Here’s my answer; and you can have this one for free…

Don’t piss your customers off…

Respect their time…

Create a culture that is about helping them with their issues, not make them worse

It’s not rocket science.

Here is my story…

This morning I received a text from Virgin Mobile Australia saying that I am coming close to my agreed credit limit. Weird. So I went on-line and discovered my account was at some ridiculously high amount. Checked my data charges and they were all good. So it must be something in my call charges. I have never reached my limit, so I wanted to find out what was going on. At this stage I am still open to the fact this could be my problem. I am on a new plan so I’m not sure how it’s all working out. Maybe I have made more calls than I normally have, although I am not sure I have.

So I call the customer service team. My experience with the Virgin Mobile customer service team in the past has been frankly terrible. Appalling. Hair-pulling-frustratingly crap. You get the picture. But there has always been light at the end of the tunnel via their very responsive and most-excellent social media team. The person (or people?) who handles their twitter account has helped me out on more than one occasion, or at least been a sympathetic ear to my issue.

But just once I’d like to call their “customer service” team and not be frustrated enough with their handling of my issue. To not be forecd into asking their social media guys for help. Just for once for them to listen to what I need, and be able to deliver it.

I’m not sure why I had any basic expectations with this call, as they’ve never been able to help me, but yes – I have a 20 minute plus phone call that instead of just answering my question (“is it actually me who has made all these calls or is something gone awry in the system”, “Am I on the wrong plan?”) I get to talk to two members of their team who have not been enabled in any way to help me.  In fact, they get me so angry and frustrated that if I could walk away from Virgin Mobile right now I would.

It’s all good and well to have a great social media team to monitor what is being said about your brand and help customers out if needed, but hey, here’s a radical idea – why not create a service culture that means that things don’t have to be “escalated”?

I am singling out Virgin Mobile Australia here as I am a customer – an unhappy one, and my experience is still a fresh and ugly wound . But I have these same experiences with a whole lot of other service businesses and I’m sure you do too.   Frustrating and annoying.

So I sit and wait for someone to call me and tell me why my bill is so high this month – who knows? Maybe it is my calls? Maybe it’s not. But the fact that no one can tell me until my bill is created in four days time seems a bit stupid. Especially as they send out a message telling me it’s high. If you don’t want me to ask why it’s so high or you can’t tell me, don’t send the flipping message! Is the message designed to hep alleviate what they call “bill shock”?  Trust me, I am already shocked but also now frustrated and really, really angry!

So yes – a simple story to help stop churn.

So service businesses of Australia. If you want to stop churn…Get your service culture right. Offer us a great product. Don’t piss us off. Be great to us instead. If all that fails, your sexy new marketing campaign won’t turn me around. In fact, whenever I see it it will just remind me how disappointed and cross with you I am.  There, I just saved you about $200,000 in research costs, and god knows how many squillions in a fluffy new ad campaign to try and make me feel good about you.

(Right now I am looking at a box from Zappos that says “powered by service”. I’d like a little bit of that culture right now. It’s a great line and from what I hear they deliver to that.)

No amount of free pies will make me happy right now Virgin...

I think this was on Orwell Street in the Cross, but I love how they have made it look like a Chinese Shophouse with the lovely laquer like shutters. It sits very comfortably with it’s Victorian terraced neighbours.  And walking past on a particularly steamy Sydney day, it was like a little bit of Malacca in our city. All I needed was a little nonya cooking.

The best part of it is feeling OK about saying no.

Saying no to a projects I think I’d be no good for

Saying no to something I’m not intersted in

Saying no because I want to spend more time with Fin

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not turning down stuff left, right and centre. But the power of being able to turn something down is one of the most attractive aspects of this gig.  And hopefully it will free me up for the fun stuff and the fun people – and there is a lot of that about.

Another debate needs to be had about whether there should be anyone living in the low lying, flood prone areas, but agagin – that’s another debate to be had. What is clear is that people need help now.

It appears though that Tony Abbot has been campaigning off the back of the levy. And thanks to that piece by John Birmingham, I have been alerted to the stingingly funny post by Girl Clumsy.   If you object to paying the levy, she will pay it for you. But there is a catch. Read about it here.

What often cannot be faulted is the service. Lovely, personable, professional service. Such nice staff. There is one girl there who is so on the ball – a laugh, great suggestions, a smile. She is great. But they are all great.

