I’m in Galway, Ireland for a few weeks to do some work for a client.
The last time I was in Galway, I was here for year with my family. This time I’m here for 5 weeks without my family and no cooking facilities in my digs. Combine that with an allowance from my client that I can only get if I spend it, leaves me with no choice really – I have to eat out.
So over the next 20 days, I intend to have dinner at 10 choices from the Top 20 restaurants in the Galway city center area (because they have to be within walking distance!) and another 10 – randomly selected – from all the other 230. I’ll blog about each one and perhaps suggest an alternative ranking based on my own experiences.
The aim, first and foremost, is to get fed and have a good time getting so. The other is to check how wise the TripAdvisor crowd is. Is their #1 really worthy of being a #1?
Join me as I eat my way through Galway’s most popular eateries, sponsored by my client.
Some of the first restaurants I shall be checking out are:
Oscar’s Seafood Bistro
La Fine Bouche
Kai
Kirwans Lane Restaurant
The Pie Maker
The Park House
Brasserie on the Corner
Brasserie on the Corner
Sushi In the Sky
The Quay Street Kitchen
How I intend on reviewing these restaurants
Well I’m no restaurant critic – I lack the pretension that I can tell my wines apart or that my steak is blue, green or grass fed.
Frankly I’m going with trying to review the entire experience – from making the reservation to how welcome they made me feel, how lovely their food looks, smells and tastes and how accommodating they are to my requests. I’ll include how they value my time (I get fairly upset if I’m kept waiting too long for stuff) and I’ll consider the ambiance of the restaurant and the providence of their ingredients – locally sourced vs otherwise.
Where I can I would like to hear the story of the restaurant – preferably from someone other than the owner.
If there is anything you think I should include, please let me know and I’ll consider it.
Wish me luck, I’m doing this for you (ok, who am I kidding)!
My bro sent me these images showing new and imaginative ways old products are reused. I feel very inspired – if a little inadequate a designer!
What interesting ways are you reusing old materials?
ps: I don’t know what the copyright status of any of these images are. If you believe any of them are not to be freely published under some sort of creative commons license, please let me know and I shall take them down.
I ceased work on ServiceChat – the startup that I have been working on for six months. It might not seem that long to you, but to me it is a very long time of illusions and self discovery.
My learning from why ServiceChat didn’t go where I had ambitions for it to go will continue to emerge over time, but one thing that pops straight out is that I didn’t know my own my mind. Let me explain?
Too many sources of information
We are in an age of startup frenzy. All the cool kids are in startups and it is an exciting time that is all the more exaggerated by the media feeding on the spectacular valuations and fortunes. Politicians rest the recovery from recession on startups and entrepreneurs, kids are encouraged to code from a young age and be the next Zuckerberg and dreamy eyed youth are cluing on to the fact that the barriers to realise their ambitions are lower than at any other time in the history of business – well at least for tech startups anyway.
There is such a rich ecosystem for startups – blogs, books, incubators , accelerators, coaches, advisers, mentors and so much more – maybe too rich. The reality is that almost everyone in this ecosystem is a startup themselves. They are selling something – their idea, their learning and some times their services. So you are their customer – of sorts – and their messages can be interpreted to make you think their way is better or your goals are the wrong ones. With so many opinions competing for your attention, it is easy to get distracted.
I got sucked in. I bought and read the books, I read the blogs and heard expert after expert tell you how to do it – or how not to do it. Everyone means well – absolutely – and there is a wealth of anecdotal sense in what they say. But in a blog or a book, you read what was written whereas the learning you might need is in what was unwritten. In any case, as much as you recognise the symptoms they talk about, they are not talking about your particular condition in its entirety. I still needed to know my own mind.
But there is no recipe for growing a successful startup. There are general ingredients – test your idea, continuously validate and others. The exciting bit is that you get to decide what you are cooking and what the recipe should be.
Fail on your own terms
My trouble was I was seeking my mind in the words of others. That took a huge amount of focus away from what I was supposed to be doing – finding customers and trying to find market/product fit. It was also emotionally wrecking, constantly second guessing myself when yet another blog implied to do the opposite of that the previous book advocated. Was I following the *exact* process or was I doing what the book said? Occasionally my rational mind would chime in and say:
‘Screw them, they don’t have to find next month’s rent, you do – you have to do what you have to do to build this thing!’.
But I would mute it. Failure is hard to accept. But it can be easier to deal with if you understand why you failed and you learn from it. Failing on your own terms is perhaps the best you can have. In my case, one of the reasons I failed was not knowing my own mind.
My Learning
I’m not blaming anyone or anything – I don’t believe in blame.
