Time to waste? Prozac beats Travian hollow. Travian sucks!

I had some time to kill.  You know, that time in between having a good idea and waiting for your brain to get it right before making the idea work.  So I tried Travian.

Travian is a drug.  Seriously.  Try Travian and the drug takes hold very fast.

It's a game, allegedly.  Well, no.  It is a real game that is fun, allegedly.  All you need is a browser and to take leave of your senses, and  Travian does the rest.

You build a village and make alliances with other village chiefs to conquer the known world.  It's a real time browser based economics and warfare simulation game.  For the first age some weirdo avatar told me what to do.  Then I was on my own.

First impressions?

Well, have you ever driven the slowest car in the world, and then hitched a caravan to it?  Trust me, it gets slower as you play it.

Best yet, if the people who got in early ever find you they'll nuke you.  Yup, the little guy just can't win!  

"Real time" is a joke.  The time is so real you can imagine them sitting down and having meetings inside the game.  It takes for EVER to play even a single action.  I'm waiting now and have been for the past two hours, to have enough resources to let me upgrade a wheat field!  In another two hours I'll have enough.  That's why you need Prozac.

I should have known when the validation email took 30 minutes to arrive when I started.  They wanted me to get used to being bored out of my skull!

If you want to play a serious game you need to use real money to buy fake gold to spend inside the game.  Without "gold" my wheat production would fall below the level of production my game people need to have in order to eat.

Look, I'm rambling.  That's Travian for you.  Thousands of worldwide players all watching the production figures on their resources grow with excruciating slowness while they wonder if anything is going to happen, and all about to be nuked by an early player who is big and hardcore.

Travian.....  For insomniacs everywhere.  Even nerds find it terrible!

Test that website! Even though it worked last week, test it now!

Remember I castigated Pizza GoGo?  Well something happened.  They do have a problem, but that problem is not poor brand awareness.

I had a call last evening from a charming man who said he was having an evening of difficult phone calls.  His job is to handle web site lodged complaints, and they all arrived in a rush last night!  Some of them go back a long way.  He's not having a nice time, but he's shouldered the responsibility for calling each and every person who left a phone number and is emailing the rest.

Their site let them down.  At least it retained the messages!  But they were delivered very late, in some cases so late that brand damage had been done.

When was the last time you actually tested your web site to see that it was working properly?

I don't just mean the forms, either.  Dial the phone numbers and see who answers.  Use the email addresses and see who answers.  check out "privacy@", "abuse@" and some other common ones.  See what happens.  Check your user experience out.  Do it from a mystery account, obviously.

Pizza GoGo do not like leaflet delivery operatives walking across lawns.  They view it as something that gets in the way of the first customer experience.  That is being handled.  More important, by serious distaste for them has also been handled.  I may or may not buy a pizza from them, but now they have an even chance.  I buy pizza very rarely, though!

Are they checking their website?

You betcha! 

So, what about yours?  Will you check that or will you leave it to someone else?

Marketing, Honda and The Recession

I was invited, and went, to test drive the new Honda Insight.  I went because, if my right foot is light enough, I can win some goodies.  And I do, at some point, think I ought to have a hybrid car.  And I like my little Honda Jazz (or Honda Fit in the USA).

So She Who Must Be Obeyed at All Times and I bimbled over to the showroom and the very nice man who let us buy the Jazz from him 18 months ago showed us the Insight.

Honda has upgraded the styling on the Civic to dump old fuddy duddies, so imagine my surprise when it looked a but like an updated Accord.  The product is positioned firmly as "Retirement Car" and requires you to be dead already.

I keep trying to work out product positioning with Honda.  The Jazz doesn't seem to have a position.  The Insight?  Sixth Sense.  Haley Joel Osment sees them.  Dead people.

This is not a sexy hybrid.

That's a shame.  I got 55.1 miles to the imperial gallon on the test drive.  My Jazz gives me 40+, and I can approach 50 on a really good day if I'm not in a hurry.  As I drove the nice salesman asked me what I thought of it.

Well, it's unexceptional to drive.  The view in the rear view mirror is execrable, and the digital speedometer annoyed me at once.  Speed is analogue.  And the gizmos that showed me when the electricity was powering the car and when petrol was doing it, plus five trees with leaves or not, they annoyed me beyond belief.

The load space is full of batteries, and it looks like a Toyota Prius.  Like bran it's obviously good for you.  Never buy one in beige!