It’s nice to have somewhere local that is a bit special, but still warm and friendly. And places like this can be very rare. We need to be kind to this place so it doesn’t go away.

The last time I saw Sufjan Stevens it was one of my highlights of 2008. He did it again. Such an uplifting, fantastic show.

and on Sunday night we went to see Cat Power, who staged a haunting, melodic show that was very sweet indeed.

And then there’s the house itself. Wow. What a building. As Sufjan said – our spaceship.

We even had a little trip to Opera in the Park on Saturday  night as a family. It was a magic evening and a great production of Carmen.

Ah Sydney – you can be a magical place.

That’s a bit bonkers isn’t it? I mean, I did a lot of travel, but should there be enough soap and other bits to provide ‘bathroom care’ for over two years? For two people and their guests?   We are starting to reach the end of our bag of bathroom bits. The end of a bag of lots of small plastic bottles. The plastic bottles that maybe are tossed away as they are half empty when left in a shower, or a cake of soap tossed after one wash of the hands.

More hotels need to do what the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto does. They have small hand crafted cakes of soap, shampoo and body moisturiser. All of them are cakes, and they are sparingly wrapped in a simple paper strip.

So while this last two years have been great – no soap buying, no body wash, no shampoo (I guess I don’t wash my hair much but that’s for another post…) but I can’t help thinking that the whole little bottles of bathroom bits in hotels is just a bit bonkers. They go on and on about “saving water” and reusing your towels, but still fill their showers with millions and millions of tiny plastic bottles. Silly stuff indeed.

We get a coffee in the morning and have a nice chat with Steve and Nicki in the cafe.

I meet up with five or so other Mums and their kids in the park and everyone is smiling in the sunshine.

I slow down on the bike as I see a guy pull out of his drive-way but he stops, reverses, and let’s us pass with a smile and a wave.

And this all occurs in Marrickville today just in the past few hours.

Last night ABC aired a programme called making Australia Happy. I was cheekily watching the finals of Junior Master Chef! Earlier this year Matt and I had been filmed sitting outside a cafe for this programme. We signed a waiver, and the woman explained what the show was about and how the footage would be used. I remember being suprised that Marrickville was one of the unhappiest suburbs, but quickly forgot about the show and that maybe we’d be on TV.

A few people have got in contact with us in the last day or so to say that yes, we are in it for a very brief moment at the beginning. Check it out here if you like – we are in it at around the three or four minute mark. They are talking about despite the growing afflunece of the area (cut to us – me playing with iphone and the three of us generally living it up in a cafe – oh happy affluent days!) it is significantly less happy than the rest of the country.

We all talked about this at our meet up in the park and were all a little bit perplexed. We were happy, the people around us are happy – so who are the people dragging our average down?

I will watch the episode on iView and see the story unfold over the coming weeks. While I understand the show is bigger than Marrickville’s unhappiness, and looks instead at how people can achieve happiness by going about things / looking at them in a different way – the Marrickville aspect is bugging me.

Our only hope is that unhappiness may make people weary of the place and keep our real estate prices down! Marrickville is not the new Paddington people. We are too busy being miserable.

The is quite a bit of unhappiness expressed on the Screaming Bridge

The one “best” lists I have been doing a lot is the people I have worked with. The best people I have worked with share some common characteristics. They have been eccentric, brilliant, creative, difficult, curious, insightful, passionate, unreasonable, pains-in-the-arse.

But who has had the most influence on my career? For that we need to go way back to 1999, where I quit my job as a surveycraft programmer at Colmar Brunton not sure about what I wanted to do and Ellen Baron said “Hey, why don’t you try out Qual? I need some help with project management. You ca do that part time while you work out what you want to do.”

In about two weeks I was bustling down Illawarra Road with a video camera filming a lady shop for food, and then back to her house in Petersham to film her cooking some Vietnamese dishes (which we got to eat!). I could not believe that people got paid to do this.  Ellen kept asking me things like “what did you notice about so-and-so”, and “How do you think this impacts the client question”.  She’d listen to what I said, encourage me to think more about an issue, and then let me get out and film more people. More people shopping and cooking for us. Teling us their stories. Introducing us to their families. Sitting down and eating with them. I used to go home and cook the dishes the ladies taught me. Then I edited the footage into a movie for the client. It was stuff I did at uni thinking I’d never be  able to get a chance to do in the “real world”. Yes – you could get paid to do ethnography. It was a revelation!