I do believe in behaviors being more or less effective towards a goal. My learning here is that focusing on a process or a body of other people’s experiences to build my own startup was not an effective way for me to achieve my goal of a successful and viable startup business. The next time – and there will be a next time – I won’t do the same thing.
I will have my plan and I’ll be comfortable with my plan. I’ll formulate it from my own experiences and instincts. I may run it past advisers or check for obviously stupid aspects of it with books or blogs or other sources of information. I may otherwise revise it but ultimately I will do it because it makes sense in my mind.
I encourage you to completely disregard this post. It was my learning and my experience and it absolutely may not apply to you. Know your mind.
A few years ago I spent a few weeks working in Berlin. The work was through the consultancy owned by my friends Marion and Andrea. To keep costs low and to help make my stay in Berlin more enjoyable, they offered me a room in their lovely apartment.
Marion is a beautiful human being and absolutely WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get – and she also speaks her mind. From the get go she declared that there shall be no peeing standing up. This applied to me and the other visiting consultants.
Her reasons were perfectly logical – you sprinkle when you tinkle and the wipe up can be a little hit and miss, so be a sweetie and sit down when you pee! It almost entirely eliminates the mess. Also reasonable because she has a cleaning lady come in a couple of times a week to clean the apartment and no one really needs to be wiping up other peoples’ pee.
A few jokes were made, but we all knew that she made sense and even if her directness was a little grazing, we would still be more mindful of her request. Now I don’t know how the other guests complied with her request or the need behind it – leave the bathroom clean and dry after your visit, but I actually tried to do what she suggested. I tried to sitting down to pee.
A history of being upright
For a guy who has spent 39 years peeing upright, this was a fairly unnatural stance. I would guess I’m not alone in that sense. I’ve never been in a men’s bathroom that had the urinal area that was anything other than gross. Granted there are different degrees of gross, but gross nonetheless. There is always bits of hair, occasional dandruff and chewing gum in the urinal, legacy wee on the flow and the ever present danger of you peeing on your own shoes. And don’t forget the awkward avoidance of looking down when you are shoulder to shoulder with other men draining the camel.
Typically, going for a pee is a super fast job – in and out. There is no lingering by the urinals – unless there are other agendas afoot. You wouldn’t anyway – the stink is fairly overpowering.
Even peeing upright in the privacy of your own bathroom is fraught with risk – so much could go wrong. Toilet seats dampened and left up, lids not put down and the potential for puddles all make this a risky venture. Many a loving relationship has been strained by this recurring risk.
You might think that with so much opportunity to practice that there would be no problem. I have a theory about this – You only get good at what you deliberately try to get good at.
If I pee on average twice a day everyday for 39 years – that is 14244 days or 28,488 opportunities to practice. You would think that I would be an expert at peeing. But no, I still get seats wet, the occasional drip on my shoes and certainly leave the seat/lid in the wrong configuration many many times. So if it’s not the lack of practice, then it must be about the lack of deliberate focus.
Time for something different
So with this in mind, I was determined to explore something different – to deliberately get better at peeing. I tried sitting down and over time the sense of weirdness disappeared. Not only that, but I also found there was no spillage and no puddle. It was all tinkle with no sprinkle. The toilet seat is left down and it is clean and dry for the next occupant. The residual hair dropping was also greatly reduced. I never had a dandruff problem so no view on that.
What amazed me more was the opportunity to take a break. Sit down, take a load off and enjoy the experience. At least twice a day, you get a moment to yourself. It takes marginally longer than an upright pee but you get so much more. Peeing upright does not really afford you that opportunity, you’re on your feet, you got places to go and people to see. You might wash your hands or not and often if you do, do you really wash them well enough?
I found myself consistently more relaxed and remembering to wash my hands more often and more deeply than when I was an upright urinator. (ok that is not a real word).
For all the benefits I mentioned, there is still one bit that I am not yet entirely consistent at doing – putting the lid down. But with time and deliberate focus, I expect that will happen to0.
Thanks
I have to say a huge thank you to Marion for that suggestion two years ago – I know we joked about it, but it really worked for me! Olaf, my male German friend says that men peeing sitting down is far more common in Germany that anywhere else he had been. I don’t have experience of that either way.
So fellas if you are looking for something that will help you be more hygienic, delight the ladies you share your lavatories with, give you back a few serene minutes of your day and leave you with dry shoes then consider peeing sitting down. You might thank me!
Whilst researching a post about Morrisons and its customer service on Twitter, I discovered that even though I could see all the customers that had an experience on a given day, they couldn’t see each other and at least one person commented on her impressions being totally different when she discovered the ‘big picture’. This left me intrigued.
