GrubHubMike

One In a Million Crazy

I'm a big fan of giving good customer service. If a company is going to do it, they need to do it right.  That said, there are some serious crazies out there.  Let me be perfectly clear, I'm not talking about individuals who have mental illness. My heart goes out to them, and as a community we need to provide support.   Also, I'm not referring to customers who have had a bad experience and are angry and irritated by a failure.

Now, if in a given night lets say a company handles 5,000 orders.  You would have 5 people who have had a one in a thousand difficult to work through situation.  Those 5 people. Not crazy. In fact, this is where customer service really shines. working through these one in thousand bad circumstances. Great opportunity. Embrace it.  Even a one in ten thousand bad situation.  Try to give the benefit of the doubt.  Its sort of the tipping point between going as far as possible to rectify a situation and tossing your hands up and saying: "nothing to be done, that sucks". 

One in one hundred thousand. Now this is crazy.  The odds are against you now. If you find yourself in a situation where somebody could help 99,999 people, but not you, its probably because you are crazy.  Now, if its a one in a million kind of experience. That means that there are at most 349 other people in the country with a chance of being crazier than you. No need for hyperbole here.  Once a company passes one million transactions. There is exactly one that fits this distinction. 

If you are worried this may be you. Let me illustrate some warning signals:

1. If you engage in sexually explicit conversations with customer service, the problem may be on your end.

2. If you threaten to call your friend in the states attorney's office. Your understanding of the American legal process and definition of the word friend may be called into question.

3. If you claim to have deep understanding of the inner workings of the company you are talking to, you might need to challenge some assumptions.

4. If you call a customer service agent a liar, you may have a misunderstanding of the point of all this.

5. If your goal of a phone call is to make somebody cry, you may need to think more about your moral value system.

6. If the person on the other end of the phone can put you on mute and you don't notice, its not really a helpful conversation.

7. If you are *always* angrier after talking to any company's customer service, you may have problems with rage. 

Measuring Service

I'm very focused on measurement.  As far as I can tell, if there is no way to measure an initiative, its very hard to understand the value.  Customer service can be particularly tricky with this.  One can measure the number of times that a customer comes back after having a good service experience.

The difficulty is that this kind of measurement shortchanges the real value of a commitment to customer service.  Seth Godin would say its building a tribe.  Nordstrom would claim that it is the central offering of their company.  Zappos would relate that their entire business was built on hard to track word of mouth.  Measuring ROI is just so frakking tough with this stuff. I had some very personal experience with this recently:

I ordered some stuff from Dell. It was a disaster. An initial email that simply said "order cancel." 8 phone calls.  Several disconnects. Lots of transfers.  Lack of understanding. Blaming the customer. We've all been there before.  Yet for all that, I'll probably order from them again. The price is right. Our other PCs are Dells. Its a pain in the butt, but it is a known quantity.

Later that same day I was riding a bus. A guy a few seats down was in a nice suit. The "gentleman" next to him started abusing him for being "some kind of fancy downtown lawyer or accountant"  The suit replied very politely.  Gently informed him that he worked at a Nordstrom. Went on to explain it was a clothing store and that he'd be happy to be of service. He went so far as to give the crazy man a card.  No prejudices. All politeness and service.  I was absolutely stunned. To be that polite and service oriented on the way home on the bus.  No way!  And yet, even though this backed up what I've read about "The Nordstrom Way" I'll probably not be going to that store anytime soon. 

So here I have this dilemma:  Anecdotally, giving great service is the right thing to do.  Statistically, its hard to prove. Most pundits intuition is that great service is the way to go. Sure there are outliers that show great service works wonders: Zappos.  But, there are also outliers in the other direction of generally reviled companies that do really well.  Experts on the subject such as Malcom Gladwell and Seth Godin present powerful arguments. But they are just that: arguments. Usually proven through assertion and repetition rather than statistics and facts. 

*sigh* I'm going to need to keep cracking away at this problem. Its an important issue. After all, how can one improve if one isn't able to effectively measure progress. No point in putting a bunch of effort in and stumbling around.  *sigh* 

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Serendipitous Searching

I've recently rediscovered the joy of serendipity.  StumbleUpon is a great tool for a couple of things.  When you are sitting at lunch and need a brain break, but don't want to go to the old sources, you hit the Stumble button. SU brings you to a site based on your preferences. You say if you like the site. If so, you'll get more sites that are similar to your interests.  SU helps you experience randomness and relevance at the same time!  As opposed to these issues with objectivity in a normal search:

1. The search engine has an agenda.  It might be to provide relevance, or sort by usefulness, or appear unbiased. Whatever. These things don't happen by accident. 

2. The providers of content legitimately want you to see their stuff.  So, they spend a lot of time, effort and money on making their stuff show up first

3. Lots of people want to make money on this without providing any real value. So, they spend lots of time, effort and money trying to trick the engine into showing you their junk.

