Jananas

The Daily Knitter is a website that drives traffic by offering a free daily knitting pattern. They also have a repository of free patterns, plus some exclusive patterns and articles. They drive traffic to their site by offering free patterns and earn revenue from advertising based on that traffic. My personal experience is that they are doing that at the expense of the designers.

Back in September my Basic Ear Flap Hat Pattern was picked up as one of their free patterns of the day. I was pretty excited because it meant a) traffic to my site, b) more exposure for the knitting pattern, and c) more people knitting my hat. Free patterns of the day are on the site for the last two weeks (backwards from today), however I kept getting traffic for about four months. All of a sudden in January it just stopped. Nadda, nothing.

I sent their editor a first email in January asking (nicely I might add) if the pattern could be listed on their repository of free patterns. No response and it wasn’t added. Apparently it was good enough for their free pattern of the day, but not good enough to be listed. At this point I’m a little annoyed, but hey there could be a million and one reasons why the editor didn’t respond back. So I sent another email early in February and again, no response and the pattern wasn’t added. Now, I’m really irritated – six weeks is reasonable time frame to expect a response.

This is a shitty way to treat the pattern designers. In my case, I wasn’t even asked if I was okay with them listing my pattern as the free pattern of the day. At the time I was glad for the increase in traffic but once that traffic died away but the benefit to their business continued, I was peeved because they continued to profit from using my pattern.

Here’s how I interpret their business model – they use daily free patterns to entice people to come to their site daily, driving their stats and generating ad revenue. Every new free pattern helps drive their business – so while I received a finite increase in traffic, the benefit to them from using my pattern continues long after any benefits to me (the designer) stopped.

Behind that, though, are the people writing the free patterns that the Daily Knitter is the goodwill of the designers whose patterns they use to drive traffic. In an era where reputation and trust are important, why would you risk that over something so minor?

Really, is it that difficult to add all patterns listed as ‘free patterns of the day’ on your ‘free patterns’ pages as well? Is it that difficult to respond to an email from a person whose design you’ve used (and therefore profited from)? I would think that it would be in your best interest to maintain a good relationship with your designers so that they’d be more willing to contribute to your site in the future (and thus increase the value your provide).

Daily Knitter, I think that you’ve behaved poorly and I certainly won’t be recommending that anyone use you.

Edit (March 10th) - the pattern has been added back to their listings. I’m not 100% if it was just that they finally read through their emails and there was simple a system error that I was caught in or if they came across this acted. Regardless, the email I finally got back was pleasant and friendly and the pattern has been added back. WIN!

I’ve written before about the potential impact that an increase in mobile phone usage could have on our standard call centre model. Basically, that because most customers are not paying for their minutes we should be considering the impact that the financial cost of using minutes (either real or perceived) has on their interaction with us. Namely that they’ll be less likely to put up with long waits and CSRs who can’t help them, and more likely to become irritated with our service.

Last night I woke up out of an almost dead sleep with another question. The scenario starts with one major assumption – that some users have (essentially) unlimited plans and some have a limited number of minutes available to them. The question, at least for me at that moment, is could this information be used by call centres and how would it impact service? I’m also going to make the assumption that only telecoms could act on this information because they are the only ones with access to it (in this case, could using it appropriately give them a legs up in the profitability race?).

Different kinds of service models:

• Take calls from people with limited minutes first, as they have the added pressure of the financial cost of their minutes. They may be less likely to ask for compensation or make a complaint if you don’t waste their time (which is also money in this case).
• Take calls from people with unlimited minutes first, so you could get extra revenue from the people with the limited minutes as they’d be on the phone longer. This is a little of a moot point as (as least for my teleco) all calls into the company don’t count towards your monthly limits. Its also a revenue-centric, big company squashes the little guy view but its still a potential option and so its here.
• Treat everyone equally, and answer calls on a first come first serve basis. Nothing new here and its very likely the status quo.

As a teleco, if I was going to bother to implement any sort of plan based queuing system I might as well make my decision based on customer profitability.

Again, consider this me thinking aloud. I don’t know what the status quo actually is inside Bell or Rogers or Telus or Wind. I’m sure that an employee has already made these same connections and its been talked to death about. But I haven’t and I’m trying to flex my mental muscles by thinking about how things could be different.

Before I get too deep into this post, I thought I’d make it clear that I haven’t done any research to see if anyone else has done this. For all I know it already exists and has been done well. I’m doing this more as a thought experiment – to flex my mental muscles and to think about how things could be done differently to make them better.

First, the story. I was walking to my weekly Stitch ‘n Bitch last night and I saw a parking ticket lying forlornly on the sidewalk. I’m going to make the assumption that it hadn’t been paid (it was on the street) – so there was lost revenue and potentially a repercussion down the road for the person who didn’t pay. It made me think.

What would stop someone from paying the ticket.

It could get blown off the car before someone even notices it (can’t do much about that). More than likely the parking tickets gets stuffed in a pocket and forgotten. Or taken inside and left on the coffee table/desk/by the front door/etc. and again… forgotten.

If it is remembered, then someone either has to write a cheque and mail it in (technology, what?!?), go pay in person (value of time, say what?!?), or pay online. At least with the City of Toronto, it is pretty easy to pay online. In fact, all details are covered here in case you were curious. You have to enter the ticket number [as an aside, why are the parking ticket reference numbers never, ever, ever in the system? I pay and sort of hope that it gets connected on the backend somewhere.], enter your card information, get a confirmation code, and done. Not hard.