But the marketing is odd.  The salesman knows I don't like it, and don't want it.  So he's calling me later this week to confirm that!  That happens even though I said "Please don't bother, I'm not going to buy one."

Honda, though, is about to cut workers' pay in the UK.  It needs to sell cars.  But I can't smell any incentives.  Trade in on my Jazz, bought not new 18 months ago for £11,000 is £7,200.  An Insight will set me back £16,500 or so.  No zero percentage finances, no special offers, nothing.

From this I deduce that there is no recession, at least at Honda.

This time last year they could sell all they could make.  This year seems to feel the same, but they're cutting assembly workers' pay.

I still want a hybrid.  But I can wait.

British Gas can provide customer service, if pushed hard enough!

It takes an effort of will and serious determination, but British Gas can be made to provide customer service.  I just succeeded, but I had to be assertive.

I pay by monthly budget direct debit, and they had managed to achieve a whole month's worth of my money in advance.  Nice going.  For them!  So I called and asked them to recalculate, which they did.

"This will start from the April payment, sir.  March will be the current payment"

So, I've been overpaying during a cold winter, and, as it goes into spring, and my usage gets less because it is also getting lighter, I get to overpay more.  I thought not.  So I explained that this would happen from the March payment, which is on 27th March.

"We can't do that, sir.  We sent the request to the bank 14 days in advance to make sure there were sufficient funds available."

That's a new excuse.  That one I have not heard before.  14 days in advance, eh?

So I explained that they would be making the change, that they were able to make the change, that they had just spoken total unmitigated bull, and that I would wait.

Lo and behold they were indeed able to make that change.  I did have to explain that I was the customer and their job was to provide customer service.  It seems that a manager (shock, horror, we had to bother such a high ranking mortal) had to cancel the old direct debit6 and create a new one.  Well whooopeeedoooo!

So these people wanted more of my money in advance before giving me any back.  Ye gods!  But, in the end, a very determined customer was able to get customer service.  Boy do you have to stand your ground against a point blank refusal to co-operate though.

At least the call was free.

On being a customer

I was asked to write a short guest piece for my friends at 1 to 1 media.  A great many of their topics are about CRM.

Now CRM is, in my view, a culture, not implementation of a large and unwieldy piece of software.  And you know that I view Customer Service very much as a part of Marketing, so I penned (do we still pen?) a piece on what being a customer means, especially when you mishandle me.  It's called On Being a Customer.

And it asks you for your experiences.

The BBC's Botnet controlled 22,000 home computers

This is the report I saw today in Computer Weekly.

How can that have been legal? If you or I did that we'd have been prosecuted under the Computer Misuse Act wouldn't we?

Now I know that the vast millions out there are totally unaware that their damned PC has been compromised and is running someone else's crap, but that's no reason for the BBC to perpetrate an attack, is it?  

Follow the link, read the article, watch the video and then start asking questions.

When the journalist becomes the news isn't it time for the journalist to go?  And also the producer and the people who signed the programme off.  In reality this is as offensive as the Ross and Brand stupid phone call to Andrew Sachs.

Remember the pizza guy?

Of course you do.  He walked on my grass!

Well, no-one from Pizza Go Go responded, even after a week  So they don't seem to care about their brand image.  Now I know this is small beer to them.  After all it's not as if I'm reporting a mystery illness and was a customer of The Fat Duck and Heston Blumenthal, the unfortunate super-chef in Bray.

But this is a complaint.  And they are not handling it.  I never even got an auto acknowledgement!

I have mentioned it again to them via their website.  I'll keep you posted.

What does your online complaints system do?

Being laid off does not make you a consultant

Newly redundant?  Facing redundancy?  If you think you might enjoy being an independent consultant, think again.  Only do it if you already know you have a market and will be good at it.  If you are tempted to go to one of those "Give me £500 and I'll tell you how to be a consultant" seminars, trust me, you are not going to make it.

I'd forgotten about people who take redundancy packages off the newly unemployed and trusting souls who are really only ever employee material.  They turn up during a recession and offer... stuff: stuff like seminars on how to be a consultant!  

If you need a course to learn what a consultant is, you are not cut out to be one.  Save the money.  £500 goes a long way towards feeding your family for another month.

