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Inspiration from Haneberg and Strickland

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Just listening to Lisa Haneberg’s podcast with Bill Strickland.  I can’t get enough of these ideas.  They consider a really powerful question along the lines of:

Will your life be a reflection of your environment or a reflection of your vision of how you want the world to be?

How can we build a relationship with our clients that is strong enough to allow us to ask this question?

If you have done my enterprise coaching programme you will (I hope) recognise this as a classic and powerful ‘confrontational’ question.  It is one that we should aspire to ask in our work with clients.

Making the right choice in relation to this question could be fundamental in helping stimulate a more enterprising culture in some of our most disadvantaged communities.

We should also consider this question in relation to our own practice and the nature of the relationship with our own organisation.  If our organisation is obsessed with outputs and targets does that mean our service needs to reflect that?  If our employer is bureaucratic and process driven do we choose to reflect that – or a more entrepreneurial culture?

Do we have the courage to take a different route?

Bill talks about changing the environment, physical and psychological, to provide a context that is affirming, positive and facilitative of peoples’ assets rather than focusing on, labelling and magnifying their deficits.

Enterprise professionals as custodians of the human spirit.  What a vision.  Now where was that business plan.

Give the podcast a whirl – watch the videos – you could even read the book!

More Customer Service Craziness?

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Mobile phones and insurance policies.

I like NEITHER.  Yet renewal time comes around and we dutifully spend hours on web sites to ‘compare the market’ and get great prices.

So this morning, after a mammoth web-surfing session I rang KWIK FIT Insurance Services to tell that we were not renewing our existing policy because we had found a better price and insurance coverage elsewhere.  I was put on hold while they transferred my call to someone who could ‘cancel down’ their renewal quote.

In fact I was transferred to someone who was trained to stop me placing my business elsewhere.  He asked me why I hadn’t rung them for a quote as they can offer better deals over the phone than they do over the net!

Not what I wanted to hear!

Mobile phone companies are the same.  They only offer you their best deals once you have already decided to place you business elsewhere!

Bad psychology and bad business!

So – in spite of all the recommendations to use web-based comparison sites to get the best deals and safe money – the best bet is to use those sites to find the best deal you can – and then ring up call centres and haggle to see who will beat the deal!

Hardly model customer service though is it?

So much for progress.

If you read my HP rant then you maybe interested to hear how it finally got resolved!   Eventually they told me they would issue me with a letter to authorise the seller to replace the machine. Yippee!  Then two days letter I got a call from an engineer telling me he was outside my house wanting to repair the machine!  I am the other side of the city about to go into a meeting.  No-one has mentioned this change of plan to me – or that the engineer was coming!!

Eventually without any further dealings with call centres I was able to get the engineer access to the machine and he replaced the motherboard.  Should be back in busniess soon!

The Joy Of HP Technical Support

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Why do so many IT companies get the basics of customer service wrong?

I have been buying HP gear for a long time.  I have always found it to be expensive (well not cheap) but reliable and robust.

Recently an HP desktop PC refused to start up.  I rang technical support as the machine was still under warranty.  I had to pay for the privilege.

They told me that the warranty had lapsed – even though I had bought the machine less than a year ago.  They explained that they look at date of manufacture not date of purchase, but if I faxed them prove of purchase they would honour the warranty.

You try finding a fax machine when you need one!

They then accepted my warranty claim and sent me a series of troubleshooting things to try:

– unplug the power cable

– open the access panel

– Clearing the CMOS (Remove the silver colored CMOS Battery for 10 seconds and reseat the battery or hold the yellow button next to the memory modules for 10 seconds)

– Without connecting the power cable press and hold the power button for 10 seconds

– Power on the system and check if it boots to bios by pressing F10 on startup

Did all that and got no joy so rang them again.  I received the following e-mail:

Disconnect HDD and OPTICAL Drives

Strip the system to PSU, System Board, Memory and Processor

Remove the Memory and check for Beep Codes (Note the no. of beeps)

Reseat / Swap Memory / Try 1 Memory Module at a time Reseat Processor

Reseat Power Connector on the System Board

Now excuse me – but I am a businessman who bought an HP PC to run a business (perhaps this was my first mistake?).  I am not a PC engineer.

I don’t know how to do the things they have asked me to do.

I don’t have time to do the things they have asked me to do.

I just want to run my business.

Am I being unreasonable in asking them to repair my machine?

The thing that finally hacked me off was this:
In case we dont hear from you in next two days, we will conclude that you are not having any further issues with that system, and will close the case.

UNBELIEVABLE!

If they don’t hear from me they will assume that all is well!

Any suggestions about what I should do next?