That stumble feature was *pretty* cool. But the issues above make it *really* cool.  I've got it installed in my browser and now I can see when I do a google search if the site has been rated well by other Stumblers.  Check out this picture of a google search for the word "awesome."  Look at the little gold stars from SU that show me which links might be more interesting then others.  No longer am I chained to the first result!

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Zach Kaplan CEO of Inventables

Zach Kaplan is the founder and CEO of Inventables, Inc.   Kaplan has spoken on product innovation to audiences at conferences across the country, including the Technology Entertainment and Design Conference (TED), Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) National Conference, National Plastics Exposition, Sensors Expo & Conference and the International Housewares Show. His work has been covered by Business Week, Fortune, Forbes, CNN, NPR and other leading media outlets (now including knowist!).

Knowist: Tell me a little bit about your work.
Kaplan: I'm the founder of www.inventables.com.  The Inventables Marketplace is pushing product development forward by making it possible for our customers to connect with the right vendors in seconds rather than waiting weeks or months. We're accelerating how fast products come to market and helping to improve quality.

Knowist: How is this bad economy good for new entrepreneur's?
Kaplan: The bad economy helps entrepreneurs focus on what's really important to their customers.  When things are bad customers are focused on what they need to survive.  In this environment if you can find a product customers are willing to pay for as the economy recovers and companies have more cash on hand you'll likely find even more customers  to buy from you.

Knowsit: How is this bad economy good for existing entrepreneurial startups?
Kaplan: This economy provides an opportunity to make your business more durable.  It's a tremendous opportunity to look at your current product offerings evaluate which ones should stay and which should go.  The turbulent economy makes it easier to make changes with customers and employees because everyone understands you need to innovate to survive. 

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What is (fancy pants) technical competency?

In addition to having great perspective, a great software engineer needs to be very competent. How competent? Fancy pants competent.  I've adapted the technical term fancy pants competentcy from this great resource.

Let me break it down for you:

• Knowledge of distributed VCS systems.
• Can setup a script to build the system, installers, and tag the code in source control
• Understands and is able to setup automated functional, load/performance and UI tests
• Able to recognize and code dynamic programming solutions, good knowledge of algorithms
• Use of appropriate data structures and algorithms and comes up with generic/object-oriented code that encapsulate aspects of the problem that are subject to change.
• Physical layout of source tree matches logical hierarchy and organization.
• Writes unit tests that simulate faults

The best part of this process has been lighting a fire under my ass to make sure that I rank in these categories.  Its nice to have an objective measurement with concrete examples.  Now I got to look for measurement of a good COO.  Or... maybe I can make one.... hmmmm.....

Hiring a (fancy pants) software engineer

We've been hiring a senior software engineer. I've read over 500 resume's. Identifying personal biases is very important.  Very quickly I realized I needed some kind of objective standard by which I judged applications so that I could be confident that I wasn't rejecting resume because I was tired, or hungry, or annoyed at the last resume, or whatever.

According to the research I've read, a software engineer in the top 5% in terms of performance accomplishes almost 2.5 times that of an "above average" programmer.  Nearly 10 times the performance of a "median" programmer.  The problem is, how does one speculate on an engineer's performance? 

In addition to technical competency, we evaluate on the following questions:

1. Is the candidate passionate about learning and improving? Have they read a technical book lately? Are they excited about some new technology?
2. Can the candidate think strategically about solving problems as opposed to being mired in minutiae?
3. Can the candidate think in a detailed once a strategic direction has been chosen?
4. Is the candidate actually interested at working at *this* company as opposed to just wanting a job
5. Is the candidate a technically proficient hard worker?

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Epic Backup Fail

Windows Vista isn't that bad.  Really. It is a great operating system. Needs a few tweaks, sure. But mostly its a victim of a bad history and worse media attention.  Unfortunately, my own PC has betrayed my crusade to make this claim:

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Bruichladdich

Whiskeyfest Chicago was this last Wednesday.  And what Wendesday it was (check out that sexy alliteration). I'm going to need to compose my full thoughts about it. But in the meantime, a quick teaser on that wonderful world of Scotch.  I tasted Bruichladdich for the first time while I was there. Two flavors stuck out.

Bruichladdich Waves was one of the most distinctive scotches I tasted.  It has a very "briny" flavor. Think salty without actually tasting salt.  It gave me imagery of sailing the high seas with a glass of Scotch in hand.  I was pleasantly surprised when it showed up at a buddy's poker night a few nights later.  I confirmed my original assessment.  A solid scotch with a distinctive flavor. 7/10 on the knowist scale with an asterisk for distinctiveness

Bruichladdich Rocks also had an interesting flavor. The distillery guy told me it was very peaty.  On an absolute scale I disagree, it wasn't very peaty. But on a relative scale compared to "Waves" it was pretty smoky while maintaining that briny flavor.  The overall effect was very good. I highly recommend it 8/10 on the knowist scale.

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