[When shoe company] Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers…After a week or so in this immersive experience…[Zappos] says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” [Because]…if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for.
— William C. Taylor, Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too
From my very satisfied customer’s point-of-view, Zappos is an incredible company. What’s even more fascinating to see is their corporate culture functioning in non-standard ways like the quoted policy, and fully embracing technology like Twitter (they have over 300 employees using Twitter) in order to connect directly with customers.
Publications seem to cohere around certain templates. Then something comes along—an innovation, a change in technology—and it’s all up for grabs. Everyone scrambles and experiments furiously, and then everyone settles on a new template…this is often done without any reference to the customers or audience…It’s often more a matter of editors and designers imitating each other…than it is of thinking clearly about how best to serve readers and subscribers. — Annals of Illegibility 2: Table of Contents
If a theme is to succeed, it must be completely consistent with the character of the business that is promoting it. Anything less feels disingenuous and detracts from the experience rather than improve it…An effective theme must be concise and compelling… [It] must drive all the design elements and staged events of an experience toward a unified storyline that wholly captivates the customer. That is the essence of theme; all the rest simply lends support. — Pine & Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage
Enterprise Rent-A-Car just sent me an unsolicited email. En Español. If you’re going to interrupt me with advertising, at least make sure it’s correctly targeted.
[W]e have decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. Details are still being worked out and will be posted on Apple’s website next week. — Steve Jobs, in an open letter to iPhone usersNow all you people who complained so vehemently that Apple let you down, you can all go back to being fanboys, walk into the Apple Store with your $100 gift card and pound of flesh, buy something that costs more than $100, and give Apple more of your money.
I take a camera with me almost everyday. These are a few responses I’ve gotten lately from various individuals:
“No picture! No picture! No picture!”Fabric store shopkeeper in Chinatown
“No pictures on the train! Absolutely NO pictures on the train!”Green Line Boston College MBTA driver
“SIR! There is no photographing in MBTA stations without a permit, sir!”Copley Station MBTA attendant, who sprinted up to me and yelled this 1′ from my face
Ok, Chinatown fabric purveyor, it’s your store and if you don’t want me to take photos of your luxurious Asian-themed fabrics, that’s completely fine. I don’t particularly understand your fear of it, but I respect your wishes because you own the place and its contents. (And because you probably know David Lo-Pan.)
But the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority? I have been harassed by your employees on numerous occasions since my arrival in Boston. While I understand that these people are “just doing their jobs,” it is also abundantly clear to me that they don’t know what they’re talking about and you need to fix it.
Photography is not against the law. Photography in public spaces is protected by the U.S. Constitution (Freedom of Expression, the 1st Amendment) and the Massachusetts Constitution (Freedom of the Press, the 16th Amendment, which doesn’t provide criteria for “the press”). These rights are obviously protected by law as civil rights, and any attempt to stop me from exercising them is a violation of my civil rights. The MBTA does not own the property it operates on, it merely manages it. It’s public space, and I am free to excercise my civil rights on said public space how I see fit.
(Before someone jumps on some Patriot Act, Post 9/11, threat of terrorism thing - If one were looking for a terrorism starter-kit, the MBTA posts 3D BLUEPRINTS OF EACH STATION [PDF] on their website. I’d wager that’s a slightly bigger threat to transit security than me snapping photos of my wife with a plastic toy camera.)