Then I was reading about Elon Musk and his suggestion about first principles as great place to start looking for innovative ideas. I prefer this idea to thinking in analogies – which are great for many things, but perhaps less for disruptive innovation.
That is when a weird thought came to me – a first principle of human interaction is that we seek connection. What if we could be connected by shared experiences as customers – what might happen?
Honestly I don’t know and I would like to find out. Better still I would like to see if what I find can form the basis of a viable startup business. Regardless – it would still be interesting to explore what a direct interactive connection between consumers around a shared experience would mean for customer services, how commerce is conducted and maybe even how we think of each other as human beings.
What’s with the timer?
So my last experiment took me almost 6 months to fail – that is way too long – I need it to be 6 weeks or less. I got distracted and I lost my sense of urgency. This timer, along with my plan and a new found discipline are to help me not make the same mistakes again. If this experiment is still running when this clock runs out – it may have been validated as unviable before – I will stop it unless I have a paying customer for something. It sounds aggressive and it is. Game on!
For nearly 25 years, I have been writing some form of software code or another. For nearly twenty of those years I was paid to do it. When I started I was called a ‘programmer’. I don’t know exactly when everyone – including myself – started using the term ‘developer’ as a synonym for ‘programmer’, I do remember spending all 12+ years as a Java programmer being called a Java developer. But really I still just programmed – this time in Java.
Then along comes all these fancy shmancy process frameworks that talk of teams. One in particular – Scrum – boldly calls out the ‘development team’ as a cross-functional group who deliver an increment of a product at regular iterations.
Now as I help teams and organisations be more effective by applying Scrum (amongst other things), I am often asked who is in the Scrum development team. Typically I say:
Developers, testers and everyone who can carry out the required functions needed to sustainably deliver a working product increment
Often this response gets some push-back along with a sense a alienation – “But I’m a QA, I’m not a developer – am I in the development team?” or “I’m an Interaction Designer, am I in the development team?”.
My revelation
These questions left me puzzled and during one of my thinking sessions it dawned on me that:
Yes, all those people are in the development team and they are all expected to be developers. The problem is not them. The cause of the confusion is not their function, it is the hijacking of the term ‘developer’ and making it mean the same as ‘programmer’.
Being developer is not a function, it is an attitude.
Programmer, tester, UX, cryptologist, devops, CM engineer and other similar things are specialist functions. You can have a group full of these in your ‘cross functional team’ without them being a development team. Likewise, you can have them all in a group and they can simultaneously be developers with certain functional expertise.
About programmers
Programmers like to program. Actually let me rephrase that. Programmers love to program. It is our passion. We love to play with code for no other reason that it makes us happy and it fuels our curiosity.
In programming, we push the boundaries of our knowledge, gain skills and explore a world where we make things – sometimes pretty cool things – happen. Programmers are curious people – not about everything – but certainly about how computers tick and how we can make them tick differently. I say again – it is our passion. The thing that makes our eyes light up in an otherwise uninteresting conversation.
As a programmer, I don’t really care whether what I wrote is marketable or whether it is usable by anyone but me. Even broken code is interesting to a programmer and as for tests – screw them – I know how this sucker is put together and where it breaks and how to avoid it. Also, I don’t care if it solves anyone’s problem other than mine – even if my problem was “I was bored”.
Programmers are not lone wolves or billy-no-mates. We have friends, not many and typically they are other programmers. Programmers are collaborative even if sometimes a little competitive. Our focus is inherently narrow, oh but what focus. We think deeply about the problem and delight in reaching a state of elegance and great technical design that makes our every future move in the code sublime.
Now, please don’t misunderstand me. Programmers are vitally important. The World is deeply computerised and will continue to be. It needs people who are curious about computers and passionate about making them do things. The World also needs at least some of those programmers to apply their skill to developing solutions for the challenges that face us all.
Expanding this further, let me say that functional specialists are vitally important. That is where expertise is created and boundaries of the possible are pushed out further and further. Functional specialists are driven by the curiosity and fulfillment that their specialisation provides.
There is no shame in wanting to remain only a programmer or any functional specialist. Personally I would be delighted to simply code stuff in my study all day and all night and never attend a single meeting about any damn thing. In fact I would like to not talk to anyone and have no one talk to me. My brain gets shafted with all the things I have to hold in it as a developer AND as a programmer and I would be quite content not having my brain shafted. Luckily the stuff I know as a programmer is pretty much instinctive now, but nevertheless, being a developer is still hard work.
