We've been having an interesting time with our Mobile service provider of late. In this latest spat of wrestling with the corporate dragon, the conversation quickly deteriorated into some fantastic comedy moments:

My discussion with Customer Service O2Bot - Lucy

Our Answer:

Hi I'm Lucy, how can I help you today?

You asked:

Hi Lucy, I need some help with our Business account, we have technical problems with two of our phones, and also a problem logging into our account via the O2 website. Our contract number is DNAG-003347987

Our Answer:

I'm sorry but I won't be able to answer such a long question. You can click on the 'My O2' link below for more information on your account. Otherwise please could you rephrase? My O2

You asked:

How about I go to Vodafone instead, thanx

Our Answer:

I'm delighted to help.

You asked:

Great, so you'd be happy to help your new customer move to Vodafone?

Our Answer:

We are glad you're thinking of joining O2 and for me to help you with your query please choose an option from below: 1. PAC Code information 2. Request or cancel a mobile number transfer 3. Timescales and charges for keeping your number 4. What to do before the day of your number transfer

You asked:

No you misunderstand as usual. We have had enough of your rubbish service and we are going to terminate our contract with O2 and move to Vodafone. Are you sure you are delighted about that ?

Our Answer:

I'm sorry but I can only understand one sentence at a time. Please could you simplify and rephrase your question. Alternatively, Click here to find out how to contact customer services.

You asked:

I see, well that's better than your Human counterparts they can't get that far.

Our Answer:

I'm glad.

You asked:

You're glad that your customer service agents can't understand one sentence ?

Our Answer:

I know you're talking about services but I'm not sure of your exact enquiry. Please rephrase your question or take a look at the FAQs to the left.

You asked:

Yes Services, your are completely rubbish and nothing works.

Our Answer:

I know you're talking about services but I'm not sure of your exact enquiry. Please rephrase your question or take a look at the FAQs to the left.

You asked:

I see, OK well can you tell me why our phones can't send SMS messages ?

Our Answer:

Press Menu on your phone and choose the 'Send Messages' or 'Messages' option. Type in your message using your keypad. Follow the on screen prompts to enter the number you want to send the message to. Press 'Send.' For comprehensive details on how to send a text message from your mobile, please refer to your mobile manufacturer's user guide. Important Note The 'delivery report' function is not supported on our network. If you'd like to receive delivery reports, you can enter *0# followed by your text message and then send the message as you usually would. Has this resolved your issue? Yes No Go Back

You asked:

Look Lucy, it's been a blast, but we're not getting anywhere.

Our Answer:

To send a text message from your mobile, you must have the correct message centre number stored in your mobile phone. For customers on the Pay & Go™ Original, Pay & Go™ Talkalot, Pay & Go™ Wild and O2 Online Pay & Go™ tariffs, your message centre number is +447802092035. For all other O2 customers, including U, Easylife, Pay & Go™ Free Best Friend and all Pay Monthly tariffs, your message centre number is +447802000332. Has this resolved your issue? Yes No Go Back

You asked:

OK, never mind I think I will just transfer our account to Vodafone.

Our Answer:

Occasionally dust and static can build up on your SIM card and prevent it from working correctly. To clean your SIM card, turn off your mobile, remove the cover and the battery. Slide out your SIM card and wipe it down with a dry lint free cloth then place it back in your mobile. Replace the battery and cover and turn your mobile back on. Has this resolved your issue? Yes No Go Back

What exactly is meant when we say marketing automation?

Perhaps the first question to ask is, what aspect of marketing are we wishing to automate? Remember marketing is about selecting subset groups from the overall market and understanding how your products and services can be applied to those groups and sub sets. It is also about understanding which messages and what communications channels are best utilised for each individual group or sub set. The final aspect of this triangle is then understanding how those sub-set groups interact with your messages and communications. How they respond, via the interest shown in your products and services. As you can see there are three corners to this triangle the first two that we discussed are perhaps somewhat more difficult to automate than the final element or alternatively I should say the degree of complexity required to automate each of the three sections is reducing as the definition of the requirement becomes more clear. Customer Relationship Management systems are geared to deliver just that: "customer relationship management".

