Dealing with a customer complaint is an art.
We have the great joy of running a car park. One day, when we have the time and energy, we will gather together some of the excuses that folks use to justify why they should not pay a parking fine and publish them here. Many produce the most wonderfully convoluted arguments which double back on themselves to avoid the simple admission 'OK, guv. It's a fair cop.'
The wind turns tickets face down or blows up through the air conditioning units to blow them into the foot well. Then here are the sob stories: 'I had two children and a pushchair and I had just got back from shopping and one of the children was screaming and ...'
Then there are the urban myths 'Your clock was wrong' or 'I only overstayed by two minutes and ...' not knowing there are actually fifteen minutes' grace. Or the malicious one 'The wardens are known to open car doors which have been left unlocked and ...'
But I digress. Here is one of our own about which we are still puzzling. It was from an investment house we will call simply Nice Unit Trust. To precis it, the story runs:
December 2012 - Us: Please close our account. Nice Unit Trust: Will do
March 2013 - NUT sent through the usual vast wodge of papers showing that we still had about £40. Us: Please close this account. NUT: Will do, here is a cheque for the balance
June - NUT sent through the usual vast wodge of papers showing that we now had £0.17 in our account
August - NUT: Here is a fascinating magazine all about how we invest your money. Us: It is awfully difficult to close an account with you, isn't it. Please close this account. Don't bother to send us the £0.17, simply give it to charity. NUT: Thank you for your instructions, here is a piece of paper confirming that we have closed the account
November - this is where it gets surreal - NUT: Thank you for your complaint (?). Please accept apologies for the delay in replying. we will 'investigate' your complaint. As your complaint was received 8 weeks ago mutter, mutter Ombudsman ... enclosed were a leaflet and a Complaint Handling Policy
NUT (in a letter dated two days later): Apologies ... appreciate your patience ... list of the dates on which things happened ... accept apologies for any inconvenience ... and here is a cheque for £25 'in recognition of the fact that we failed to investigate and respond to the complaint within an acceptable time period'
Collapse of stout parties. So we now have a cheque for £25 for a complaint that we did not make. Nice Unit Trust have spent far too much money chopping down trees and on postage and now they compound the problem by spending another £25. Know any good charities anyone?
Now back to my car park letters: 'And precisely why did you leave your Doberman in your car with your parking ticket in its jaws ...?'
Saturday, 30 November 2013
Monday, 21 October 2013
The Life of Brian
There was a great fuss when the film came out which culminated in one of the great television debates of the age when Cleese and Palin met Muggeridge and Stockwood. Muggeridge and Stockwood vs Cleese and Palin
The idea that we should learn about religion to understand the jokes in a film which was condemned by leading churchmen when it came out, rather than for any moral improvement has a special educational charm.
And if we have to learn about religion to understand the jokes then what about Romans go Home? Come on you Latin teachers, join the fight. Only someone with a grounding in Latin - preferably from Kennedy's First Eating (sic) Primer, but from the Cambridge Latin Course if you are younger - would begin to understand the scene. Surely this is a reason to learn Latin as well as RE 'so that we can understand the jokes in the film.'
How times change; or Tempora mutantur as Latinists might say. Definitely one for the Vicar of Bray.
Monday, 30 September 2013
Translation required ...
The following arrived today
Knowledge Co-Creation between Organisations and the Public
Call for Participation in the XXX Workshop which will be held on [Date] in YYYY
Inspired by concepts such as collective intelligence, citizen science, citizen journalism and crowdsourcing, diverse types of organisations are aiming to increase engagement with the public, collect localised knowledge, or leverage human cognition and creativity. In supporting these approaches, organisations are often provoked to make their data and processes more open, and to be inclusive of differing motivations and perspectives from inside and outside the organisation. In doing so, they raise new questions for both designers and organisations:
How are systems designed to manage data, attribute work, or draw boundaries between ”official” and externally generated knowledge? How can openness support collaborations across organisations as well as with the public where there are shared interests?
How can the professional framed context and metadata standards be connected with the just-in-time, emergent nature of amateur online collection and curation? Is the role of the professional changed by these innovations?
How can systems be designed to leverage complementary or differing motivations, and how do we conceptualise these in design? How to prompt amateurs’ contributions that may be of value for institutions and users?
Any offers on what it means?
The email attached to it ended '... one of the most relevant conferences on social computing. Hope you will find it of interest!' Um ...
Knowledge Co-Creation between Organisations and the Public
Call for Participation in the XXX Workshop which will be held on [Date] in YYYY
Inspired by concepts such as collective intelligence, citizen science, citizen journalism and crowdsourcing, diverse types of organisations are aiming to increase engagement with the public, collect localised knowledge, or leverage human cognition and creativity. In supporting these approaches, organisations are often provoked to make their data and processes more open, and to be inclusive of differing motivations and perspectives from inside and outside the organisation. In doing so, they raise new questions for both designers and organisations:
How are systems designed to manage data, attribute work, or draw boundaries between ”official” and externally generated knowledge? How can openness support collaborations across organisations as well as with the public where there are shared interests?