In my four weeks of consistent train travel, I’ve never seen a signage prohibiting photography in MBTA stations or trains. Searching for “photography” or “photography policy” on MBTA’s website yields minimal results - mainly pages related to procuring commercial permits for filming/sampling. There is no official policy for non-commercial photography in any MBTA literature on the web, in print, or in the stations and trains. The MBTA workforce is enforcing a non-existent policy.However, thanks to the consistent pressure of local photographer Jason Desjardins and the local ACLU, the MBTA’s hand has been forced to draft a policy in writing. It would make too much sense to post that policy on the MBTA site, so you have to visit the MBTA Transit Police site to download the MBTA Photography Policy [PDF]. I now carry it me on a daily basis. It’s a gem, especially this part:
No permit is required for non-commercial/personal use pictures taken in public areas. However, any person taking pictures on, in, or of MBTA property, vehicles, or employees must provide proper identification* upon request of an MBTA Transit Police Officer or other MBTA Official. The MBTA Transit Police Officer or other MBTA Official may allow the person to take pictures at the specific location under the followingconditions:• the person provides proper identification; the circumstances indicate that the subject(s) of the picture(s) does/do not pose a security or safety threat or in any way cause disruption of service or operations of the MBTA; and• the picture(s) is/are for personal or educational use only (e.g., tourist, railroad buff, student, artist, etc.).Non-commercial photographers are prohibited from using tripods, monopods, wiring or any like equipment that may have an impact on the safety of customers or employees and are prohibited from interfering with the free flow of passengers or disrupting service in any manner.*Photo identification that includes, at a minimum, name, address, and date of birth.
While the bit about “picture(s) do not pose a security or safety threat” is completely subjective and left to the whims of MBTA employees, as long as I have a photo ID and I’m not using lights and tripods, I’m not to be bothered.
MBTA, please do all the Boston-area and tourist photographers a favor by uploading your new policy to your website and educating your employees about it. And photographers, know your rights and don’t back down when someone is trampling on your civil rights.
“This is such a big bowl of wrong. I don’t understand this in personal relationships, and I don’t understand it in business-to-customer relationships. Shouldn’t you treat the people you’re in a relationship with better than you treat anyone else? Shouldn’t you treat your existing customers better than the ones who’ve given you nothing?…if we shift that marketing and ad budget from pre-sales to post-sales, we won’t have to worry about getting new customers. Our loyal, cared-for customers will take care of that.”Creating Passionate Users on how Too many companies are like bad marriages
It’s been right at 5 days since the server most of my sites sit on started acting up. Despite my hosting company’s best-reported efforts, the live versions of said sites are currently only updated to around September 21. For the average web folk, that might be suitable, but for me that means I’m currently missing something in the neighborhood of 150 blog posts and lots of site updates and such.I’ve been reluctant to post regularly because I was unsure what would happen to posts I posted in the meantime. (That was a lot of post-ing in one sentence.) Now I’m just frustrated.I understand that things break. I understand that things go badly sometimes, especially in regards to computer-related matters. What I don’t understand is a hosting company having a blog (ostensibly to stay in contact with its customers) that isn’t giving me regular posts about the status of my content on their servers, especially after FIVE DAYS. And by “regular posts” I mean every hour on the hour. I mean I want to know what the heck is going on. Overwhelm me with information. Flood my computer with so many updates about what you’re doing that I politely ask you to just stop until it’s all resolved. But whatever you do, silence shouldn’t EVER be an option for your clients.eleven2 has been a good hosting company to me for almost two years. They’ve provided a decent cost-to-service ratio, I’ve rarely had problems with them, and they’ve typically been available via IM for any support issues. (In fact, IM was one of the things that hooked me in the first place.)But I think one of the unfortunate truths of business has more to do with how the customer perceives you when things go BADLY as opposed to the previous months (years?) of good service. Sadly, just about every ounce of goodwill a customer has can evaporate with a quickness if the company fumbles one issue, or doesn’t communicate in the midst of it, or (even more frightening) if they handle something in a way we just plain don’t like. Customers are fickle. Our consumer culture makes it easy to be fickle; I’m only a mouse-click away from hundreds of businesses that do EXACTLY WHAT YOU DO (whatever that is) and so you need to be unique (and communicate!) or poof… they’re gone.
