Watched this fantastic documentary. Really good. Delivers on the trailer. Also makes you think about the upside of FIFA's venality - the way great football facilities are pushed into every corner of the earth.
Failure waste - a story
(I have to admit this upfront, this is one of those complaining-about-shitty-service-disguised-as-thoughts-about-service-design blog posts. I'm sorry. It just is. It's just one of the characteristics of shitty service that you have to vent somehow, it puts you in such a strangely helpless mindset and you have to tell someone, in my case the three people who still follow the RSS. Sorry. Look at what they make you give.)
We've got an old Nissan. It needed an MOT. I went to this site and a very efficient service let me find my nearest dealer, pick a free slot in their service schedule and book an MOT. They even offered to pick up the car and return it. And, since the first slot was between 8am and 9am, I went for that.It's hard for us to be in for that sort of thing otherwise.
I was rather bowled over by how smooth the whole thing was.
They even sent us a spiffy and reassuring confirmation email.
And then the trouble started.
We'd booked it in for the Monday morning. So, on the previous Thursday, just feeling that it couldn't be this simple I called them to confirm that everything was still on. They had no record of my booking whatsoever. The reference number meant nothing to them. It wasn't on their system.
It subsequently emerged that the system I'd used to book the service was entirely separate from the one they used, relying on someone to manually transfer the booking. This hadn't happened, creating two opposing versions of the truth. My version of the truth where they were crazily insisting I had no booking and their version of the truth where I was crazily insisting I had.
The email above is not, apparently, a confirmation that I had made a service booking, it's a confirmation that I had requested a service booking.
I was, then, of course, instantly forced into being a difficult customer.
I knew, in order to get the MOT slot I'd booked, around which we'd arranged our week, I'd have to be an arse. So I argued for half an hour until they relented, went round their system and agreed to send someone to pick up the car.
They then asked for an address and realised that we live in Central London. It's a nightmare for them to get to, there's no free parking near us, and together we identified another failure in the website booking system - it should probably have an exclusion zone around Central London. They're in Mill Hill, it is not economic for them to be servicing cars around us, but, sadly, for their profitability, the website said they did.
They agreed to send someone to collect the car on Monday, as originally booked.
They sent someone on Friday morning.
I sent them away again. Monday, I said, Monday.
And, then, you know what, it was just an averagely bad experience with a car dealer. They quoted prices that made no sense, their systems didn't tell them we had an extended warranty, they never called back when they said they would, just the stuff you expect. And getting the car back again demanded more arsey behaviour because they're not equipped to deliver to our part of town. But, you know, not especially bad, just typically bad.
And all this cost us just £40. Just £40. They can't be making money on it. I assume it's some sort of loss leader arrangement - trying to get our ongoing service business. Well, sadly, that's all loss and no leader.
Thoughts occur:
1. A well-built, properly researched web service would have made this problem go away. I bet they scrimped on it, to save a bit of money. It's going to cost them a fortune in costs they can't track.
2. This is why you need to own your own systems and be able to iterate. I just tried to make the same booking again, it's still perfectly possible. I bet it will be for years. The people at the coalface need to be able to get these things fixed. I bet they can't. I bet 'the system' seems so immutable they don't even ask.
3. But even if they'd invested a bit more it was bound to fail sometime. Everything fails in some way at some time. You have to assume that, you have to create a system and a culture that can swiftly escape the failure loop and find a good solution. "I'm sorry Mr Davies, we seem to have screwed up, let's see what we can do to work this out." But, instead, these service failures force you into an oppositional relationship with the service people. They were all trying to do the right thing, they were all patient and polite. Once I'd made it clear I wasn't backing down they went around their systems and made it all work. But they could have done that earlier. They could have a sanctioned escape loop, not one that relies on a customer injecting sufficient aggro into the machine. Clearly they're not at fault either, they blame the central Nissan system, so they're trapped in the same loop I am. It's just horrible. These service arguments leave me feeling as drained as Jason Bourne.
4. This is why I would buy a Tesla. (If you could get a second-hand one for £5k). Not because it's a battery car but because it's a car from an internet era business. It's a service model wrapped round a car. Not a car lumbered with a legacy dealer network.
5. I bet things like this explains a massive slice of the productivity gap. Imagine if we were actually good at the internet, imagine how productive we'd be then.
Podcast notes
I posted a 'podcast' yesterday. Here it is again.
And here are some links and pictures of the things we talked about. And a couple of things we should have.
Alex is here. Matt blogs here.
Alex does IOT London. Matt does hardware-ish coffee mornings.
Kevin Ashton on the internet of things. Internet of things - a history. Ubicomp.
Cisco's - internet of everything.
The Good Night Lamp.
The Nabaztag. (And a bonus botanicalls).
Natalie Jeremijenko's Dangling String.
(And one we should have mentioned: bubblino)
Cloudwash: the connected washing machine from Berg on Vimeo.
Brutal
Went to see The Brutalist Playground at RIBA. You can imagine what I was imagining. Lots of drawings and information and small type and long words about council estates and and architecture and play.
This kind of vibe:
(Which is a good kind of vibe. That's why I went.)
But, of course, you imagine there'll be nothing for actual kids to do. Bloody architects!
Well, I couldn't have been more wrong.
All there seems to be, in fact, is some brutalist looking soft play. The sort of structures you see on the website rendered in soft foam and being crawled all over by kids. Magnificent. Modernists - this is where to take your toddlers!
If you want to actually read anything about brutalist playgrounds, you can pick up a free newspaper but most of the good stuff is on the site. I guess that's the right way to do things - make the exhibition about the actual physical thing, put the information online - but it requires careful management of expectations, especially if you're going to be so brutally focused.
Don't go expecting to learn, go expecting to clamber.