Last week’s theme appears to have been customer service. The following were all waiting for me in Newsgator.
- The Art of Customer Service, by Guy Kawasaki, via Meryl
- How not to inspire customer confidence, by Jon Udell
- Lazy Programmer, Didn’t Handle Exception, by Joel Spolsky
The latter two deal with programmatic oversights, where a simple step on the Company’s part would have saved tremendous headache on the Customer’s. As Jon puts it,
Imagine the behind-the-scenes drama: pointy-haired bosses, surly engineers, elusive vendors, tense meetings, recriminatory memos. Think about the poor soul who had to deliver this unfortunate message. And ask yourself: wouldn’t you rather just write one line of JavaScript instead?
Joel’s example I take personally, because my employer owns 60% of that mistake. But he evaluates the situation the same way that Jon did.
All of them suffer from hard working shlubs who are stuck in a situation created by incompetent managers, who have built esoteric mountains of complicated and brittle systems with a million moving parts, 3/4’s of them outsourced, where it’s simply impossible to get anything done.
Meanwhile, we had an interesting week at DisneyWorld.
We arrived in Orlando just before midnight. The last time we did that, it took almost two hours for Mears to find a vehicle to take us to the hotel. This time, Disney’s Magical Express whisked us from MCO to Lake Buena Vista is just over 30 minutes. The funny part there is that Disney’s Magical Express is operated by Mears.
At the hotel, we found that our reservations had been lost. (Though more likely they had been inadvertently cancelled by the travel agent.) They put us in a room for the night, and in the morning rebooked our trip. It will be interesting to see what happens on the credit card.
In the room, the carpet was soaked. The air conditioner was draining in the wrong direction. We were tired. We went to bed. We later mentioned the wet carpet; it was cleaned. It got wet again. We mentioned it again, and a night’s stay disappeared from the final bill. I mentioned it again at checkout just so the manager would have engineering check out the drip.
At the Magic Kingdom, we had fun!
On the way back from the park, I accidentally sent us on a tour of the monorail. By the time we got back to the correct bus stop, the line stretched back to the ferry. We waited, and waited. Eventually the bus coordinator called in a pair of buses and the line began to move, but it took almost two hours to get back to the hotel. Standing in line with two dead-on-their-feet kids is not fun, especially when your pregnant wife can’t hold one.
The next morning, we — and the other 5000 people in queue — mentioned that perhaps Disney Transport needed to plan better. A bit later someone called to discuss the situation.
After that, things ran smoothly.
And lest you get the wrong impression, the trip was a blast. We were on vacation, so how could it not be?