Way of the Retainer

While I’m closing out the next Tuxedo post, this is almost more of a note to myself more than anyone else. It’s about useability and acclimatisation, and may well be blindingly obvious to you. I had an experience this week that really drilled home how we acclimatise to interfaces, internalise the positive stuff, and only really think consciously about what’s left visible and apparent – the negative.

I drive a 2004 Holden Astra hatch. It is not a glamorous or luxury car. I will never drive it down winding forest roads or through oil-black rainslick streets while my eerily coiffed European model wife sleeps, elegantly arranged next to me. (cue sweeping strains of classical music) But it does me just fine, thank you very much. I like the car so much that, after someone killed my last black Holden Astra, I brought pretty much the same car again. Then someone tried to kill this one in Melbourne, but that’s another story entirely

Recently, my car was kind enough to suggest that a new fuel pump might be in order, by way of killing the old one. While I was procrastinating over getting the car fixed, my partner was kind enough to let me do a substantial amount of driving in her car. I’ve driven her car around a number of times before, as you do in regular life. But this was a long enough stretch to acclimatise to her car as my regular driving experience. And it is a neat, practical car – it’s compact, corners fantastically, has more pick-up than mine in first gear, and has awesome cup-holders. And for coffee freaks, cup-holders are important.

But the experience when I got my car fixed was like driving a completely new car again. I saw my car through the eyes I had when I first bought it, and remember why I love the act of driving it, and why its been a great companion relocating interstate twice. Why I like sitting a little closer to the road, how comfortable the seats really are, how the interior design is put together in a way to melt away when you’re driving at night, and the sense of space and comfort it gives, even though it’s a smallish four-door hatch.

The lesson for myself here, which you’re welcome to take away too if it resonates, is this: when we use products, we often assume the positive parts of the experience as a given, and they become transparent – it’s difficult to appreciate them on a day to day basis. We can still see the negative though, and focus on that. It’s only when we move away from a product that the positive becomes clear, often by contrast. So I’m going to do my damnedest to remember that, if the only feedback for something is negative, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, if it’s still doing its job and being used widely.

It could just mean that the good stuff has become transparent.

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I will get back to looking at training venues in short order, but I wanted to talk about customer service, based on some experiences on the weekend.

I had what you might call an “interesting” weekend. After flying back from Perth to Melbourne and getting home at ten past midnight, I couldn’t get into my apartment building. The security keypad was completely dead at the front door. After leaving a message with my real estate agent (that wasn’t returned, despite the “urgent” setting on the voice mail) I had no other option but to check into the hotel next door.

I spent most of the next day getting hand-balled between my real estate agent and the body corporate for my building, driven almost to tears with frustration and still unable to get into my own apartment thanks to the absence of a miracle key. Based on the experience, I wouldn’t recommend either my body corporate or real estate agent as great businesses.

Situations like these – adverse circumstances where there are questions around who is responsible for what, are great opportunities to win over customers. Personally, all I’m ever looking for in these situations is the exact same thing I try to provide our customers professionally: an advocate who is apologetic, sympathetic and will help get a solution to the situation. Someone who’s on your side.

Maybe it comes out of working in the integration space, where as the glue between applications you’re most often guilty until proven innocent. But I don’t think that’s quite it. I was talking with my partner while all of this was happening, and while we work in vastly different fields, we have very similar views on commitment to quality service.

We were boggling at the time at the language people were using over the phone – not our responsibility, not part of our service, not going to do that for another hour or so. People spent more time telling me what they weren’t going to do for me, rather than what they could do for me. That, and pointing all care and responsibility at the other party.

The problem was solved eventually, but not before a slew of phone calls ensuring that both parties would actually do something to solve the issue rather than ignore it. And I’m not looking forward to the bugfight ahead to get my hotel bill sorted.

I could go into a myriad of tiny details about the incompetence and indifference I pushed through just to be able to get into my apartment, but that’s not the point. The point is, next time you have a disgruntled customer to deal with, while you may have no control over what’s happened up to that point, you have complete control over what happens next. People remember customer service that goes above and beyond the expected norm, and there is no better opportunity to create an advocate for your company or service.

It’d be nice to think in our Kevin Rudd / Barack Obama world, we can be better than hand-balling problems to avoid culpability.

So take that opportunity to be extraordinary, and sell your company on amazing quality of service.

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As Banjo Paterson would put it, there is movement at the browser station. Unless you’ve fallen off the internet in the last couple of weeks, you’ve no doubt heard that Google has released their own browser – Google Chrome. It’s based on the same original codebase as Firefox 3 and Flock (which we’ll get back to) which puts it in interesting company.

I’ve only tinkered with Chrome a little bit, but it’s targeted at being as non-intrusive and lightweight as possible. The idea is that it gets the hell out of your way, which is an admirable goal. There’s only two menus in the browser. Two. It seems to have some great support for debugging web development, as well. I’m looking forward to giving it a decent trial by fire when I start doing some fairly heavy-weight web development using the Zend framework – lots of Javascript doing sexy stuff like this, which will really put it through its paces.

I’ve only just upgraded to Firefox 3, personally. I held off for a while due to potential issues with the Delicious plugin I use. Not having Delicious was a deal-breaker, as that’s where I keep most, if not all of my bookmarks now when I can manage it. Turns out that Firefox 3’s Delicious support is fantastic! But, Flock is more what I wanted to talk about, after having tinkered with it a bit.

Since my migration south, I’ve been more and more reliant on using the web to keep in touch with friends. I’ve plugged in to Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, 43 Things, LinkedIn, Delicious, Plaxo Pulse, and Bebo. (the last two of which I’m still not really using to their full effect) All of these are great ways to keep up with friends and know what’s happening in their world (and let them know what’s happening in yours)

BUT. (like Sir Mixalot, I like big buts)

All of this can also create a lot of work to keep up with. It’s sort of the reverse of the Inbox Zero / RSS problem. Not so much having to work through a queue put in front of you, but having to find where the new information is. And for my money, Flock is fantastic at neatly summarising and pointing you at updated information. Distilling your social network updates into some simple visual cues.

It integrates with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and adds two new concepts – the People Sidebar – a vertical pane to the left of the browser, and the the media bar – a strip at the top of the browser.

Contacts are sorted in order of last update by default, and a summary is shown based on the site. For Facebook, this means their current status, and whether they’ve made profile changes recently. For Twitter, this means their last Tweet. For Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, a media icon is also highlighted () if they’ve uploaded media (photos or video) recently.

This is where the media bar comes in. Its purpose is to show thumbnails of new media – images or videos that have been uploaded. So if a friend uploads new photos to Facebook, I’ll see the media icon highlight for that friend. Clicking their media icon shows me a strip of thumbnails of their new photos in the media bar.

Simple, huh?

The media bar can also be customised to save favourite media streams you can look at – essentially, smart, repeatable searches based on the functionality of different sites: what’s popular on YouTube / Flickr, photos of you on Facebook, or certain tag searches on Flickr. Powerful, easy, repeatable. There’s still a lot of Flock’s functionality I haven’t tinkered with yet. The ability to blog starting with a photo/video looks neat, but it’s not how I do the majority of my posting.

So, there are some interesting choices out there when it comes to browsers at the moment.

Want a lean, stripped-back browser, with good developer support and very economic memory usage? Go with Google Chrome.

Want a flexible, pluggable browser with great developer support via plugins like Firebug? Go with Firefox 3.

Want to make social networking a lot easier? Go with Flock.

That’s my view on the whole browser thing right now. What browser do you recommend, and what’s the killer must-have feature that means you wouldn’t shift from it?

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