Then we analysed what we had seen. We drew diagrams, we talked, we threw ideas away. Ellen pulled everything together and we presented it to the client. They loved it. Everyone was excited about what they had seen. It is still my favourite project I have ever worked on.

Ellen left Colmar Brunton and went to The Leading Edge. I left Colmar Brunton and took a year off to try something else out and see if research was what I wanted to keep doing.  When I was thinking about getting back into research Ellen said “come and talk to them at TLE – it’s a good place to work.”

So that’s ten years ago. During that time Ellen continued to have a big influence on what I was doing. She had (and I’m sure still has) the wonderful ability to hear you trying to articulate an idea – then hand you a book to read, and say “have a look at this; there may be something in there for you.” So you went away and read the book, and had the “tah-dah!” moment. She’d let you find the answer yourself - knowing full well what it was, but not spoon feeding or telling you the way to go. Just suggesting, nudging, hinting. It made a lot of us great researchers. We picked up a lot. We began to flex our own muscles, so she’d challenge us with bigger issues, bigger roles, bigger stakes. But she’d aways be there to help; and again, not by taking over and telling you the answer, but by working with you, and giving you the spit and polish on a project to make it sing. I was really sad when she left TLE (in 2008?) but excited for her as she set up her own company, Ruby Cha Cha.

I am indebted to Ellen for a few things. The first is making research fun. Fun for researchers but also the participants of research, so we all got a lot of joy out of it. She is a huge consumer advocate – fighting their case in boardrooms all about the place. She taught us all that their stores were the centre of being successful, and if we could convey their issues and needs then we’d done a great job.

The second is being in my corner more times than I could count. I was a stubborn little shit at the start of my career. Difficult, feisty and more often than not a pain-in-the-ass. And if things were ever going a bit awry it was Ellen who would tell me to pull my head in and encourage me to keep going.

Ellen – you got me into a career that has been infinitely interesting, challenging and most of all fun. Thanks for your patience and brilliance!

Who would you say your greatest mentor or supporter is? How have they impacted your life or career?

Ten years is a long time.  Close to one in every four days of my life has been spent there.

There has been some amazing payouts for that time. The main one for me is the travel. It can be a bitch some of the time, but I will not lie. The travelling was the best part of the job – not just a plane ride to the other side of the world, but sometimes just a cab ride to the other side of the city. You never knew what or who would be there waiting. It’s one of the best aspects of qualitative research – it gets you away from a desk and into places you’d normally not get a chance to venture.

First the travel was local. Then you find your feet and your confidence and then it’s up to Singapore. And before you know it you are sitting in a small flat in Nizhny Novgorod talking to a factory worker about Bony M, the Petshop boys and choosing wallpaper.

Yes, there have  been times at TLE where I have had to sit back and savour the moment. That “hang-on-I-am-sitting-in-the-global-head-office-of-a-bloody-big-brand-about-to-kick-off-a-meeting” feeling. I also get it when you are travelling and you get a weekend off to explore a city. Relaxing on a bench at Central Park watching eccentric dog owners parade past, catching a bus downtown in LA and chatting with the locals, having a nice meal with a client by the canal in Copenhagen, wolfing down caviar at GUM in Red Square, staring out at frozen Lake Michigan in Chicago, having a martini at Chateau Marmont (hello Ellen!). All of these experiences and places and people. None of them would have happened without working for this company.

Those little things kept me going. Hard work, lots of long hours, tough projects. All of that really was OK because I got to do all the other fun stuff too.

And the fun stuff wasn’t limited to the glamour of the global project. It was also the local stuff – the hilarity of the focus group were everyone is on a roll, cracking jokes, coming up with suggestions, telling you about their lives, helping you get to an answer. Being cooked lovely home meals and sharing them with a family; hearing their stories, some of them amazing and moving stories about coming to this country. (I think this should be mandatory for any politician – I think policy around immigration and community would improve tenfold).

And then there has been the opportunity to work with some very sharp minds. Some VERY sharp minds. This was also a big reason for my ten year tenure. I don’t think a smarter, more creative bunch of people exist out there.

So why leave? Well, the answer is Fin. He’s growing so fast. He is laughing and walking, and he is telling us stories. He’s one already and I’m the happiest when I’m with him. In a very short time no doubt he’ll not want to spend as much time with me as he does now – so I want to take advantage if every minute I can.

It seems like the perfect reason and time to depart.