Whilst there is no shame in choosing to be only a programmer, there is pain and suffering in privately and silently choosing that but publicly being expected to be a developer. Choose who to be and be who you choose.
About developers
If programmers are focused intently on a narrow and often technical problem, developers focus on much broader and often business-centric problems. The broader problem that developers are challenged with may need nothing to be programmed nor tested or designed. They care that the solution meets the need. They care that it is usable and valuable and they seek feedback to those ends.
There is always a big picture and developers make time and head space to understand it and be part of evolving and delivering it.
Developers seek feedback and are prepared to do whatever is needed to get to it. Developers seek collaboration with other developers because they realise it takes more than their specialisation to deliver a solution. This collaboration takes behaviors often missing in certain functions and developers seek to gain those behaviors so that they can collaborate better.
Critically developers recognise that the most functionally correct thing is not the same as the most effective solution. They know when enough is good enough.
In my line of work, I come across many functional specialists who complain they often do not have enough to do during an iteration. They often say this when there is an abundance of work to be done to deliver the solution. They argue that it is inefficient or ‘poor resource utilization’ for a programmer to test or get involved with elaborating requirements. A developer contributes in whatever way they can to develop the solution.
Re-defining the development Team
A development team contains developers. A cross functional development team contains developers who together are able to perform all the functions required to deliver the solution.
A developer is, almost always, also a functional specialist. That is they have the attitude and have deep skills in one or more functions.
A development team is fundamentally a learning vehicle. Its members recognise that in order for each person to consistently and effectively contribute to the solution that they must they learn from each other. They know that sometimes the nature of the work needs different measures of the functions and they adopt behaviors – like pairing – to create that learning towards helping each developer contribute as much as they can. So programmers learn to test and design and do configuration management – at least a little. Testers learn to code and design and manage configuration. At least enough to be useful.
Why I wrote this
I wrote this post because it I consider it to be cruel to expect people to be what they don’t want to be and worse still, to penalise them when they do not meet those expectations. This cruelty saddens me deeply.
I wrote this because I witness the violence that is done in the name of delivering software and I have unwittingly been part of that violence. From the sense of exclusion encouraged by functional silos to the treating of certain functions as second class citizens, peoples’ feelings are marginalised and their needs ignored.
I wrote this because I sincerely want organisations and specifically their management to understand the distinction between the attitude and the function. I want them to act more humanely when they hire and when they reward. I want them to explore more non-violent ways to design an environment that encourages developers AND functional excellence.
I wrote this because I want programmers to understand what is expected of a ‘developer’ and to make an informed decision whether they want that. I want them to make that choice without coercion.
If they choose to be a developer, they accept that they may be called upon to do things not in their expertise and they do so happily. I want them to fully realise that their choice means they are interested both in the joy of programming as well as the satisfaction of developing something that makes a difference.
Finally, I wrote this so that the word ‘programmer’ is no longer considered synonymous with ‘developer’. I believe that, by breaking this defacto equivalence, programmers will be happier people and simultaneously other functional specialists will feel equal and included partners in delivering a solution that meets a need.
What do you think?
If you are a developer, do you recognise that it is an attitude and not a function? If not, why not?
Do you disagree with the distinction between developer and programmer? I’d love to know why you think they are not different.
What are your experiences of one being confused with the other?
I’d love you to drop me a comment below or let’s chat it out on Twitter.
I am mothballing my ServiceChat startup experiment.
After six months, I have to admit to myself that ServiceChat has no legs. People who I thought should be interested are not and actually trying to find people interested is proven too difficult for my abilities. The lack of interest is itself great feedback – if you struggle to find 10 customers how impossible will it be to find 100? So as it stands, I don’t have a marketable product, nor even one I can get customers to use. So I’m done with it.
My enduring philosophy in life is failing fast – not only because it costs less financially but also because it costs less emotionally. I want to fail fast because it means I can get to the next thing sooner – and with the learning I make from each ‘failed’ idea – I increase the probability of future success.
Here is my check in:
Sad that ServiceChat is not going any where and that I am mothballing it. Nothing ever truly dies. But for now – learn, adapt, repeat.
Sad that I have unanswered questions – for example why could I not get people interested, what was truly incorrect about my choice of customer segments.
Glad that I now know a lot more where my strengths are and I can better make decisions about how to address those areas I suck at.
Glad that I am much clearer about what my passion is. Without this, I will fail on any startup before I even begin. I really didn’t know this before. Now I know that all the ideas I care the most about are about harnessing diversity and connecting people so they can be better informed, make better decisions and generally be happier and more joyful.
Glad that I learned that I need to experiment more about what idea I want to build a startup business around. For this I need to take a fundamentally different approach (more lab like and less startup like).