How can the professional framed context and metadata standards be connected with the just-in-time, emergent nature of amateur online collection and curation? Is the role of the professional changed by these innovations?
How can systems be designed to leverage complementary or differing motivations, and how do we conceptualise these in design? How to prompt amateurs’ contributions that may be of value for institutions and users?
Any offers on what it means?
The email attached to it ended '... one of the most relevant conferences on social computing. Hope you will find it of interest!' Um ...
Monday, 23 September 2013
Lacking in vision?
A current favourite is a poem by Kipling called the Gods of the Copybook Headings. This argues that the old sayings have stood the test of time and are much better guides than following the call of the market: Kipling in his reactionary phase, perhaps.
It contains some wonderful lines which are so appropriate for some of the funding bodies, agencies and bureaucracies with which we deal. The best is the verse:
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
How often we are told the obvious as if it were some new discovery ...
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
How could we possibly think that bureaucrats were 'lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind ...'?
Unheard of. They have lists of boxes that need ticking.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place ...
Good customer-responsive stuff then. Or try:
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch ...
By now you should be beginning to say yeeeees! ...
Love the lines; we just wish Kipling's conclusion was not so backward-looking.
It contains some wonderful lines which are so appropriate for some of the funding bodies, agencies and bureaucracies with which we deal. The best is the verse:
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
How often we are told the obvious as if it were some new discovery ...
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
How could we possibly think that bureaucrats were 'lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind ...'?
Unheard of. They have lists of boxes that need ticking.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place ...
Good customer-responsive stuff then. Or try:
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch ...
By now you should be beginning to say yeeeees! ...
Love the lines; we just wish Kipling's conclusion was not so backward-looking.
Monday, 19 August 2013
Belbin strikes back ...
... or the rise of the Monitor/Evaluator.
We have just been reading through a thrilling 340 page document called a Business Survival Toolkit. This includes some 69 different rather 'tools' for business planning drawing largely on the works of various academics. For those of us who have been around a bit, it is notable that few of the basics have changes much from the work of the great business thinkers of the post-War generation: people like Hawthorne, Herzberg and Maslow whose work was so able summarised by people like Charles Handy and others. A new generation must have its say, however (Smith & Jones 2013).
Somewhere deep inside this riveting document is a quotation from someone called Richard Piper of the NCVO (National Council of Voluntary Organisations). He says:
Some people in our sector concentrate more on the technical problem of measuring outcomes, and less on the strategic problem of achieving them. This is a disease, an affliction, and we can call it measurement anxiety. It can paralyse us and it seems to be contagious.
It goes on to describe an exercise in which he asked 50 people to word associate with 'outcomes' and 48 of them mentioned something about assessment or measurement.
Now this is interesting for three reasons. The easy one is that we all know it has happened and has become endemic over the last twenty years leading to paralysis of action. The word Ofsted is enough to send quivers through any teacher's bloodstream as Accreditation should in the Museum world: inspection and measurement by those who can't of those who can and are doing their damnedest to do better.
We have mentioned before Einstein's remark that Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. This should be written over every Monitor/Evaluator's desk.
The second is that someone is brave enough to say it out loud, knowing that a whole cohort of assessors will round on him from a great height and claim that they are absolutely convinced that achieving objectives is the Most Important thing and that their systems are designed to be Entirely Helpful... a this will hurt me much more than it hurts you response.
The third is that he seems to have been quoted as saying it and this suggests that the report writers approve of what he is saying. This is a document of 340 pages almost wholly given over to the thoughts of academics setting out the 'best practice' way of doing things which, you guessed it, include lots and lots of monitoring and evaluation. And being the work of academics even the most banal or self-evident remark is referenced (Smith & Robinson 2013) but that is a topic for another time (Mumblings, date to be announced).
Every Belbin group needs its different role-players, even including Monitor/Evaluators, but when they start to impose their vision of how business should be done, acting as judge and jury, we do feel inclined to agree with the old ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace, that they would be much happier with a nice dose of elderflower cordial which, you may recall, contained something less harmless to end the existence of those who were lonely or did not have a fulfilling life. It would do wonders for this particular disease or affliction.
We have just been reading through a thrilling 340 page document called a Business Survival Toolkit. This includes some 69 different rather 'tools' for business planning drawing largely on the works of various academics. For those of us who have been around a bit, it is notable that few of the basics have changes much from the work of the great business thinkers of the post-War generation: people like Hawthorne, Herzberg and Maslow whose work was so able summarised by people like Charles Handy and others. A new generation must have its say, however (Smith & Jones 2013).
Somewhere deep inside this riveting document is a quotation from someone called Richard Piper of the NCVO (National Council of Voluntary Organisations). He says:
Some people in our sector concentrate more on the technical problem of measuring outcomes, and less on the strategic problem of achieving them. This is a disease, an affliction, and we can call it measurement anxiety. It can paralyse us and it seems to be contagious.
It goes on to describe an exercise in which he asked 50 people to word associate with 'outcomes' and 48 of them mentioned something about assessment or measurement.
