. Checkout staff are measured on how many items they scan per minute. This doesn’t speed up the checkout process. The goods pile up in a random heap at the end of the conveyor as the hapless customer tries to re-sort them into a sensible order for packing. The end result is an irate customer, damaged goods, and a queue which is processed more slowly than if the checkout operator had been allowed to deliver the simple customer service of matching scanning speed to the customer’s packing speed. Similar examples can be found in many other areas, where easily measurable targets are used as a substitute for good process. The DeliveryDemon is not impressed!

Delivering Food in the Internet Age

The DeliveryDemon hates shopping. Walk round the supermarket spending money on stuff to eat, and you only have to do the same thing a week later. It’s SUCH a chore!! So it came as a bit of a surprise, returning from a holiday in the Lake District, to have a reasonably enjoyable shopping experience. Which, of course lead the DeliveryDemon to wonder why she doesn’t mind picking up foodstuff at Booths in Keswick, while she absolutely hates trudging round each and every one of the local supermarkets in her home area.

And before anyone suggests that the DeliveryDemon shop online to avoid the supermarket experience, think about trust. On a visit to a supermarket you can form an opinion about how the goods are handled when customers can see what’s going on. If an online order is packed in some distant warehouse, that discipline has gone. If you don’t see respect for food in a store, how is food being handled behind the scenes? If, when you come to unpack your order and cook dinner, the veg are unappetisingly wilted or bashed, what do you do? You can complain and return items but by then your meal has been spoiled, and often people find it too much hassle to return stuff. It’s you who has to deal with the quality problem.

So why does Booths deliver a shopping experience which is so different? Certainly the layout is a bit more spacious, reducing the frustration caused by shoppers who stop for an extended chat, trolleys carefully parked to block the aisle. The excellent selection of beers on offer is an attraction, as is the carefully chosen range of local products, but the range doesn’t dictate the shopping experience. The secret is in the way the goods are handled and displayed, something long known to every market trader with a layer of shiny polished apples hiding a stock of poorer quality fruit.

Compare and contrast:

• A freshly picked carrot with a glazed looking item from near-zero storage,  in its brief orange period between frozen lump and black slime
• The tight white curds of a trimmed new cauliflower with the brown-splodged, limp-leaf-hidden face of one which has survived a lengthy trip along the supply chain
• Tomatos with the sharp green smell of the plant, and the green-red, rock hard spheres, picked long before ripeness to prevent bruising in transit
• A choice of breads from various bakers, each with their own baking method, and a choice of breadshapes all made to the same process and with zero taste variation
• Glittering fish you need to get up early for because it comes in fresh every day and sells out every day, and dull-eyed specimens dragged from the freezer
• Large packs of perky-leaved herbs, and niggardly sachets bulked out with parsley stalks and leaf fragments.

When the Delivery Demon stops at Booths she usually heads back south with a full shopping bag. Lakeland plum bread, Morecambe Bay prawns, rye loaf, ‘Cornish’ pasties, fresh fruit and vegetables, chocolates, artisan crisps and some interesting local beers. When she shops in her home area, she comes back with a bad temper and a list of items which were out of stock.

What’s this got to do with the internet age? In the old days, word of a poor shopping experience would circulate in a local community, but lack of convenient options would to some extent protect a poor quality shop from wholesale customer defection. The internet has widened the options. Supermarkets think they have addressed the internet age by offering online shopping and web-based information. Many have still to realise that the web has created a window into the quality of their entire operation.

Whatever Happened to Quality Management?

A strange new convention has emerged during the last few years and the DeliveryDemon doesn’t think much of it.

It can be seen in many customer-facing organisation and it goes something like this:

• Something goes wrong and a customer complains
• The organisation investigates the complaint and gets back to the customer with an explanation of why it will never happen again. The customer gets a refund and possibly a gift ‘as a thank you for bringing the matter to the organisation’s attention’.
• The same thing happens again and again with different customers. When the complaint level reaches a critical mass, the organisation does one of two things. The better organisations do some root cause analysis and make changes to get rid of the problem. Other organisations – and the number of these is increasing – stop responding to complaints, in particular those from customers who have been affected several times.

Two things are happening here.

• The organisation is not bothering to carry out pre-emptive quality management processes
• The organisation is assuming that it’s down to the customers to carry out quality checks.

It might be the bread from the supermarket not being properly cooked, or the bag of parsley containing fragments held together with numerous rubber bands. It might be the electricity supply which keeps cutting out because movement of nearby tree branches causes equipment to cut out. It might be diminishing pressure in the water supply caused by a type of pressure valve known to malfunction regularly. It might be the emailed or website link which doesn’t work. It might be the peak hour commuter train delays regularly caused by running freight on the same line. It might be the hospital which sends a letter cancelling a Choose and Book appointment and replacing it with an appointment for an unspecified procedure. Most people have a fund of similar examples.

There is something seriously wrong with this widespread custom of organisations delivering poor quality for as long as they can get away with it.

The UK isn’t delivering

This is a bit of a consumer rant, but with a delivery focus. The UK isn’t delivering at the most basic levels. Being a customer in this country is a battle through marketing hype in a vain attempt to get the goods or services you want to buy or are already paying for. With businesses struggling you would think that some effort would have been diverted to delivering to customers and improving the bottom line. But not in this country. I’ve wasted half of this morning on the phone as a result.

T-mobile is having network problems. OK, technical problems happen. But when the network is down, customers need to find out whether the problems they encounter relate to the phone or the network. When it’s the network they need to know whether the problem is local or widespread. For a technology company with a large website you might expect some sort of network status on the front page. Not with T-mobile. You can’t contact them from the handset of course, so you have to find a landline. Once you get through, you might expect a recorded message to the effect that the network is down. Not with T-mobile. You get stuck in an interminable queue for 20 minutes, listening to some dire muzak selection. At the end of all that it takes about 20 seconds for someone to say the entire network is down, but by this time the customer has wasted the best part of half an hour.

Wake up, T-mobile. If you have problems delivering the network service, there’s no excuse for wasting the time of thousands of customers this way. Use the technology available to you to deliver information to the customer in 3 seconds, not 30 minutes.

And Keyline aren’t doing any better at delivering shampoo to customers. They talk about brands, not products that customers want to buy. It took numerous emails and phonecalls to find that they had bought the Henara brand from Schwartzkopf. Keyline customer services don’t want to get involved in anything so mundane as telling customers where they can obtain a particular product. All they do is pass the customer on to their wholesaler. The wholesaler doesn’t seem to know what they deliver, all the will say is who they deliver to. This leaves the customer ringing round individual pharmacies to find out whether they stock the particular product.

There’s a pattern emerging here and it’s not an encouraging one. For a long time there’s been a focus on branding and marketing. That’s not a bad thing in itself as it makes the product recognisable and visible. But all the branding and marketing in the world doesn’t bring in a penny if the customer can’t buy the product or access the service. And a customer service department is a complete waste of money if they can’t tell the customer what the customer needs to know.

It all comes back to delivery. In hard economic times customers naturally take more care of their spend, and money will gravitate to the companies which deliver the goods. It seems obvious, doesn’t it?  But companies are surprisingly slow to learn the lesson.