And this marks post 200

December 29th, 2007 • blog

I’ve now hit post #200 on my blog, from a fury of posts in the beginning to slowly trickling updates now that my life is a bit more hectic than it was. Unlike many bloggers who learn things about themselves the more they blog — typically because it’s their first blog, this is probably my 5th — I haven’t really learned much about myself from blogging this year other than how to write better and hopefully, more clearly. My other blog about music reviews has sat stagnant for 3 months now and I plan on changing that in 2008, due in part to wanting to write more about music and the hopes that 2008 actually holds more worthy albums than this year did (by no means did most of the music I picked up this year suck, I’ve just neglected to review most of the good stuff). I did receive some demos and mail orders but in an effort to escape the doldrums of being chained to a PC for living, I’ve just stopped writing about music.

Here’s to another 200 and to more frequent posts.

Rosey Baby

December 29th, 2007 • 1 comment chatter

Rosey Baby,
originally uploaded by tehbizz.

Tonight we ate at Rosey Baby so Jess could indulge herself in crawdads for the first time. She loved’em and stated we’ll be going back because she likes the food and the selection is bigger than what’s at Alligator Alley (where I love the gator gumbo). Having never eaten them before she didn’t know what to do so I didn’t bother telling her how to eat them but she quickly figured it out and she “loves the buttery stuff in the head”. But she wasn’t too thrilled when I said she was indulging in brains and gills. I stated earlier today I wanted to eat something different like brains or grilled hearts so I settled for eating mushy crustacean brains.

The prices are much more reasonable than at Alligator Alley and they’ve got gator tenderloin so we may eat there more often. Tonight wasn’t the greatest night to eat there since it was game night and rather rowdy, and I’d just spent the last 2 hours changing her busted fuel filter, mostly in the dark — not fun. I was thinking of going to Shisha Cafe tonight but bailed last second because I badly need to wash this gasoline off and Jess is just tired.

So the holidays are over

December 27th, 2007 • chatter

…at least for most people. Ours will be over some time in 2008 once my mother comes down and has her little visit with us for the first time in about a year. What a riot that’s going to be. I’m not really looking forward to it but that’s me.

We did a German gift exchange days ago so we didn’t have to wallow in sleepiness to open our presents after a day of work. I got a mountain of horror movies along with How to Survive a Horror Movie and Zen of Zombie, see a pattern? I got Jessa hard-as-hell-to-find tokidoki Ciao Pirata purse, Fruits by Phaidon, Fresh Fruits by Phaidon, and Gothic & Lolita also by Phaidon. Seems to be another Harijuku-inspired pattern. I do have to say, that purse took a few weeks to find, even online, since it’s been out of print for a while.

After my Customer Service post, I’ve gotten more ideas from work on what’s wrong with Customer Service and I’m just thinking of how to write it. The week’s been hellacious and far more busy than last year. That has its ups and downs but mostly downs since I’m now pretty burned out and it’s only Wednesday. But here’s to two more days, one of which we’re going to see Juno!

The end of the stick or “Why Customer Service always sucks”

December 24th, 2007 • 1 comment customer service

Why can’t more companies be geared towards customer satisfaction, sincerely? All customer service is geared towards satisfying their customers superficially but just below the surface, it’s all about internal metrics not customers. If satisfied customers are the net product of highly trained customer service reps, then nearly all customer service teams are operating at a huge financial loss. But why? Like I said, it’s not about customers despite the name. Almost everyone that’s had a job has been a CSR — customer service representative — at one point or another, I’ve been one for the last 13 years in various forms and under various names. Job descriptions aside, every job in every company is a CSR position to some degree. So why is most customer service just so darned awful? One word: metrics. Helping customers with their issues, big and small, is about applying band-aids because nearly all customer service requests are reactive in nature and get sprinkled with proactive measures here and there. Proactive measures can take on the allegorical form of many things: bigger band-aids, sledgehammers, miracle fixes, and so on.

I’m going to refer to customer service centers as call centers since that’s what they all are anyway, in any various form. Call centers see customers as cattle, the more you get in and out the door in a shift, the better you’re doing your job. This is evidenced by the fact that, in a call center, everything is done for you and you’re just a conduit through which information flows. When you come to work, your break times are planned out for you, your necessary documentation and information is already neatly prepared for you, every minutiae is laid out for you so you can leave your brain behind; yes this does not apply for every position but I’m generalizing.

Take my own job for example: mail/sys admin. I do boring doldrum work everyday, much of it with very little thought given to the processes I do each day, hundreds of times a day. I make very few decisions on my own because I’m not a “manager” so I get to ask someone to make them for me. I type out the same responses to emails nearly 130 times a day, everyday and I’ve long forgotten to think about what I’m writing but I do know it’s a blend of what managers tell me what customers want to hear and what I have to really want to say. I take my lunch at mostly the same time, in line with our schedule and I hardly ever take the full lunch break. Since I work at home and not at a call center any longer, parts of my day go “unscripted” such as the fact that I eat breakfast while mulling over spam or I’ll read a book when work is slow (since, again, I can’t make decisions to be proactive). Most people aren’t this lucky. My job is to be as reactive to problems as I can be, my company cares nothing about proactive measures to help make a customer’s experience with our company better, trust me I’ve tried almost everyday for the last 16 months. They just won’t have it. And what do our customers have to say about our support in general? Most of them think it sucks and regularly vocalize it to our company, which is an unfortunate waste of time for them since nothing will come of their complaints. My job, along with nearly every other position in the company requires little more than a pulse and the ability to speak English and write in English, but no promises about how well either are done. I can plow right through an entire day’s worth of work in just a few hours, providing pretty bad customer service and I won’t get into trouble. It’s when I start thinking outside the box that I do get in trouble, I’m seen as a thinker and not a doer, and thinking doesn’t get my job done. Again, my company is about shuffling cattle through not making sure they’re satisfied. This really bothers me, a lot. So much so that I’ve long forgone pleasantry and let what I really want to say out and of course, no one in upper management likes it but amazingly (note the sarcasm), the customers like when I’m frank and upfront. I’m not the only person that sees it but I’m the only one who doesn’t play office politics to get my message across. More bees with honey, I know but these bees are especially dense bees. I used to find it amazing that a manager who acts in much the same way I do is heralded for their efforts in keeping customers “in line” and “enforcing policies” and I’m just called a bad apple. My last job was pretty close to this same environment but in a thin veil of academics and a lot more money being bandied about by customers. The problem with both jobs wasn’t that I wasn’t saying the right things to the right people, I was saying the right things to people who didn’t have the means to be heard by anyone that wanted to do anything. Ivory towers and all that.

