Infuriated by BT automated-answer so-called Customer Helpline?

Possibly one of the least customer-friendly things that big companies do these days is only offer automated answer facilities for customer helplines - "for so-and-so press 1, for something-else press 2...."

BT is one of the worst offenders in this respect, but a guy on Richard Hammond's 5 o'clock show today has found a way to beat it. If you dial 150, ignore what the woman says, and keep pressing the * (star) key in response each time she starts speaking - after six repetitions you beat the computer and actually get to talk to a human being.

So if enough customers do this, maybe BT will get the message about proper customer service!

The waste of customer delays at a Hilton Hotel

Two of the "Seven Service wastes" are delay on the part of customers waiting for service, and opportunity lost to retain or win customers.

I experienced both of these at the Hilton Hotel off junction 15 of the M40 today. I was meeting a colleague and we both ordered a simple club sandwich for lunch. They took over an hour to arrive, and complaints on our part after 45 mins and 60 mins. Nobody bothered to come and explain about the delay, and complaints were met with "the hotel is busy today, sir".

Even worse, the hotel has implemented car park charges. We had to queue to get a ticket to exit the car park, the machine was not working properly - it was not accepting credit cards, and the ultimate insult was that the cumulative delays meant we were pushed into a higher charge band for using the car park.

We shall not be using Hilton Hotels again!

Toyota - they must be doing something right

Toyota, so often held up as the very epitome of World Class organisations, must be doing something right. The Times 4th Jan 2006 reports that Toyota recently announced production forecasts that would push the company past General Motors to become the biggest car maker in the world.

And it's not only Toyota - Nissan and Honda have also achieved years of record profits.

And their success spreads through the supply chain. The same article says that there is a £3billion expansion drive to solidify the position of Japan's steelmakers ahead of Russia to be the world's greatest exporter of steel. In fact, Japan exports more than the US, Britain, China, and South Korea put together already.

Over the years, the fortunes of the Japanese steelmakers have ridden high on the success of the Japanese car industry. The Times says that the big steelmakers will be directing their big expansion plans towards Nagoya, the city where Toyota is based.

The finest employees? What do the people think?

I couldn't resist taking this photo in the staff entrance lobby of a Marriott Hotel in California.
I wonder what the people who work there think of it? Is it exhortational and patronising? Or is there something happening there that means the people really believe it? And how does that show in the service given to customers?

Police crime numbers up - BCS crime numbers down!

You only get the numbers that your data collection system is designed to deliver. And when making judgements about the figures, you have to bear in mind the context in which the data was collected. This extract is taken from an article published in The Guardian Oct 14th 2004.

“Michael Howard was complaining about the British Crime Survey. “The most reliable crime statistics, those recorded by the police – show that crime in England and Wales has risen by 850,000 in the past five years”, he claimed.

But police statistics bear little relation to the reality of crime trends. The BCS shows unequivocally that major types of crime have fallen dramatically since 1995; vehicle crime down by half; house burglary down by 47%; assault down by 43%; the list goes on.

Recorded crime has gone up because the police have changed the way they count crime. In 1998 the “counting rules” were changed. In 2002 a new national crime recording standard was introduced - they previously rejected victims’ reports of crime if they doubted them: under the new standard, these are taken at face value. Both changes inflated the numbers police looked at as recorded crime.

But statisticians have always known that only a proportion of crimes get reported to the police, and only a proportion of these find their way into police records. The BCS trend is simple, and quite different from the police numbers: people’s personal experience of crime rose from 1981 to 1995 and then fell back again to near 1981 levels. Violent crime involving firearms is rare but rising; e-crime is surging. But the headline trend for crimes that affect everyone’s daily lives is downward.