Now this is interesting for three reasons. The easy one is that we all know it has happened and has become endemic over the last twenty years leading to paralysis of action. The word Ofsted is enough to send quivers through any teacher's bloodstream as Accreditation should in the Museum world: inspection and measurement by those who can't of those who can and are doing their damnedest to do better.
We have mentioned before Einstein's remark that Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. This should be written over every Monitor/Evaluator's desk.
The second is that someone is brave enough to say it out loud, knowing that a whole cohort of assessors will round on him from a great height and claim that they are absolutely convinced that achieving objectives is the Most Important thing and that their systems are designed to be Entirely Helpful... a this will hurt me much more than it hurts you response.
The third is that he seems to have been quoted as saying it and this suggests that the report writers approve of what he is saying. This is a document of 340 pages almost wholly given over to the thoughts of academics setting out the 'best practice' way of doing things which, you guessed it, include lots and lots of monitoring and evaluation. And being the work of academics even the most banal or self-evident remark is referenced (Smith & Robinson 2013) but that is a topic for another time (Mumblings, date to be announced).
Every Belbin group needs its different role-players, even including Monitor/Evaluators, but when they start to impose their vision of how business should be done, acting as judge and jury, we do feel inclined to agree with the old ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace, that they would be much happier with a nice dose of elderflower cordial which, you may recall, contained something less harmless to end the existence of those who were lonely or did not have a fulfilling life. It would do wonders for this particular disease or affliction.
Friday, 9 August 2013
Who are you?
We have just had one of those delightful conversations with an insurance company. It went along the following lines:
Me: Hello, I would like to cancel my insurance policy and receive its surrender value.
Them: Can I just confirm your identity: what is your policy number?
Me: [reads out the number]
Them: What is the first line of your address?
Me: [gives it]
Them: What is your date of birth?
Me: [gives it]
Them: When did you start this policy?
Me: (reading from a letter they recently sent me) February 1988
Them: How much have you been paying monthly?
Me: I think it is about £18 a month
Them: OK, I shall send you a form to close the thing down … we will need evidence of identity for both you and your wife.
Me (thinks): So you have been taking £18 a month off us for over 25 years and only now, when we want OUR money back, do you even think to ask us to prove who we are. What if we had been funding this policy by some criminal activity all these years?
Me: Hello, I would like to cancel my insurance policy and receive its surrender value.
Them: Can I just confirm your identity: what is your policy number?
Me: [reads out the number]
Them: What is the first line of your address?
Me: [gives it]
Them: What is your date of birth?
Me: [gives it]
Them: When did you start this policy?
Me: (reading from a letter they recently sent me) February 1988
Them: How much have you been paying monthly?
Me: I think it is about £18 a month
Them: OK, I shall send you a form to close the thing down … we will need evidence of identity for both you and your wife.
Me (thinks): So you have been taking £18 a month off us for over 25 years and only now, when we want OUR money back, do you even think to ask us to prove who we are. What if we had been funding this policy by some criminal activity all these years?
Thursday, 8 August 2013
Cold calling letter
We received a letter this week from a company with whom we have not done business who claim to be 'Winning Contracts for [County]'. They presumably want our business. Why do we feel an instinctive desire to put it straight in the bin?
I am writing to tell you about a new project supporting the social economy and to invite you to participate in a survey that will help us to tailor this and future projects to your needs. (So I fill in a survey which allows you to tailor your products ... about which I so far know nothing ... to which of my needs?).
[Our scheme] is a project that aims to increase the number and size of contracts being won by social enterprises in [county] by facilitating business development, collaboration and engagement of potential product and service buyers. (Nothing like a good bit of facilitating ... it's those fleas again)
We are conducting a survey to identify the drivers and barriers for growth and scaling up of social enterprises in the area. The results of the study will enable us all to understand where to focus resources to benefit enterprises like yours ...
If you are interested in winning new or bigger contracts for your enterprise - or engaging with prime contractors of services - we would love to help ... (And your knowledge, expertise, experience and understanding of our sector is what?)
Are you any the wiser as to what they are offering and why we might be tempted to waste time on their survey?
No 1 file, I think.
I am writing to tell you about a new project supporting the social economy and to invite you to participate in a survey that will help us to tailor this and future projects to your needs. (So I fill in a survey which allows you to tailor your products ... about which I so far know nothing ... to which of my needs?).
[Our scheme] is a project that aims to increase the number and size of contracts being won by social enterprises in [county] by facilitating business development, collaboration and engagement of potential product and service buyers. (Nothing like a good bit of facilitating ... it's those fleas again)
We are conducting a survey to identify the drivers and barriers for growth and scaling up of social enterprises in the area. The results of the study will enable us all to understand where to focus resources to benefit enterprises like yours ...
If you are interested in winning new or bigger contracts for your enterprise - or engaging with prime contractors of services - we would love to help ... (And your knowledge, expertise, experience and understanding of our sector is what?)
Are you any the wiser as to what they are offering and why we might be tempted to waste time on their survey?
No 1 file, I think.
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