You were laid off because your industry is overmanned.  That overmanning is true whether you are an employee or a contractor.  They couldn't afford to pay your salary then and they sure as hell won't be able to afford your fees now.

"Ah, Tim, but you would say that, because you're afraid of competition."

Well, would I?

Perhaps.  Though I like good competition.  It makes the market work.

But that doesn't detract from the message.  Consultancy is not what you do while looking for a job.  It's a business, with business taxes to administer and pay.  It's a serious commitment to yourself, your family and your clients.  And you have to be able to afford to eat for the first empty months.  You need to be able to get the debt in and know when to stand firm and when to be walked all over.

And, if they let you go from your high priced executive job, you are used to too many safety nets that weren't really there.  So will you make it as a consultant?

Well, not if the first thing you do is go on a training course and spend a month's food bill on it, no, you will not.  Spend that money looking hard for a job instead, because a consultant you are absolutely not.

There is worse pornography than sex on display

I first became aware of this as two aircraft killed people in the World Trade Center and the world media showed us despairing people dying.  We were horrified.  And they we were horrified again and again.  And then we were horrified until we became immune to the horror.  And that is when I realised that this was true pornography.

I saw it again and again after that.  Madelaine McCann, who vanished in Portugal, and the press speculation about the poor child's fate and at whose hands was a prime example of media pornography.

Today I see it yet again.  Some poor deluded kid went on a shooting rampage in Germany.  Tim Kretschmer went on a rampage in Winnenden.  Many are dead, including him.  I'm deeply sorry for all the victims and for their families and young Tim's family.  But there it should stop.

Instead we have theories about his being a loner, troubled, having a collection of horror films.  Well, I expect he did.  That does not make someone take a gun and kill people.  But the pornography of media news machines that must be fed creates all this weirdness out of a simple, tragic, unpleasant incident.

Did you know that a building in Cologne vanished into the ground the other day?

Nor did I until I was told.  It never made our news.  But blood and gore does.  

At least in the UK we are spared the Winnenden incident's press conferences and the eternal rehashing of the incident again and again.  But we do see press conferences far too often.  You know the history and purpose of the thing: a conference intended for the press to get information and distill a report from it.

Lazy journalists show the event live!  But it is not designed for us.  Even so, we get to see people giving halting presentations, or statements read at dictation speed live!

Give me good old fashioned sex broadcast in harsh closeup any day!  It beats the pornography of the news machine hollow.  It's honest!

Always nice to help an old colleague

More years ago that I care to remember I used to work at Prime Computer on the marketing team with Mark Mills.  Of course he got labelled "Marketing Mills" and he was also good at it.  We each moved on as Prime folded in on itself.

I bumped into him on LinkedIn recently, and he and his wife Anita have restored an old dilapidated farm in France and are running an amazing Gite.  Quite a change from IT Marketing, that.  I'm giving him some help on marketing ideas for old times' sake.

I'm passionate about Customer Service because I see it as a key element of Marketing, so imagine my pleasant surprise when I saw his blog with a post entitled Customer Satisfaction.  I like the fact that Mark's website for Les Hallais "doesn't do them justice" according to his guests.  It doesn't!

We've been talking about the amazing range of fresh local seasonal produce they have and the awesome standard of Anita's cooking.  None of that is covered on the site yet, and Mark's new to blogging so that will only appear in his blog as time passes.  They've not long finished turning a wrecked farmstead into an amazing luxury Gite.

He's told me about the weird French business rules, too.  He can't organise a tour of the area or the authorities classify him as a travel agent and want a stonking great bond in Euros that no sane person can afford.  So he has to be very careful when attracting business that he never gets seen as a travel agent.  But his area has the most amazing attractions and is only an hour by car form the Le Mans motor racing circuit, or a day's car tour from the incredible Mont St Michel.

There's a lot of ingenuity to be used organising things round those without getting taken for a stonking great travel agency bond.

I have some friends who are looking to organise choral masterclasses.  Les Hallais would be ideal for that, especially with a concert in the local hall at the end of the masterclass.  I'm putting them in touch!

Why offer me one thing and do another?

For many years I have banked with First Direct.  They're a pretty average bank except they do everything by phone and online.  Part of HSBC, they may well come through the recession unscathed.  Who knows?  And for many years they have made error after error.  So I am not at all surprised at their latest lack of customer service.

