No doubt you’ve already read about this, but I couldn’t believe/resist this:
Simpson’s attorney, Yale Galanter, said the incident was about race, and he intended to pursue the matter and possibly go after the restaurant’s liquor license.
”He screwed with the wrong guy, he really did,” Galanter said this week.
Umm, Galanter, you’re fired?
The IRS has an online version of form SS-4, Application for an Employer Identification Number. One fills out the info and submits it. First time, I got back poorly written and insulting error warnings. Turns out if you indicate something in box 8, you must not put anything in box 33, etc. etc. How should I know? And no commas in your street address, ever!
But okay, you fix those things and resubmit, and voila! You see a page with your provisional temporary EIN. With an official document to follow in the mail in 15 days. A button at the bottom invites you to review and print – nice! But clicking the button opens a printable version of the form you just filled out! Not the real useful stuff – the result of the form, the precious EIN!
Oops, just go back in the browser and double-oops, the results page is gone and you’ve caused an error by going back there. You can’t reload without causing an error and you can’t even successfully go forward again. The result of the form submission is gone to browser-cache hell. Every attempt to return to that page produces an irs.gov warning that frightens and disheartens. Starting the process anew could lead to weird legal complications, perhaps, since there are questions about having ever applied for an EIN before, and a big under-penalty-of-perjury button.
Got our EIN, but don’t know what our EIN is, and now I must wait, and wait, for the document in the mail.
Lame, IRS, just lame!
Many years ago we worked with a client who wanted to help people with “out-of-home personal cleansing.” It was surprising in our interviews to learn that some people worried about the germs left behind on a shopping cart handle. Then last year at a high-end grocery store in Tucson I saw this:
A dispenser for cart wipes. Finally a product that addresses the anxiety, if not removing it.
[Recently some students in our Design Research class at CCA came up with some stats around this same issue that I can’t remember, but they were disturbing/gross – the handle was the dirtiest item we’d touch in a typical week??]
Last week I was in my local Safeway and saw this pathetic effort:
Safeway has shifted the problem definition, allowing you to clean your hands instead of the cart? If the cart is dirty, what do you get out of cleaning your hands before you shop? Maybe a hand wipe on the way out, after you return your cart? But still, if the cart is (seen as) dirty, then clean the cart.
They’ve put it right in the entranceway in a location that is filled with other things that people need to access (drinking fountains, DVD vending machine, bubble gum, hallway to restroom). And really, the whole thing is poorly executed: it’s all about the poster; with little focus on the thing you need to grab – the wrong-sized wipe dispenser and then it’s finished off with the inappropriate, ugly, exposed garbage bin.
Maybe it was a prototype to see how people used it, but I think they’ve created something so pathetic and so much about failure (theirs, and your own) that the results wouldn’t be worth too much to me.
BusinessWeek’s Customer Service Champs supports my plan for innovation through empathy that I outlined previously: Everyone – EVERYONE – will go through the process that their “clients” go through, on a regular basis.
But new research from Katzenbach Partners offers an updated metaphor. The firm stresses the importance of an “empathy engine,” which looks at the role of the entire organization, including middle and senior management, in providing great service. If that engine is thought of as a heart, “the whole company has to pump the customer through it,” says Traci Entel, a principal at Katzenbach Partners who recently studied 13 leading service companies’ best practices. “It starts much further back, with how they organize themselves, and how they place value on thinking about the customer.”
Helping employees become more empathetic with customers was a common focus among the brands on our list. For instance, USAA, whose home and auto insurance are only open to military members and their families, serves new employees MREs (meals ready to eat) during orientation so they can better identify with military life. All frontline workers at Cabela’s, the outfitter famous for its massive retail shrines to hunting, fishing, and camping, partake in a free product-loaner program. Staffers are encouraged to borrow any of the company’s more than 200,000 products for up to two months, so long as they write a review that’s shared via a companywide software system when the goods are returned. That’s not only a perk for employees; it also helps them better empathize with product issues customers might have.
But few places make empathizing with customers quite as luxurious an experience as Four Seasons Hotels. At most of its properties, the final piece of the seven-step employee orientation is something the chain’s executives call a “familiarization stay” or “fam trip.” Each worker in these hotels, from housekeepers to front-desk clerks, is given a free night’s stay for themselves and a guest, along with free dining.
While there, employees are asked to grade the hotels on such measures as the number of times the phone rings when calling room service to how long it takes to get items to a room. “We bill it as a training session,” says Ellen Dubois du Bellay, vice-president of learning and development. “They’re learning what it looks like to receive service from the other side.”
I spoke recently at Shift, the IDSA conference held at RISD. I outlined seventeen ways to not suck at research:
1. Quit worrying about jargon
2. Think more broadly about which people you want to learn about
3. Garbage in, garbage out
4. Give other people the space to tell their stories
5. Follow up, and then follow up, and then follow up
6. Do you really want to use a survey? Probably not.
7. Collect and use natural language
8. Don’t forget that any research process with real live humans is hard
9. Breathe their air
10. Learning anything new requires rapport, and building rapport takes time
11. Finding insights requires pattern matching, creativity, synthesis
12. Personas are user-centered bullshit
13. Phil McKinney says “You’re probably not listening.”
14. Practice noticing stuff and telling stories (updated: read more here)
15. Do some improv
16. Embrace pop culture
17. Don’t forget about culture and social norms
The presentation was very well received, and I hope to share this material with another group before too long.
This restroom-last-cleaned-at status box is a digital device that replaces a familiar paper version. I’m not totally clear what the function of this has been: enforce compliance by employees who are responsible for doing the cleaning, remind the public that (appearance notwithstanding) the institution does indeed care about restroom cleanliness?
How does making it digital improve the performance? Is it the meaning of digital (to the public, or the monitored staff?) or the usability of the technology (one button press replaces writing by hand?) or the affordances of the technology (networked data tracking to look for patterns over time/location?)…
RedEnvelope is recalling 1,200 Life is Good sweatshirts for children. The garments have a drawstring through the hood, posing a strangulation hazard to children.
Instead, why not make yourself into a ninja using a shirt
? Strangulation and asphyxiation hazard, perhaps, but very cool?
The SF Chron channels Futurama (or else Teen People’s May 2027 edition) with this ridiculous Sunday feature.
The entire paper is turning into a comic book; huge amounts of meaningless visual imagery, and lurid headlines. Robots, should we trust them?
As the Robot Defense League
reminds us
Discrimination against Robots is the last socially sanctioned bigotry allowed in this world….Being a Robot is not a crime.
In 2003, a nightclub fire in Rhode Island killed 100 people. I recently visited the site of the club, now a somewhat makeshift memorial.
There were several of these, enough to prompt a web search. One can buy the same stone here.
The pictures now strike me as interesting, but experience of visiting was very touching, very moving. There’s a lot of detail everywhere, something that even a whole pile of pictures don’t capture. Each of those details evokes a pungent sense of loss and pain.
You can see all my photos from the site here.
Also, see IN LOVING MEMORY: Artifacts of Remembrance, by RISD grad student (or recent graduate) Chelsea Green. The site “investigates commemoration with the intention to create artifacts + experiences of remembrance that support healing.”