You are (apparently) an “internet service provider.” In other words, there is this wonderful resource called the internet, and you provide the service of connecting me to it (for an outrageous fee that only a monopoly could get away with, of course.) The problem is, lately (always) you seem to have this “2 out of 3 ain’t bad” mentality.For instance, typically when I have an issue with you, you simply decide to become an “internet provider” (sort of) and the missing service comes in the form of irritable, unhelpful employees and phone trees so complex I started mapping one out one time while I was being bounced back and forth on hold and eventually just gave up when I RAN OUT OF ROOM ON THE PIECE OF PAPER.This weekend, specifically, you decided to ditch the “internet” part of your duties, and let’s be honest… that’s sort of the most important part.3 out of 3 please,JoshuaP.S. Luckily, due to your weekend of lacking merit, hack director Brett Ratner narrowly avoided getting today’s letter sent to him, expressing how badly X-Men 3 WAS THE VERY DEFINITION OF SUCK.
Timeline: Charter installs a modem and internet service at my house from 5:35-6:45pm yesterday. It works great… for an hour. For the rest of the evening service cuts in and out until it finally whimpers and dies around 9:00pm. I then spend 7 minutes on hold and talk to a rep who schedules me for a follow-up service call “…between 1:00 and 5:00pm…” today. Jeremy, a very helpful service tech, Shondell at dispatch (what’s up, girl?), and I have spent the last hour and a half having varying degrees of success and failure at fixing the problem which is now resolved.And you know what it came down to? Not the service… but the piece of junk modems they’re using now. And some fancy new IP system on their end that everyone hates. Truly a company which doesn’t seem to pay any attention to their employee’s suggestions, much less to their customer’s complaints.
I’ve spent the better part of this evening researching lenses for the Canon Mark II that I want. And i’ve come to a realization… all of you apparently have NO DESIRE TO SELL LENSES TO UNINFORMED CUSTOMERS. Seriously, i’m basically a novice photographer wanting to improve my skills and upgrade to a much better camera with interchangeable lenses… and none of you seem to want to give me any information that actually helps me. That’s fine… lose customers because you won’t make information that you already have readily available to the people that actually need it.No love,Joshua
As I was preparing to finally have a “real website” I began shopping around for hosting companies. It seems like about 97.562% of the design world uses Media Temple, and I talked with them… nice guys, decent prices, recommendations from a who’s who list of great designers, etc. However, when it came time to break out the plastic and purchase hosting, I didn’t jump on the Media Temple bandwagon. Why?Instant Messenger.Now what could IM and buying web hosting have to do with one another? Nothing, really… except for a Texas company called eleven2. You see, I ran across eleven2 for the first time when the Shanes launched a redesign. But I look at hundreds of websites a day, so to be completely honest, I probably didn’t pay much attention to the fact that eleven2 was hosting their site. (After all, I had Media Temple blinders on like most of the design world.)Nonetheless, I bookmarked their site… not because they were a competitively priced hosting provider, but because their site was extremely well-designed. (Little Thing #1) When I returned to the site later on I noticed the most unusual of features… at the very top of their contact information, before their phone number or their email, was an IM icon and the address for eleven2support. (Little Thing #2)I just signed on for a one year contract with a hosting provider because i’ve been able to have IM chats directly with the Systems Administrator Rodney Giles. I was able to ask all my questions and run some options by him in a few minutes and make a very informed decision to become an eleven2 client… all because of IM.Could I have gotten the same info and customer service from Media Temple or any other good hosting provider? Of course I could… that’s why they’re still in business. But that’s not the point. The point is that eleven2 got my attention with great design and then made it easier than anyone else to get in touch with them, get answers to my questions, and feel like I was informed by someone within the company who knew what they were talking about. I’m a web head… I spend all day online. As a company that basically exists to service people like me, it makes sense to have a great-looking site and let me contact that company in the way that i’m accustomed to. Having to pickup the phone just lost Media Temple a customer… having a FREE INSTANT MESSENGER ADDRESS just won eleven2 a customer.And that’s how little things can have a big impact. What changes can you make today to change the way the world sees you? And no, i’m not just talking about business here.