This year we holidayed ‘staycationer’ style in Cornwall. Rock, to be precise, where the large gull wing houses remain unsold amongst the debris of the banking crisis. This being peak season we thought that it would be a good idea to organise an online shop to coincide with our arrival. The only online store that delivers locally is Tesco.com. Admittedly the night before leaving London probably wasn’t the best time to visit Tesco.com, there being a myriad of items that needed to be packed carefully into our Volvo jalopy to ensure fun could be had by all regardless of the weather.

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It being the summer hols my family have decamped to less urban climes with the car, whilst I continue to run the gauntlet of the Kings Road on my bike.

At the weekend I took the train to Yorkshire to be reunited with them.  I tried to buy my ticket at the website on Tuesday evening last; ‘ah ha’ , I thought, a nice slick website with all the prices and options clearly shown. I chose the train I wanted at a welcoming cheap price but was stopped from the purchasing it because there were no seats available.

This is a web issue that I find regularly and it’s not only frustrating, it’s downright misleading as they’re saying that it’s for sale and if that’s the case then I want to buy it. Online clothes stores do this regularly as well, showing me items of clothing that I can buy, only when I try to select any size they are all mysteriously ‘sold out’ – like the maitre’d at an empty restaurant telling the unexpected man in the bad suit that ‘no sir we have no tables free this week’.

Eventually I purchased a ticket, I went for a first class option as it was only £4 more than the standard fare (though their dynamic pricing strategy is neither here nor there as far as this tale is concerned) and looked forward to traveling in the comfort of the executive class. I am proud to say that I am a big fan of trains and I have had the great pleasure of traveling on some of the greatest train journeys around the world. When Joseph Pine says that ‘Work is Theatre and Every Business A Stage’ he really hits the nail on the head as far as the train is concerned.

When the conductor makes his rounds there always seems to be someone near me who has a problem; losing part of their ticket, just having the email confirmation or not having the correct ticket. Always, after pleading and sometimes tearful negotiation the customer is forced to buy a new ticket at the full price. On this occasion a young lady had used the website incorrectly and had purchased 2 young people’s tickets and her companion was not with her. Thus she had 2 useless tickets. The conductor listened patiently to her story and explained that he knew the website had a problem and that it had happened before. He then professionally charged her the price for a new full price ticket.

Shortly after all our white paper table covers were removed and replaced with blue ones; with a cup covering each corner. The old ones crumpled and thrown into a bag of rubbish. An attendant soon followed with a rubbish bag and filled it with copies of the Evening Standard that she had previously distributed. When I asked if there was a policy for re-cycling she said there were plans to bring in a special trolley to undertake that task.

Whilst the staff were not to blame for these events they are symptomatic of an organisation that is out of alignment with it’s values. Why isn’t there a mechanism for telling the web people that there is a problem with the logic of the site so avoiding customer angst? Why doesn’t the business build on it’s environmentally sound basis to deliver a customer experience that they could be a positive re-enforcement of their values?

If their business is a theatre, it would be like a performance of the Krankies at the Albert Hall, beautiful but bloody annoying.

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We were fortunate enough to attend the sell-out ‘UX London’ conference at The Cumberland Hotel, Marble Arch this year. It was the first conference if its type here in London aimed at user experience practitioners and there were some big names in attendance – both lecturing and running half-day workshops. The conference ran over three information-filled days. Day One was lecture day, with inspirational talks from the likes of Peter Merholz, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Saffer, Jared Spool, Jeffrey Veen and most excitingly Don ‘The Don’ Norman.

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I’ve had my email since 1996 and I’m subjected to a torrent of spam. Friends have said to me that I should just get a new email address and be done with it but to my mind that indicates defeat. Of course, the work email has spam software but it only acts as a series of breakwaters over which the relentless surge of mindless drivel will eventually find a way. Frequently, at the end of a day I’ll have a look at my spam folder to find over 3,000 junk messages from that day alone. Importantly, whilst I could be driven to the point of insanity by having to delete swarms of spam emails I am also interested in some of the messages that come my way, for example when friends complete a form at a website that generates an email campaign that is sent to me.

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 I’m seriously thinking about attending this year’s TED Conference in Oxford. In case you don’t know, TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conferences bring together an eclectic mix of speakers and attendees, questioning perceptions and encouraging discussion of new ideas. Whilst looking through videos of past speakers I came across Joseph Pine, who has an interesting take on customer experience and the search for authenticity.

In short, Josephs proposition (as I understand it) is that in economic history we kicked off by trading commodities like wheat, meat and cotton, we then progressed by processing the commodities to make goods that enabled us to achieve added value. Over the last twenty years we have seen the commoditisation of goods that has lead to greater price competition over and above other product attributes. In order to achieve competitive advantage organisations need to now rely on customer experience as the primary differentiator, but importantly what prospective customers are looking for is authenticity.

So what does Joseph mean by authenticity? Essentially it is that what customers get is what they’ve been promised, however, importantly it is necessary for the organisation to be fully aligned with the delivery of the experience in order for the maximum effect to be garnered. Joseph cites the example of Disney Land as a great example of the delivery of authenticity, because the experience delivered is exactly what’s been promised and the employees and organisation are all pointing in the same direction.

What does this mean for online experience? By focusing on the holistic experience of the website and less on individual experiential items an organisation can achieve greater success. For many websites, it’s recognising that online is a step on the customer journey and not the end destination, if a website can help a customer on their journey and encourage more of them to stay than go with a competitor then it can say that it has helped the experience achieve authenticity.

The thoughts expressed here are my own and do not have anything to do with Joseph Pine who I am sure will have his own take on what’s been written. If you’d like to find out more about TED please visit www.ted.com

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Back in 2000, a couple of researchers tested the theory that if we’re provided with too many choices then we end up making none at all. They set up a booth at a posh supermarket in America and posing as employees of the shop, displayed an alternating number of products to the shoppers. Half the time they displayed 6 jars of jam, the other half they displayed 24 jars.

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I keep reading about the emergence of the value consumer, who, once driven by quality and exclusivity is now busily coupon cutting for cheap or largely incentivized offers. Luke Johnson in the FT recently said that businesses must adapt and embrace this new order or asphyxiate.

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If you’ve had the opportunity to visit our office you’ll have been struck by the black and white photos adorning the walls. Louis Armstrong, The London Playboy Club, Black Power, Swinging London and the Beatles. They’re left over from a ‘dot-com’ idea we had back in 2000 when we hoped to sell framed photographs via the web. The photos’ came via an ex Spitfire Pilot called Terry Spencer who amongst other things is in the Guinness book of records for the lowest ever parachute jump. After the war he bought a plane and flew with his new wife, without a map, down to South Africa. There he started working for Life magazine, returning to the UK in the 60′s to photograph the defining moments of the decade.

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The author, blogger and software developer Joel Spolsky recently likened software development to fine tuning a transistor radio. You spin the dial to roughly the right point, make a series of minor adjustments before the clear signal rings through and you can enjoy your favourite radio station.

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Being a customer service obsessed type of blogger, I couldn’t help notice on www.squaremeal.co.uk (we’re the web agency behind the site!) that the newly voted restaurant of the year Scott’s, was described by the editors as a ‘customer-driven restaurant par excellence.’

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