Because interest rates are now falling through the floor I wanted to migrate two of my accounts, one that handles my holiday fund and another that handles some other small monies, into higher yield accounts.  I used their secure online message to initiate that, with a request for a response by telephone.

I logged on today and found a secure message saying that they could not handle my request and that I had to phone them.

So my question for First Direct is "Why ask me what you want me to do if you do what you were always going to do anyway?  How does that show good Customer Service?"

Think about your service operation.  Is there a risk that they will do that, too?  And, if so, why ask me one thing and do another?  Why?  What do you think you can possibly achieve except ill will?  Or do you, also, try to spell "customer service" with an "F"?

Update, 16 September 2009: Yes, they did it again!

Door to door leaflet drops can cause brand damage

Just before the weather turned wintry I relaid my front lawn after putting in land drains.  I reseeded just in time to get a partial growth of grass before everything shut down for the winter. It's not that I'm lawn-proud, it's just that I was fed up with sinking in up to my oxters every time I cut the grass.

Today I was sitting happily doing not much at all when a pizza leaflet came through my door from Pizza GOGO in Bracknell.  They're a franchise.  The delivery operative walked diagonally across the newly seeded grass, stepped over a hedge and was on his way, happily.

Well, happily until I challenged him, when he expressed apology.

I called the Bracknell franchise to be told "We always get these complaints, what you want me to do?"  Well, I don't want a free pizza, that's for sure!  What I want this small businessman to do is to care about his reputation.  His leaflet boy has had a negative effect on his business.  Ok, there will be sales, but the brand is damaged.

Leaflet boy just left our road on the other side of the street.  He has to be either arrogant or stupid.  Right opposite me he walked across a neighbour's front grass!

So I called the franchise again.  THIS time the guy is going to call leaflet boy!

I imagine he'll get a call from the franchisor's management on Monday, too.  Their web site has a "complain here" area.

Now this is a rant, based on facts.  No problem with that, but the message is strong:

If you trade B2C and leaflets get you your business, be very careful whom you employ to drop the leaflets, and monitor their performance.  And have cash clawback in your contract to ensure that complaints hit the leafletters personally, in the wallet.

And if you employ them directly?  Take it even more seriously.  You may be paying a wage to someone who will damage your brand.

****

There is an update  

The Information Chihuahua Bites The Consulting Association

The BBC News today carried a wonderful story.  The UK Information Commissioner has a bite!  And he bit a Droitwich based company that he states traded unlawfully in data.  He expects the company to cease trading by the end of the week.  Hardly surprising since its sole trade appears to have been in secret files of data on construction workers, according to the reports.

He used his investigatory powers to conduct a raid, yes a raid, on their premises.

Does this herald a new era when the Commissioner will now start to bite real targets instead of the softer ones his press releases appear to major on so far?

The question is, surely, "How does he decide when to act?"

We can see that he can and will act when cross enough, but what does it take to make him cross?

As a footnote, while the enforcement action and prosecution are effectively closing the company down, the end result will just be a small fine for failing to notify the Information Commissioner that the processing was taking place.

Odd, isn't it, that, had they notified him all would probably have been fine!

So the bite is a Chihuahua size nip, really.  He looks like a Rottweiler with the wrong dentures.

The UK has bank base rate at 0.5%

This is a stunningly low figure.  It castrates anyone who is on a fixed income based on savings deposits.  Pension?  What pension?  And the Bank of England is going to buy up £75,000,000,000 of commercial debt to try to get money moving again!

I wonder, though.  Isn't the real idea to get us to spend our savings?

The only point in having savings now is to "have them" because you earn zilch on them, so it looks to me as if the government wants us to open our wallets and spend, spend, spend.

Pogodrive satnav serial 1000772 is stolen goods

Now you may wonder what that is about.  The answer is that it is about my GPS satellite navigation system.  It's a Pogo Drive, and it is serial number 1000772, or was.  And today, I parked my car in Ham Street, Richmond, outside Ham House, in a pleasant street, with plenty going on, with decent folk going about their business.  Lots of people were about.

At 11:45, or thereabouts, just 10 minutes after I parked, some nasty nefarious little git smashed the driver's side window and wrenched the device out of the car.  The alarm went off, of course, and so did my satnav, in the nasty little swine's hands.

I'm only blogging about it so that you, when you get offered this on eBay, and discover that you have bought serial number 1000772, realise that it is nicked, and know that it is useless to you because the central computer account is already disabled.