Tag Archives: life

How to confuse a Belgian call-center operator

Posted by on May 30, 2012 No comments

I love my job as a software engineer. I love it so much, in fact, that whenever I have time, I do it for free by working on open-source software and writing about software development on this excuse for a blog.

I am, therefore, highly aware that some people don’t enjoy their jobs. Call centers, for example, which will be the focus for this example.

When I lived in the UK, call centers were a fact of life. Anytime you needed to call your bank, your car insurance, your ISP, whatever, it’s a call center. Anytime you need to call one of those places because there was an issue or they’d screwed up in some way, there would be a call center operative doing their job by taking your call. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they would be extremely helpful because that’s the best way to enjoy your job – do it well, and try to get some satisfaction out of it. One time out of a hundred, they would be…um…anywhere on a range of not-so-helpful through to downright rude and obstructive.

Call centers, as far as I can make out, are set up to do three things – field calls, field calls that are complaints, and field complaints against the call center personnel. There is one category that it seems they’re not set up to deal with.

When you call a call center and the call ends, occasionally you’ll have a little touch-tone survey. “Did the operative help you? Press 1 for yes, or 2 for no”. Press 1 or 2, and you’ll get a cheery “Thank you for your feedback”. This is not the way to collect satisfaction data – or, at least, it’s not the way to collect anything other than the coarsest-grained data possible. The survey may as well be tone-sensitive and ask you to fart or belch to indicate your level of satisfaction.

Personally, I make a point of explicitly thanking people when they’ve been helpful. If the calls are recorded (which they invariably are, for “training purposes”), then you would hope it would show up. I also think those tapes are only used for the training purposes of lawyers when the company in question is getting sued. That’s why I also like to speak or contact the operative’s manager to pass on my positive thoughts on their performance.

Fast forward through two years of living in Belgium, and I’m back in call center land. I just signed up with Lampiris as my new utility provider, and there was an issue with my on-line sign-up. I got in touch with the service center and the guy I spoke to – in English, of course, despite the fact I’m living in Belgium – resolved the issue, looked at the root cause of the issue and got me to where I want to be in the sign-up process. I am one happy bunny.

So I ask to speak to his manager, at which point he gets a little bit confused. Now, customer service in Belgium is not what you would call satisfactory – in the majority of cases, you feel like you’ve achieved something when asking customer services anything if they haven’t poured sugar into your fuel tank as a response. Consequently, when you do get not just good but excellent customer service, you feel inordinately happy – maybe this is a country-wide long-term strategy, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

But I digress – I asked to speak to the guy’s manager, and he got confused and asked why. I briefly explained my philosophy, and he went off to get his manager (another difference to UK call centers – there, it seems the lines are constantly monitored by people issues can be referred to). The eventual outcome of this – his manager had stepped out for a minute. What a kick in the nuts! I put up with crappy customer service all the time, and when I want to express my satisfaction, there’s no-one there I can do it to!

I think I’ll file this one under “thoughts”.

Sometimes, it’s like the internet never happened – listen and learn, Disney

Posted by on April 8, 2012 No comments

Ever read Freakonomics? There’s a great chapter on how internet-accessible information drove down insurance premiums massively. The same story can be found in many places – but some companies are apparently completely oblivious to this.

Which is the specific company that triggered this blog post? Disney – Disneyland Paris, to be exact.

On visiting their site, I immediately got redirected to the Belgian version of their website. While my level of Dutch is good enough to deal with this, I do prefer English just for speed of reading so I switched to the UK website. I looked up 5 nights in a specific hotel, 2 adults, 1 five-year-old child, starting August 1st. The resulting price – £1338. Expensive, but about what you would expect from Disney. For comparison, the currency converter at OANDA converts this at today’s rate to €1620.70.

Now, having lived in Belgium for some time, and being acutely aware of how expensive it is, I decided to check out the same deal from the Belgian website. Same people, same date, same duration. The result this time? A jaw-dropping €2306. Since this doesn’t include transport, it would be cheaper for me to drive to the UK, turn around, drive to Paris and have the holiday than just drive 3 hours south and have the same exact holiday. What would Al Gore say about this carbon impact?

This goes completely against the concept that people won’t pay 10 for something when information is freely and easily available that indicates they should be paying 5. It does take into account the inherent laziness of some people, and the fact that some people are unaware of this information. For people who are aware of this info, and are willing to do something about it (i.e. me) it’s a complete insult. It’s also a great incentive to not go to Disney.

Remember, the democratization of information the web has brought doesn’t mean anything if you don’t vote! In the meantime, let’s call this a fail for Disney.

Moving job, house and country using good engineering practices

Posted by on June 13, 2010 No comments

Summer is almost here, the days are long and my good lady wife and I have decided to sell our house here in England and move over to Belgium (my wife is Belgian) for the rest of our lives.

Some things that need to happen to enable this decision are
a) moving house
b) moving job
c) moving contents of said house to another country

It has been said that moving house and changing jobs are two of the most stressful things you can do. Throw in the international element, and the fact we have a three year old daughter, and this could potentially make us all a tad irritable. While there’s no silver bullet for solving all the logistical issues that are going to arise, I think that using good software engineering practices can take the edge off.

1. Co-ordination
What’s the best way for me to remember what needs doing? What’s the best way to divide tasks logically between my wife and myself? How can I keep track of what’s already been done?

Important questions, and the answer is just the same as when working on a project – use good tools! In this case, Jira is providing the heavy lifting – you can buy a 10-user license for US$10, and for that you can give yourself the ability to manage all the tasks for yourself and others from anywhere. Projects and categories mean the work can be divided logically. Works best if you have a server running at home you can expose to the internet.

2. Small changes aggregate into big features
Or, to put it another way, use small boxes! Using big boxes may have the psychological benefit of clearing a lot of items from site, but they are
a) heavy, possibly too heavy
b) unwieldy
c) not as flexible when it comes to transport or storage.

Small boxes, on the other hand, allow you to control the weight of the box more easily – a large box of books weighs a *lot*, and if you don’t throw your back out it’s still possible the contents will drop through the bottom when you pick it up! Another psychological benefit is you fill more boxes more often, and it feels like you’re making real headway into the packing.

More importantly, small boxes allow you to…

3. Release early, release often
Since we’re driving over to Belgium every couple of weeks for various reasons (looking at houses, job interviews…) it makes sense to take some of those small boxes with us, and leave them in a rented storage space (or friend’s garage). This has the benefit of creating more working space in the house – boxes aren’t building up with no immediate place to go – and reducing the number of boxes we need to move over in one go on the big day.

4. Constantly refactor
This is a good opportunity to locate things you no longer need, or items you have unnecessary multiples of, and get rid of them. By starting early on the packing process, this gives you the opportunity to freecycle or sell things instead of just taking the down to the dump.

Not an exact fit?
It’s impossible to make one discipline fit another exactly without a little massaging, but I think try to apply to activity A skills learned in activity B will often provide new ways of approaching a problem, or help to anticipate issues that haven’t yet arisen.

I also think that software development provides a more useful model than most – I’ve tried to avoid really forcing the two together (“hey, let’s treat potential buyers as peer reviewers!”), but since we tend to blend a wide range of practices and have lots of shiny tools for managing work it’s easy to use engineering practices on major life-related projects.