I’m grateful for all the help, concern and love I’ve had this last 6 months.
I’m out of ServiceChat. I’m in with life.
Improve On
Do more research about competitors, partners and the problem.
Get MVPs out faster. Find more creative ways to test the idea out – without necessarily coding a damn thing!
Understand the marketing channels from day 1 – it is by far the most important thing and the riskiest one for me. I assumed that good ideas would naturally float and become viral – they don’t.
Fail faster than 6 months. Ideally 6 weeks.
What Next?
ServiceChat was based on monetising ChittyChat for business. ChittyChat as a free tool was mildly successful with absolutely no marketing. I will work to reinstate it with the enhancements I made whilst focusing on ServiceChat.
I see a need for a more usable answer to public group chats on Twitter using hashtags. The current solutions are crap. The tech that drives much of ServiceChat can help me build something for me to use twitter hashtag chats better. I will experiment with this.
Bizbuzz is providing interesting insights into how people connect with business and the deep lack of consumers connecting with each other. This is an exciting space to explore – I will continue to mine this for insight and blog about what I discover.
A couple of days ago, I walked into an outlet of a well known chain of Irish sandwich shops and ordered my lunch. As I am wont to do after my lunch, I ordered a single espresso to go.
The lady behind the counter promptly setup the coffee machine and soon enough it started to whirr and grind. After a few seconds it started to pour.
I find coffee machines fascinating – I think it is part of the culture of coffee. This was a beautiful red Gaggia – the best machines always seem to be Italian.
Anyway, as my coffee is pouring, I notice that the liquid is coming out of a twin spout attached to the brass filter – quite similar to the picture. Except, one spout is emptying into my take-away cup and the other spout is simply draining into the waste. I called the lady’s attention to this and she says ‘Ah yeah, but you only paid for a single’.
Well, I was gobsmacked to say the least. So I asked again and the exchange was no less astounding. Not only was this waste acceptable, it was justifiable.
Me: “So for every single espresso you sell, you pour a single espresso’s worth down the drain? Is that correct?”
Barista: “Yes, but you get a great espresso”
Me: “Erm, how so? It is the same coffee, except the stuff you are wasting is coming out of the other spout”
Barista: “Yes but the double has too much water, we let the single really get the good coffee taste, it’s better”
I have never in all the years I have been drinking coffee seen this. But first off let’s clear something up.
There is no way the coffee that was in my cup was any different from the coffee being wasted.
So a couple of possibilities might be happening – or both at the same time:
Every purchaser of a single espresso is paying for a double espresso, but only getting a single (at €2.60 – that might be right!)
The coffee beans are dirt cheap and so the business can afford to throw it away – might be the case in conjunction with the earlier point. That said, its coffee must just be grossly overpriced.
I know that restaurants and bars make their most profit from cups of coffee. The costs are miniscule compared to the prices they get away with charging for them. Nonetheless the level of waste is still not justified in my books.
Ultimately the way I see it is that this espresso was cheap at half the price but actually will cost the business €10/day in my lost custom, as I shan’t ever go to this sandwich shop again.
As I was sifting through the data that Bizbuzz was providing about potential ServiceChat customers, I came across Morrisons – a British grocery and supermarket business that has about 12% of the UK grocery market (source: Economics Help)
I was looking at their ‘apology’ buzz – a tracking of how many apologies they are making to customers and that would lead me to who they were apologising to – an unhappy customer with some feedback dressed as a complaint.
The date was May 27th and as I scanned the apologies, I picked one at random to see the details of the apology – what triggered it and perhaps, any further conversations in the thread. The apology I picked related to Ian Golding’s tweet.
I read Ian’s profile and reached out to him to seek more context about the events that led to his experience. Learning more about Ian revealed that he is an active blogger and a passionate customer experience specialist, striving to help businesses delight their customers – my kind of guy!
Ian had written fairly extensively about his Morrisons’ experience and after I read it I wondered whether Morrisons’ level of engagement and the resolution they demonstrated in Ian’s experience was typical and part of a designed approach to delighting customers, or was it simply a fluke. After all, I knew from my data that on May 27th – the day of Ian’s experience – there were 12 other customers who sent Morrisons a variety of feedback via Twitter.
What were their experiences of Morrisons’ engagement with them about their feedback?
How many felt they got a satisfactory resolution from calling Morrisons’ attention to something they perceived needed improvement in a store, with pricing, product quality and/or staff behaviour?
