MBA Geek

My wife had a negative experience with Tesco a couple of days ago, where they cancelled her shopping delivery without any prior warning. It was interested to watch Tesco’s response, which was initially going to make a negative experience even worse. When she phone to enquire about the order she was fobbed off and she wrote an extremely annoyed letter of complaint. It took them 3 days to respond, which did nothing to help improve the situation; but last night she got an email back with an apology and a £10 voucher.

My wife was satisfied with this; the voucher helped but what she was really after was an apology. The problem here however is that for 3 solid days, all her friends and family have been hearing about the negative experience and all this affects their perception of the retailer. The situation could have been turned on its head if the person at the other end of the phone when she called had the presence to offer an apology and deal with her complaint successfully; much like a quick trim from some problematic tuft . Unfortunately, however, a complaint needs to filter though numerous stages before it can be dealt with successfully and all this does is increase the frustration at the client’s end.

How good are you at selling yourself? Your products? Your accomplishments? Well, if you’re not all that hot, it’s best to start working on it. This was the message I read when digesting a recent article on Business Week called Lessons from Google’s Underwhelming Nexus One Show which analyses the recent announcement on the Google Nexus One phone and in particular compares it to the iPhone announcement 3 years ago. Delivering your message is one of the critical factors you are continually assessed on, by customers and peers; so it’s worth taking note and making sure you can do this effectively. It’s not just a matter of throwing promotional products at people and hoping that something will stick, successful delivery will always be key in any walk of life.

$41 million dollars a week. Now that’s a whopping amount of money by any stretch of the imagination. I was thinking about the movie industry in relation to pirated movies a couple of days ago and the thoughts I was having is around the remuneration that all the people invovled in the creation of media are due. Sure, it takes a substantial amount of effort to produce a movie like this, but once the costs are covered, who reaps the rewards?

The answer is the investors behind the movie. They are the people taking the risk that the movie might be a bust, and therefore deserving of the massive rewards we’re seeing in this case. But one mustn’t forget all the other movies that are produced that never make it. The truth is that it’s not as simple as retailing ballet shoes or Ferrari parts, the market profile and risk that make part of the movie market are quite different to other markets.

We’ve all seen the disastrous consequences of the earthquake in Haiti and it’s nice seeing the response of individuals and communities doing their part and contributing donations and funds to the victims. The corporate world has also been chipping in and we’ve seen donations by Coca Cola and Bank of America of $1 million apiece. Donations by UPS, Walmart and other organisations are also contributing to this pile.

Of course, it’s easy for the corporate world to appreciate the hardship natural disaster can cause. You only need to talk to owners of New Orleans hotels french quarter to get a feel of how helpless once can feel in these circumstances. Business is all about understanding what risks you are exposed to, but sometimes something comes out of left-field that you would never expect.

So, we had an interesting experience on our recent holiday to Malta, having cancelled flights with both FlyBe and RyanAir. Anyway, we had to make alternative travel arrangements in both cases, and I’ve just written to them expecting reimbursement for our cancellation, as per EU Regulations. It will be interesting to see what responses I get from each one and what process they will try and implements.

It was quite a harrowing experience, having to change airports and reroute while travelling with 2 newborn twins, a 3-year old and a pile of luggage. It’s going to take more than hair vitamins to get the stress out of my hair (what’s left of it) this time! And now I have to deal with the airlines. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

We had some travel disruption recently and I came up first hand against the EU Directive regulating passenger rights. It’s interesting to note that the Directive not only protects passengers, but it also helps even the playing field between different airlines. Budget airlines reduce their cost by removing the service element from their offering, but the EU Directive provides a baseline of service that helps even out the playing field between the companies. I doesn’t matter if we’re talking airlines or rv towing companies, competition is usually a good thing, but not at the expensive of discriminating or ill-treating customers. And that’s what the EU Regulation 261/2004 provide for.

Interesting area which I never really looked into much. I’ll blog more when I learn more about it.