Many CRM vendors would argue that marketing automation is simply a subset or an analytical report from the CRM system. We would argue that it is really dependent upon what is meant by marketing automation. In our interpretation of marketing automation we look for the iSAM system to deliver the third aspect in the area of marketing. We know that our clients are interested in understanding how their customers and potential customers are interacting with the marketing communications that they are distributing. Indeed this will include direct marketing, advertising, and of course e-mail marketing, and website marketing. In the latter two cases this is where the iSAM system really shines.

The iSAM system holds your customer relationship management data and therefore understands and knows about all of your contact data. When sending communications via e-mail iSAM can make each communication uniquely traceable for every individual contact to which the message is sent. Further more the marketing automation tools such as trackable URL links and our unique footprint tracking technology give you deep levels of marketing automation. Enabling you to see for each contact to which the message was sent, when they read the message, which links in the e-mail they clicked upon, where they arrived at your website, and which links on your website that they clicked up on. Giving you unique insight into which products and services they spent the most time looking at. All of this intelligence is readily available from within the iSAM system. This becomes a very powerful marketing automation tool and can give you powerful commercial advantage putting you three steps ahead of your competitors. You are able to communicate rapidly and effectively with your contact groups and subgroups, sending selective messages to each with degrees of personalisation derived from the contacts data record. You are then able to see how each contact responded to your message, this enables you to selectively pick out the contacts who showed the most interest in your products and services and then follow those up appropriately. The iSAM system enables you to be so much more effective because using the marketing automation technology you now have the information you need to make the correct decisions about the communications that you send to your target groups. Overall, the net result is an increase in marketing efficiency, an overall performance increase in your return from your marketing budget and increased support for your sales activities.

A few years ago I attended, after much deliberation, a course on photo reading. This is a technique designed to speed up your ability to read books, magazines and papers much faster than you currently can. As a minimum it will double your reading speed, beyond that it could speed your ability to read and retain information up to 100 fold. Sounds totally bonkers, and I have to admit I was very sceptical. These days I am regularly asked by folks interested in taking a photo reading course, is it for real, does it work, and did I actually learn how to do it. I thought I would write this blog to answer those questions permanently, but also now that I am 3 years into using it I think I feel I have an understanding of how it works.

Is Photo Reading Fact or Fiction ?

When I first heard about it I immediately dismissed it as complete cobblers, and even those people that said that they had been on the course and could do it, I wrote them off as simply a case of the emperors new clothes. You've paid several hundred pounds to go on the training course, you'll look a propoer charlie if you say it didn't work. Whilst the idea of being able to increase the rate at which I can intake written material appealed to me hugely as being deeply interested in Computers and Software systems there is no shortage of reading material, I continued to plod on in the same old fashioned way. 

A business networking invitation came through to me one day that included a free seminar introduction to Photo Reading with Clare Whiston. I figured if it was free It wouldn't do any harm to take a look. Clare took the group through what the course was about and also did a couple of exercises. One of the exercises compared two sentences of about 80 letters, one was just mumbo jumbo, the other said something like "The horses race with coats in the winter, except when the ground is frozen". Each sentence was flashed on the power point screen for about a quarter of a second. The first mumbo jumbo was shown and no one in the room recognised anything, then the second was shown and many of us in the room, me included, were able to read the whole sentence. Well that demonstrated to me that certainly the mind was much much quicker than the eye, and so I thought to myself "Hmm , maybe there is something in this. If I could do that with my technical reference books in my library it could be a really useful tool"

I decided to sign up for the course and contacted Clare to arrange it, and we met later that month with a small group to go through the 2 days of training. I decided that my approach would be simply to dispell any preconceived notions and adopt the training with an open mind, applying the techniques by rote and see what happened.  Well sure enough at the end of the 2 days, I had got the better part of it and was able to apply what I had learned. Now I have to say at this point it worked for me because I simply followed the system to the later doing every aspect of what I had been taught. Repeating the process each time I wanted to get a book into my head fast.

"Yes Photo Reading is a legitimate reading technique"

The answer to the question is yes Photo Reading is a legitimate reading technique that really does work. I would also state here that now that I have been doing it a while, I no longer go through the routine in with the same discipline. These days I can pick up any book I like, and Photo Read it, Read it in the old fashioned way or a mixture. I choose the technique that I'm going to use according to my need or desire.