Some Immediate Observations
Morrisons uses auto-responders
As I was looking through the content it became obvious that Morrisons’ responses are a template and most likely a template used by an auto-responder. They appear to be semi-customised templates where they try and get the first name of the account that sent the tweet they are responding to and use it to personalise the reply.
They clearly also have responses they either cycle through so they are no so obviously simply auto responding.
All responses are redirection
All the responses I saw for this date (May 27th) and the other 180 apologies in Morrisons’ buzz are all asking the other person to DM their phone number and email to the Morrison account. I imagine this is to put it on a queue for their customer service desk to deal with.
I did not observe any attempt to address the feedback directly online. The DM leads potentially to some further engagement offline – via a phone call or email. This was borne out in Ian’s case and caused me to wonder – What do Morrisons’ customer think of this lack of readiness to engage completely online.
Morrisons is not being social on social media
A quick snapshot of Morrisons’ activities on Twitter show an account that is not about engagement (contrast this with @Waitrose). It is almost exclusively about pushing offers, tips and other canned responses out there (pardon the pun!). There is no seeking engagement nor responding to any tweets coming back in. They are missing a great opportunity to build rapport with their customers and do the other canned stuff in a way that would improve their their brand perception.
@Morrisons vs @Waitrose – who is more engaging on Twitter?
What About the Other Customers?
I approached the other twelve customers to whom Morrisons had auto-apologised on May 27th on Twitter, asking for their input in answering the above questions.
The responses were mixed. Five of the 12 other customers responded to my invitation. Their experiences were sometimes quite starkly different. Some didn’t get any further contact despite sending a DM replying and others got a mixed resolution from the extended engagement.
@missySimps replied to the auto-apology as a DM. She didn’t have any further engagement from Morrisons nor any resolution to the situation.
@tracySmith2k, @jakimccarthy, @pauldavid28 and @captainratall got a reply to their DM and a call. But their experience were also fairly different:
@tracySmith2k was uncomfortable with the call she received from the store manager – she felt it was confrontational- and would have preferred it was handled by an objective intermediary.
@jakimccarthy got to speak with the store manager who explained the situation to her and apologised again. She doesn’t know if they did anything to rectify the dirty fridges she complained about, but she felt heard and the experience has not put her off from shopping at Morrisons.
@pauldavid28 – was pretty pleased with how it was handled, how Morrisons engaged with him and how his query was finally resolved. Awesome!
@captainrat – got a call, had the issue resolved and even got a token of their apology. Great outcome!
What Does It All Mean?
Let’s do the math. We now know how 6 of the apologies that Morrisons made on May 27th turned out.
75% were happy with the level of engagement
50% had a resolution they were satisfied with
10% had no further engagement beyond the auto-apology.
I think Morrisons do have a desire to engage with their customers on social media. I also think there is a strategy to genuinely engage and resolve customers queries that are received from social media platforms, in this case Twitter. From the interactions I have had with their customers, they seem to understand the value of engagement, even if currently it is mostly about handling it offline.
They may be being a little cautious online and currently don’t do anymore than auto-respond. For example, their activity on twitter smacks of auto-everything. There don’t seem to be any humans at home, which is very strange for a social platform.
Clearly, in the instances where they engage with customers, they try and get the ‘right’ person to engage with the customer. In the cases I explored, it was almost always the store manager.
This is good – let the person who can do something about the issue deal with it. In only one instance did I find that this wasn’t satisfactory.
I must confess, I am disappointed with the whole auto-responding aspect of Morrisons’ social media operation – at least on Twitter (I didn’t do any Facebook exploration).
I am especially disappointed with their auto-apologising. An apology is supposed to be sincere and human. I think automating an apology – especially one in response to a complaint – cheapens it. Not such an issue if you almost immediately follow it with human engagement – like a phone call – where you can have the conversation.
But if, as in the case of @missySimps, all that was experienced was a nondescript, auto-reply – even one faked out with personalisation – it can feel insincere.
Making people think they got contacted by a human when it was just a program is pretty ‘Matrix’. Difference is ‘Matrix’ was cool and this isn’t.
Auto-responding communicates to me that they don’t really understand the power of social media or are being advised by people who don’t really understand the power of social media!
3 Things Morrisons Can Do To Improve
I’m all about improving and this post is primarily about giving Morrisons some feedback to sweeten its social media operation and let it complement the great work they are already designed to do with store manager calls etc.
So here goes, my top 3 things Morrisons can do better at:
Lose the auto-responders and put humans on the social media desk. With the low volumes of social interaction you currently have, you might not even have to hire more people right now. You can get software to route tweets to your customer service folk. But you must make sure they know how to use social media. Social is entirely about being human.