Every job I’ve been in has basically been like this, with small adjustments here and there. But why? Why are we still treating customers like sheep even though there are people specially trained to tell employees to not treat customers like sheep. Scads of customers complain about companies day in and day out while the companies swear to improve customer service and take it “very seriously” while they keep doing the same ol’ thing. Many times when an employee thinks outside the box to actually help a customer, they are regaled endlessly by that customer only to be reprimanded by their supervisor, more than likely for “affecting the bottom line”. You get this speech because they’re worried about their numbers — again, those damn metrics — not about customers and always have the same retorts for explaining that without happy customers there is no bottom line. The one I’ve heard pretty often is “Being nice doesn’t pay the bills but being enough does.”

Is that all we’re supposed to be, “enough”? When will managers and analysts realize that cattle-pushing employees are also part of the herd and we like to talk about our jobs to other people. I relish each time I walk into a Mom-n-Pop store only to be treated like a prince even if I don’t buy anything. Each time I walk into a big box electronics store, if I’m not dragging bags of money in I’m just another cow being pushed and prodded by someone who probably hates their job — which has been vocalized to me on more than one occasion.

Why do companies applaud themselves for good customer service when they have angry customers beating down their doors? When will it stop?

This is how you treat customers

December 23rd, 2007 • 1 comment customer service

A back-end server at a Connecticut Whole Foods Market crashed and the store manager gave away about $4,000 worth of food without consulting his boss or his boss’s boss. Not only does it take balls to give away $4,000 of your company’s products, it takes more balls to do it alone. But apparently, Whole Foods didn’t mind at all. After all, they’re a store looking to please customers at their own expense, easily evidenced by the fact that they take every comment/suggestion/complaint put in their comment box very seriously. I’ve seen their public response to some very harsh criticisms at my local Whole Foods, they take it all in stride, just as any company should.

Sidenote: I had a big diatribe about customer service written up but I think I’ll post that as a separate post, it’s going to be longer than I wanted this to originally be.

Great Balls of Fire, no more!

December 20th, 2007 • chatter

I couldn’t help myself with the title, it just wrote itself. I got my Lapdesk Futura today and it’s thicker than I expected. I already noticed one problem with it: the arm to prop up half of it (to provide angled support) doesn’t hold in place like it should, it just dangles free. A small annoyance but an annoyance nonetheless.

So far the laptop is running a lot cooler than the sweltering “Lap(dance) of Fire” degree Fahrenheit it normally runs at and this can only be a good thing. The laptop is still a tad warm but that’s because the hard drive is right below my left palm, the actual lapdesk itself isn’t even warm to the touch. Now I just need a bigger battery and we’re good to go.

Be gone, ye ads!

December 19th, 2007 • 2 comments blog

I’ve finally run through my time with current big box ad networks and have removed all ads from the site now. AdSense pulled in a whopping $3.20 over a number of months and AdBrite managed to wrangle up good $0.51, all at the expense of ugly ads and slowing the site load time down.

Now, if TLA will ever approve me…

The tweet debate

December 18th, 2007 • 2 comments blog

As you can see, I’ve gotten a lot more use out of Twitter lately, I don’t really know why. I love Twitter Tools as it’s the easiest segue between Twitter and here, keeping information concurrently up-to-date however, it puts a quandary before me: tweets are filling up my blog with short content, is Twitter-to-blog worth it? I liked the original integration for use when I was out on the town and wanted to write something short, I could just Twitter it and Bam! it’d be here. Well, now it’s here and so are the rest of my tweets, looking kind of like a one-sided conversation.

I think I’ll push my tweets to a sidebar widget and see how that goes.

YEAH! Startup Schwag bag #3 d…

December 18th, 2007 • tweets

YEAH! Startup Schwag bag #3 dropped in my mailbox today. The t-shirt is huuuuuuge.

Go to Jerusalem, catch psychosis

December 18th, 2007 • beliefs

A minority of strongly religious people catch Jerusalem Syndrome on visits to the Holy Land. Can’t say I’m really surprised. It goes right along with speaking in tongues, the healing touch, and perceived divinity and superiority that staunchly religious folk like to believe in.

One tourist saw the Western Wall open up and reveal the Messiah to him — but which one was it? — and this is perceived as some kind of miracle. What if he just drank some bad water or ate some bad shawarma and was suffering from heat stroke? Then he had no memory of becoming violent to those around him. Not remembering such an awesome and faith-affirming vision must be truly heartbreaking to these adults. Oh wait, they don’t know it happened, nevermind. What a buzz kill.

Tough break.