Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: business advice

Hanging on the telephone
Ever tried to call an online company about a problem? As the New York Times explains, it’s often hard to find the telephone number, let alone someone to answer your call.

The NY Times article worries a new type of digital divide is appearing between those happy to do business using email or social media and those who who demand to speak to someone.

In reality, the truth is more subtle than just generational differences – it’s about the web2.0 service-free business model where few, if any, resources are spent on customer support. The idea is the an assistance can be given out on “self service” basis through a website or, better still, crowdsourced on a user forum where the customers work together to figure out solutions themselves.

For many of the web based cloud computing and social media businesses, this model is essential to their survival. If you were to add a customer support department answering telephones, the viability of the business would collapse.

While it’s uncertain if that business model is sustainable for many of these web based companies, it’s interesting to ponder how many phone calls most businesses could avoid by having relevant information on their website.

It’s worthwhile looking at call logs and asking your staff what are the most common questions to your business. Answering those on the company web site might mean happier customers and fewer staff distractions.

For some businesses, letting customers discuss issues in an online company forum might be a way of crowdsourcing support and giving ideas for future products or service improvements.

Rather than leaving customers and staff hanging on the phone, having relevant and helpful information on the website saves everybody time and money.

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July 9, 2012
Are small business owners whingers?
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation sends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Adam Smith – The Wealth of Nations.

At a meeting with the state’s Small Business Commission I was once again reminded of Adam Smith’s words – that business owners will try to seek whatever opportunity they can to raise prices and whinge when they can’t.

Over the last few months I’ve heard business owners complain the government doesn’t do enough to protect the quality of their imports, give them more onstreet dining permits, stop their neighbours from having onstreet dining permits and, my favourite of all, regulating discounts offered on group buying websites.

Restauranteurs are complaining their customers don’t appreciate the cost of running a business – which is true, but it isn’t the customers problem.

A spectacular example is the anti-carbon tax propaganda where local businesses are displaying letters from a political party claiming their prices will go up and one franchise chain was dumb enough to even write down their plans to blame price rises on the new tax.

We also have the ongoing narrative that local councils – particularly those controlled by Green or Independent groups – are “anti-business” and killing commerce through unfairly enforcing parking rules and building bicycle lanes. Something that nicely fits the talking points of the Corporatist political parties that anyone who isn’t endorsed by a major party is “a dangerous radical”.

The best of all though is the ongoing campaign to eliminate the GST and import duties threshold for overseas purchases, which claims all the problems of the nation’s retailers would be solved if customers were forced to wait a week a pay a couple of hundred dollars in administrative fees.

Some of these gripes are fair – some councils are unreasonable (interestingly usually in areas where local government is seen as a stronghold a big party), the current tax rules are unfair and there are truly stupid people deeply discounting on group buying sites – but most of them are just excuses.

Business is always tough, if it wasn’t everybody would be doing it and taking it easy.

If all you can do is whinge about prices, your council, the government, your competitors, staff or your customers then maybe you should think about getting a job or at least taking a holiday.

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July 8, 2012
Your business personalities
Eccentric Sydney restaurant Wafu made headlines a few years ago over the owner’s strict insistence that diners followed her house rules.

A few weeks ago Wafu announced it would close and owner Yukako Ichikawa gave Sydney diners a serve of abuse on the restaurant’s site (currently down due to bandwidth issues).

There’s no doubt diners at Wafu had to accept Ms Ichikawa’s rules or else. Bring your own “doggie bag” or container and don’t waste anything or else you would be in trouble.

Wafu was a reflection of the owner’s beliefs, she wasn’t just running her business to make money. As she’s quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald,

“Wafu is viable, as a business, if I continue to accept inconsiderate, greedy people.

“But I couldn’t do it. Wafu has always been, and will remain, more to me than simply just another business.”

People often misunderstand why someone would start a business – it isn’t always about the money. Sometimes it’s because the founder or proprietor wants to do things differently, sometimes because they don’t want to work in an office anymore and sometimes it’s because they are unemployable anywhere else.