Something you can do right now, Morrisons, might be to completely de-personalise the auto replies, make them authentically robotic. For example, ditch the first name thing and reply with ‘We aren’t here right now, we auto followed you, so please DM us…’, then route them to the store manager and work your magic. First names are for humans to speak to humans.
Get tools that promote and facilitate online engagement. People chose to engage with you online, redirecting them to some offline mechanism might suit you but it usually just frustrates them. Oh, and shun those tools that promise to help you deal with scale. The scaling problem comes later. Focus on getting great with online engagement then fix the scaling problem. From a quick search on Twitter, @Morrisons gets about 10 mentions a day, most are not about them per se. And their bizbuzz page shows they are apologising an average of 3 times a day. This is the time to get in and get good with this exciting world of social media.
Be open about your journey in trying to delight your customers on social media. There is a growing generation that will love you for it. You might be thinking “we sell groceries, we don’t need social media”. Everyone is going to need social media. Your competitors are embracing it and once they are fully established in it, it will be almost impossible to wean customers off them.
Thanks!
I am deeply grateful to @missySimps, @tracysmith2k, @jakimmcarthy, @captainrat and @pauldavid28 for responding to my tweet and being so generous with their time to listen and engage with me on this topic. It helps to continually renew my faith that people want to be connected, be heard and to engage. Thank you.
I have a tax bill due. It is ‘tax on profits’ and while I have the money set aside to pay it, there is still a deep sense of hesitation to hand the money over.
Hold up, here comes the science bit. Long ago humans became collectives to live and hunt together, socialise and defend themselves against their common threats. Living together brings its benefits and its own unique complications and so they evolved their communities norms or codes of conduct to address those complications. Laws and taboos emerged, carried in the carrier oil of the day – usually fear of some super powerful deity (or deities). Later these became commandments, religious law and in some communities – constitutions and legal code. Living together also came with additional cost. The cost in time, effort and materials to do the common things and to maintain them. As money evolved, these costs were rolled eventually up into a tax.
Money made things simpler, but it also made some things more complicated – it changed and changes the relationship people have with their community. It is important – in my view – that the people in a community contribute time and effort to the community work and not simply pay for it.
Fundamentally I am socialist. I deeply believe we are better together. I believe our collective should work for the good of all, especially the least able of us. This costs money – I get that. I’m not against funding our collective. I’m pro-fair taxes and anti-waste.
Basically I’m pissed off about taxes
My current beef with taxes is around a fundamental thing – how it is spent. Not just my taxes but all government revenue.
I deeply disagree with how my taxes are spent in the UK. I did with the previous Labour government and even more so with the current LibCon artists. I don’t want to fund wars dressed up as collective defense. I don’t want to fund insidious espionage on me and my compatriots in the name of the bogeyman. I want better outcomes for the poorest in my community – this takes money and care that money cannot buy. I want an efficient administration, not one in the clutches of greedy corporations that spend the pot I contribute to as though it were free.
Without choice, proportional taxation is malignant.
I don’t get to choose how my taxes are spent – I mean real choice – that is heard and acted on. That leads me to deeply resent proportional taxation – the idea those who have more, pay more. In theory, I am happy to pay more, if I have more. But the dysfunction on how those taxes are spent has turned that dream into a nightmare. The more I make, the more guns are bought, the more waste there is. The more spying there is. The more bankers are bailed out. The more money is diverted away from the things I want to see improve and the more money that is channeled to the things I definitely do not. The more of my taxes go to make the greedy rich, richer. This is not what I want.
So as I was in the shower contemplating handing over a not insignificant sum of corporation taxes I wondered how to pay for our shared interests without screwing over the people that pay it.
What if there was a flat subscription to be British (or American or any other nationality)?
You sign up, get a welcome pack and a token that gives access all the services that are available. Services are provided and maintained by the collective administration. It won’t be run for profit. Clearly sometimes we have to buy in things we are incapable of producing ourselves and that is rolled into the subscriptions.
This would, of course, be a no contract subscription model. You can cancel anytime. You might still access the same services, but at full cost or you might not access any at all. If there was a better provider of citizenship, you had the choice to sign up to them. If fact, you could sign up to as many as you could afford – but remember at any one time, you are probably going to just use one set of services, mostly.
Subscription
The subscription model is a little different from online apps. We can figure out what the basic subscription is and people can pay that. We can also figure out what it is worth and people can contribute their skills to realise that worth. For example, a doctor might choose to provide 200 hours of medical cover to a community clinic in exchange for their subscription. They might do it to pay the subscription for their child too. Streets need cleaning, gardens need tending, meals need serving and the lonely need company – all are aspects of collective needs that are overlooked.
