Leaves On The Line

I saw a copy of the DVD of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin the other day, a programme that had a lot of catch phrases that I've remembered over the years. Like the cartoon Dilbert, Reginald Perrin poked fun at corporations and management, in the case of Reggie, the more he tried to be a failure the more successful he became. Before long he was head of a successful company and hating every minutes of it, this providing a platform for some great comedy along the way.  

One of the gags that ran throughout the show was being late for work everyday because the train was running late, often due to leaves on the line. Now I wasn't a regular train computer until many years later and never guessed that I would end up being frequently late for the most unlikely reasons. But after many years of putting up with old trains that broke down often, we as customers were promised all would be well with new trains.

Well knew trains have come and now the local train company Trans Metro has found many a new reason for being late. Recently they've had a lot of issues wit the track being wet, apparently due to them putting grease on the line to prevent the train wheels squeaking. Often trans are cancelled meaning two trains worth of passengers end up on one train. When this happens they can't even collect the ticket money because the train is too crowded. Reggie would feel right at home on these trains, although leaves on the line is about the only excuse we've not heard yet.

JB Hi-Fi

I first came across JB Hi-fi on a trip to Sydney and every time I went to Sydney after that I made sure I visited the stores. When I was growing up there were record stores everywhere and when we went into the city (Timaru in those days), for me it was a tour of the record shops looking for either the latest albums or an album to fill the back catologue. There was no internet back then and so pretty much what was available in your local shop was what was available, you could buy albums overseas mail order, but you'd be taking your chance as more often than not they'd never get here. So JB Hi-Fi was the old style record shop selling vinyl and CD's, as well as lots of other cool stuff including TV's, computers, phones, cameras and routers.

When they announced they were coming to Wellington, they were instantly my favourite shop. Besides the prices being better than most other shops, they also allow their staff to do a bit of bartering over price, sometimes giving significant discounts on the official price tag. I gather the staff are on commission and can in effect discount their commisson, but unlike many stores they can actually negotiate, Far to many stores need the store manager to talk to you about any discount, and even then many are bound by whatever head office said it should be (even if the shop next door is selling it cheaper, they can't bargain).

I haven't yet had to take anything back to JB Hi_FI so I don't know how they are with returning items under the consumer guarantees act. However for me the shop might as well be a gold mine, I try to get there and browse the CD collection once a week at least, I know a lot of other people who work in IT also head there regularly. The staff all seem friendly as well, a culture difference they achieve by some mysterious mechanism that has evaded many other big chain in New Zealand. This is a shop that so far has never given me hypertension!! 

Shopping Online

Like many people I shop a lot online and have done for almost fifteen years (even before I had a home PC).. I think I stared with Amazon buying books, gradually over the years most of the bricks and mortar book shops started getting out of specialist computer books, leaving only things like Word for Dummies.  Amazon meanwhile gave you access to almost any book your could want and  because they were a big name, it engendered a certain amount of trust that they would deliver to a small country in the southern hemisphere.

For a couple of years at least I didn't really branch beyond buying books, the New Zealand online retailers seemed to come a bit later although the online auction house Trade Me started as early as 1999. In the computer parts online area, it is almost impossible now to think where you would go to buy a part other than through an online shop. Over time the range of things I'd consider buying has expanded, as has the range of thing I'd only buy on line. Once upon a time for example you'd never buy football boots online because you couldn't try them on first, this now seems an unimportant consideration when the boot online are around half the price of the same ones in a shop. 

For the time being you also don't have to pay a tax on the overseas purchases, something that is attracting complaints from retail stores. It should be easy to compete with these stores though on service, they can deliver a product but you can't quite get the personal touch when stores are on the other side of the world. But with the exception small record shop who cant compete on price, you rarely seem to see a store pitching to the service and help they can provide, many stores are not even as good as their online competitors.  

No News is Good News

Yesterday I had two trips on Trans Metro which ran within five minutes of their scheduled time and I almost felt  privileged. There has been no text communication for a week delayed trains, but hold on a minute, the trains have still regularly run late. I heard through the grapevine that the messages were upsetting customers too much so they stopped informing customers of the late trains. If that is true it is an interesting approach, hope your customers don't notice the poor service you're providing. 

Now on the positive side, they've installed some fancy electronic signs, and although they don't have real time information yet the aim is within a few weeks to provide at the station the real time information on the trains expected arrival. No room on the signs it seems for explanations as to why the train is late, I guess there wasn't enough room for dew on the line and other explanations that Trans Metro come up with.

So is it better to keep the reasons for delays from the customer of to tell them? Certainly the explanations appear to aggravate customers feeling about the situation, perhaps just knowing the train is going to be late is all you need to know. My feeling is the text medium is a bad way to relay explanations, you're better to leave explanation for the  web site and just tell people how late the train is going to be. The text service is useful, because if there is a big delay you can make plans to get to work by other methods. The explanation just seems to aggravate people, especially when the reason is something like dew on the line.  

Will be academic for next three days - the line is closed for maintenance, hopefully some of the problems will be resolved.

Better Late Than Never

I got some letters yesterday that had been posted five years ago but had been lost in the mail system. Naturally my first thought was how do you lose mail for five years, had it fallen down the back of a sorting machine somewhere only to turn up now? It was interesting to read five years old mail, there was one from the bank when I set up a Kiwisaver account, I'd always wondered why the bank had been so slack with the paperwork but now I find out they hadn't been. 

So while my first thought was that this was incredibly bad service, I read on with the letter from New Zealand Post that arrived. Seems one of the posties had decided to take a sack of mail home and not deliver it, reading between the lines it looks like he was in some sort of dispute with his employer. The letter from the General Manager, Postal Delivery apologised for the breach of trust, and said the matter was in the hands of the Police. It also said New Zealand Post was saddened by the incident and apologised for the inconvenience.

Now I'm not a fan of apologising for inconvenience generally as it usually sounds patronising, but in this case it did come across as sincere. So here we have a case where a rogue employee does something they shouldn't have done. It has taken five years for New Zealand Post to find out and they've had to figure out what to do. They could have done nothing, I'd have never known the mail was lost, but instead they fronted up and admitted the error, and provided an apology for the issue.  

So as a customer who lost some of his mail for five years, I feel New Zealand Post has done a pretty good job here of recovering from a pretty bad situation. Anyone who has worked as a customer manager will know things go wrong and sometimes very wrong. Best thing you can do is front up and be honest, take whatever feedback the customers decide to give you on the chin and move on. A well handled issue will generally not lose you customers, and indeed will show you are serious about good customer service.