But its still one more step. And between getting the ticket and paying for it, there is a whole lot of time where the person has the opportunity to forget about it or lose it.

How do you make it easier?

The easier way to, well, make it easier is to cut out the chance to forget. What about a mobile app (for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry) that would allow you to immediately pay the ticket. One minute of your time and its done. No more worrying if its been done, no more surprises when you have to renew your license and you can’t because of unpaid parking tickets.

Yes, with an internet enabled device you could search for how to pay the ticket but I think that with that extra step people would just put it into the mental bucket of ‘do it at home’. With an application, they can tap a button on screen and get taken directly to the online ticket payment page for the city they are in (based on gps of course). If you wanted to get fancier, you could create a mobile payment page to collect the information even faster to make the process take even less time.

It wouldn’t change the behaviour of the people who never pay their parking tickets, but I do think that you’d collect more revenue from the people who might have good intentions but otherwise forget. I don’t know if there would be any room for revenue (i.e. City’s might let you take a cut of the current credit card fee added to online payments if you can demonstrated increased payment rates) or if it would make sense for each City to roll out their own app.

If it was one single app, you could start with your local major city. Then roll out to the surrounding suburbs (where people would also be likely to go). Then roll out to other major cities. That way a person would only need one app for everywhere they’d travel and it would just be taken care of. It might also mean that Cities would get more revenue from non-residents as they’d be more in the habit of paying (well, maybe…).

What do you think?

If your company is like most others that I’ve encountered you probably have a customer service department. Except that their function is likely limited to dealing with escalated complaints and performing a once or twice yearly customer satisfaction survey.

They’re reactive. They deal with problems after they’ve arisen. They deal with the problems that they know about, that get reported, that are serious enough that someone was angry enough that they followed up. They miss all the problems that people didn’t report because they were more minor or because the customers didn’t have the energy to fight the good fight.

I think its much simpler than that and I think that its proactive.

It starts before a product or service even hits the market. In fact, it starts before its even been developed. Its a focus of corporate culture that means that a customer centric view is always present. That all staff members care about the product and are actively thinking about how to make it better. That your customer service staff are involved from the beginning and help develop business requirements.

Why is this important?

Because if you are thinking about customer experience from day one, you will build better products. Better products mean that you’ll have fewer calls into your call centre, fewer complaints about bad software or service, and all around more satisfied customers.

One of the key elements is the importance of time. Take a little more time thinking about how your customers use the software, how they interact with your staff, why they call the call centre. And then test. And then test some more. Test longer than you think would be necessary. Why? Because it means that you’ll catch more of those mistakes that customers would otherwise be frustrated about and call in for.

What else is important?

Don’t wait until your annual customer satisfaction survey to see how you’re doing. One, you’re probably too late to garner useful feedback. Two, the way that you frame the questions likely makes the information useless and unable to be actionable.

Instead, actively listen to your customers. Search for yourself through channels like twitter or using tools like google alerts or blog searches. What are people saying about you today? If you can identify a problem now, you can fix it faster and it’ll impact fewer customers. I could go into much more detail on this, but Julien and Chris did a bang up job of explaining why its vital in Trust Agents.  So trust me, and give it a read.

Test me out. Test out my theory. I’ll bet that in the long run it’ll save you money and improve your customer relations.

I’ve come across big name bloggers who make disparaging remarks about what us little guys write about. And you know what, they’re right.

I do write about my animals, although sometimes its to raise awareness of the animals rescue groups I work with (like Toronto Cat Rescue) or have adopted from (like the Soi Dog Foundation in Thailand). And you know what, this blog is really about me and my animals are a big part of my life. I’m okay with being a stereotype when it also means being myself.

I also have a tendency to write about customer experiences I’ve had (feel free to reference either the customer experience or rant categories). I don’t mean to come across as the crazy or angry or bitter customer with a huge hate on for the company. I understand that sometimes things go wrong. That’s part of life. It happens. Totally okay with that. But I also know that things can be better and more importantly I want them to be better.

In the moment I might be frustrated, but my motivation is as simple as wanting things to be better. They aren’t going to get better unless people say something and provide feedback. There aren’t really mechanisms to provide feedback. I recognize that most of the big companies I might complain about are never going to come across what I’ve written. On the off chance that they are astute enough to be looking, I can only hope that they might take the feedback into consideration.

Moreover, by writing down my thoughts, feelings, and assumptions on how things could be improved or even totally rebuilt I understand what I think is important. It helps me clarify my thoughts on what makes a good system or process or customer experience. It helps me build my expertise and refine my opinions.

To balance it out, I also write about a lot of the things that I do in my life. Food we make, cookies I bake, hats or sweaters or other assorted things that I knit. I write about places we travel. I write about the silly projects we do, like trying to make homemade plastic or our current root beer challenge.

I always read about how blogs are supposed to have a theme. How I’m supposed to provide value and build expertise. I often get a little worried that I don’t have a focus. The longer I blog, the more okay I am with not having a dedicated focus. That isn’t the point of this blog. Jananas is about me being me and everything that includes – cats, complaints, and all.