What really helps this is understand what collective needs are to be met to keep our collective thriving. It is not only money that makes the world go round!
The essentials
Everyone gets the essential services – wellness (include healthcare and basic nutrition), collective security, transportation, access to essential infrastructure and maintenance. Education is also essential, although a little different from other things. Any citizen can access learning to any level they choose, with a payback option if they decide to take go become filthy rich instead of contributing their expertise back into the community!
But what of national resources? They belong to everyone, some generate revenue and that goes into the pot along with the subs. We pay out of the pot to maintain them and provide open access to everyone to things like parks and spas etc.
We never borrow money our revenue can’t cover. Scratch that, we never borrow. Period.
In the end this might mean we grow at a pace that is sustainable. If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, we would invent lots!
There is still a market
The non essential stuff is provided by the market (yes there is still one). Basically it is everything that is not considered essential. Education is another funny one. You might buy specialised education on the market (with money from the collective pot). That, like all education, is an investment.
Sometime the lines are blurry , especially with spending our collective pot on things in the market. The distinction here is that the essential stuff is run not-for-profit – by whoever delivers it. This distinction is protected by the most binding of oaths. There is absolutely no screwing with that. By anyone. We might add to the list of essentials but almost never remove from it and even then only by referendum.
Administration is essential. The popular perception is that it is waste – after all it does not contribute to the services nor to the pot. My view is that it is not waste, but it is one of the areas that could be really wasteful.
What of corporate taxes? Well participants in the market who are not citizens would pay a fee to participate in the market. How much they pay would be linked to their level of participation in the market. Not yet sure this is based on profit. Nonetheless, but they would be bound by our laws on how they operate within our market including labor practices and protections.
Entitlement
There is entitlement. If you pay your subs or you contribute it’s equivalent in community work, you are entitled to use the services. Simple.
There are exceptions, to the ‘pay/contribute and be entitled’ rule. For those who cannot pay and who cannot contribute in other ways , for example the severely disabled or chronically ill. Our collective will subsidise them. Clearly there is a limit to how much subsidy (how many can be subsidised and/or subsidy per person) but I am currently not sure how that would work. Though I suspect there are some services that do not cost more, the more people who use them and so in real terms, the subsidy may not be substantial. There are exceptions.
Children could be subscribed by their parents. There would be no automatic citizenship and you can change whenever you want. If you want choice, then it applies across the board.
Transparency, absolute transparency
For this to work, we need absolute transparency. Everything that needs doing is public so that the others in the collective can contribute. We already know what we all pay (the same rate subs). We’ll also need to know the the size of the pot – including other revenue that feeds it – it needs to be constantly accessible and perpetually accurate. We need to see and know every penny spent and to whom and for what. The actual cost of our administration is available to scrutiny by anyone. It is the accountability that transparency engenders that will help check the waste. Transparency does not come for free, it has to be paid for also – in money and in vigilance.
Transparency takes away some of issues we are currently stuck at. For example being transparent with entitlement means that the decision on identity cards – the usual form the token that provides access to services take – would be a no-brainer. If you access services, you need a token. This token, incidentally, is also your travel card. It shows you are a paid up member of that collective and can travel under its flag.
Pensions
One area of contention for me is pensions. With this model, your subs pay for what you use now. The current public pensions crisis , in my opinion, is borne out of the shortsightedness of its creators. Basically they started with noble intentions and then they found, almost immediately, it didn’t work. So they lied. They took money they were supposed to save for ‘future’ and used it to fund the now and took the ‘now’ money of taxpayers (in the future) to pay the pensioners whose money they had already spent. It is an elaborate ‘robbing Peter to pay Grandpa Paul’ scam.
So in this model , I do not consider pensions an essential service covered by subs. If you want one, you contribute separately and you buy one that suits your circumstances from the market. We can agree that you must have one, but where you get it from is up to you. To make things easy, we might collect it as part of subs, but it doesn’t go into the pot. It goes directly to the pension provider you bough it from. That way the mandatory aspect is enforced.
Clearly in the future you can use that revenue to continue to be a subscribed member of the collective.
Explore with me
This is an evolving idea. Though it might make you feel uneasy – ideas can do that – please help me explore it. As I wrote this, I thought we are pretty close in some aspects.
What might be the gaps and how might we close them. What would you consider to be our collective needs. Which are essential and which are not. Would you pay for a monarchy for example?
How might the administration be created without the drunkenness that power inspires? I’m open to ideas!
Are we better off remodeling our current system or starting from scratch?
What are your thoughts? I’d love to know and share.