Often it’s because the business founders are sick of dealing with jerks. The freedom to refuse to do business or work with assholes is a great liberating feeling and something that those working in a corporation or government department will never experience.

Whatever the reason, those businesses reflect the owner’s personality and they have put their money, and their livelihoods, where their mouths are.

I wonder how many corporate warriors and armchair critics of Yukako Ichikawa have ever done that in their lives?

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July 5, 2012
Ranking managers
Vanity Fair’s analysis of Microsoft’s lost decade focuses on an unlikely culprit – the management tool of stack ranking.

Stack ranking, or “forced distribution”, is the practice of listing staff members in order of effectiveness or placing them on a bell curve where those in the middle are satisfactory and those at the right hand of the graph are exceptional.

Those on the left of the curve or the bottom of the list are deemed to be underperformers and risk losing their bonuses or even their jobs should the company be shedding staff.

Like all business tools, stack ranking can be useful. One manager of a North American multinational who encountered this when working with an Indian outsourcer described how it was used.

“A senior manager told me how he applied it in his group. Of 300 people, everybody was given a ranking and were told that ranking and given a chance to put their case if they thought it was unfair.

Then the bottom 5% were culled. Tough but fair.”

So at the Indian outsourcer it was applied to large groups and the bottom tier were given the opportunity to put their case. There was some transparency and at least some fairness in the process.

Used poorly though, it can backfire, “using it for groups of ten is stupid and lazy” said that manager who later saw it introduced at his own corporation with catastrophic results.

The real problem at companies misusing tools like stank ranking is too much management.

Like the old saw of “too many cooks spoil the broth”, too many managers create mischief. To justify and protect their positions they build little empires and make work for themselves.

Give empire building middle managers a tool like “stack ranking ” and you have a problem where office politics and patronage become more important than technical skill or performance which is exactly what the Vanity Fair article describes at Microsoft.

Ranking employees in a mindless way is symptom of a bigger problem in an organisation. In Microsoft’s case, the problem is too many managers.

The solution to that problem is simple.

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July 4, 2012
Is the Virginia storm outage bad news for cloud computing?
On the eve of the US Independence Day holiday weekend, the last thing you need is a storm taking out your services. Unfortunately a storm across Virginia did exactly that to one of Amazon’s key data centres, taking with it popular social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest along with the Netflix movie service.

Having a key data centre going down and knocking out the services that rely on it surely exposes one of cloud computing’s greatest weakness – or does it?

Last week I spoke to Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security for Google Apps, who made the point “not all cloud providers are created equal”. The Virginia outage illustrates this.

Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram all made choices to solely rely on one data centre for key parts of their services leaving them exposed should a storm, earthquake or tsunami affect that location.

Eran introduced me to a term I hadn’t heard before – “shared fate zones” – a good example of which would be putting all your servers in Virginia where they can be knocked out by a storm, in California or Japan where an earthquake can disable them or solely around the Indian Ocean where a tsunami like that of 2004 could know them all out.

All the major cloud providers have the facility to spread loads across the globe for exactly this situation. The services affected by the Virginia storm chose not to do this and they eventually were caught out.

Events like this aren’t just an issue with cloud computing, or even technology in general. Storms, earthquakes, fires and many other natural or man made disasters are a fact of life which can disrupt business. If an earthquake hits your town, the question is how quickly can your business and customers get back to normal.

Distributing services is actually the cloud’s strength, it means we’re not tied to one office or location so we can get back to normal a lot quicker than those who have lost everything.

Computer networks being knocked out is nothing new, we’ve seen this plenty of times over the last fifty years as squirrels have chewed cables, technicians have pressed the wrong button or natural disasters have disabled data centres. By spreading the load, cloud computing services should make networks less prone to problems.

A lot of people will say in the next few days that Amazon’s outage illustrates the unreliability of cloud computing, it’s actually the opposite.

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July 1, 2012