OK So How does it work ?

Well for the official answer on that you need to speak to a professional Photo Reading Trainer such as Clare Whiston. However, here's the Rick Timmis thinking on it.

Photo Reading is like watching Rolf Harris paint a picture, or perhaps like looking at where you live on Google Earth. You start off with a general overview of the book, seeing its entire contents but only in very blocky resolution. Perhaps you know the covers, and Chapter headings, then you extract all the core sub sections for each chapter, followed by the key paragraghs. Following this you then go away for at least 24 hrs leaving the book alone. When you return and begin to activate the material you use a peice of paper and pencil to create a mind map. This is the process where the zooming in happens, and as you do it the contents and material within the book becomes comprehensible in your own mind. Now when you want to photoread a book really fast (like my Tweet the other day, where I read 395 pages in 20 minutes) you have to know what your purpose is, what;s the objective your after. I came back to my latest book "Version Control with Subversion" and spent 1 hour with it, pencil in hand and mapping as I went. At the end of that process I'd got everything I was looking to achieve in my head, plus a bunch of other stuff I wasn't expecting (more on that below). So thats 395 pages of factual technical information consumed in 1hr 20 minutes. I have no idea how that rates against your reading rate, but its incredible compared to what I used to be capable of using the techniques that I got taught in school.

Being hit with the Unexpected

As I mentioned in the paragraph above, you also find that in your mind there are plenty of unanswered questions lurking around. I often find that when photo reading my technical computer reference books I will get knocked off track as something I was looking for an answer to which was unresolved will suddenly get cleared up. When this happens it validates the whole photo reading process, because it shows that, there in the text are  the answers that I needed. The difficulty for me had always been being able to get through those type of books (lets face it, even for a hard core geek like me, bashing away at reference books with anywhere from 400 - 800 pages is a killer) Now with photo reading I can crunch through those books, and pop them back on my library shelf. The biggest benefit however, is that with every book I photoread it gets imprinted in my head, so I always know which book has got what information in it, and I know where to look when I want the word for word detail.

Where is it not useful ?

The only time I don;t find photo reading useful is when I want to treat reading like a conversation with friends. i,e when I am reading the latest copy of Linux Format, or Admin Magazine. In this case the reading is for pleasure and having the material unroll before me like walking along on a new deep pile carpet, leading me on journey. The same is true when reading a novel. In these cases the traditional techniques that I learnt at school serve me better.

Hey guys "What does the customer want ?"

Pre-text from the author: Rick Timmis

I appreciate that the subject matter here is deeply rooted in the Linux Desktop, which many of our clients do not use as they use the Windows Operating System. I write all of my blogs on the Abazander website. I think the relevance here in this situation / dispute is getting the message across that Linux is an awesome computer operating system, that of course should be main stream and sold in PC World and other Retail outlets. To achieve that you must put your customers first! Give them what the want. I feel for a company that specialises in utilising Open Source technology to create powerful CRM and Sales / Marketing systems like iSAM that's what makes this blog relevant here."

Why is there chasm of the Open Source Community

There has been much conflict recently - spats between Ubuntu, The GNOME Foundation and the Banshee creators, all really fired up around decisions that Canonical have been making for the recent releases of the Ubuntu Linux Distribution.

It seems that Mark Shuttleworth is on a mission to address the desktop interface look and feel and the end user usability. I think his vision is to try to create an open source product that shapes up as strongly as Apples’ Mac products do and that appeal to the wider user base. Obviously, there is an open source development community at play here, not least to mention The GNOME Foundation and obviously the creators of the Banshee Media Player, which is where there have been many issues brought.

I think the unpopularity started when Ubuntu decided to drop GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) from the Ubuntu desktop. There was a lot of noise made about the fact that Canonical was not really paying attention to the community, and complaining that Canonical has tried to stamp rough-shod over The GNOME project by forking its code and developing its own Unity interface. We also have the Banshee dispute, all based around the fact that Canonical wants to introduce the Ubuntu One cloud service and Music store effectively redirecting a portion of the Gnome foundation income stream. This has been seen as a move by Canonical to simply generate revenue for themselves.

It seems to me that we have got two distinctly different sides to the chasm and I think there is an important principle that the open source community is completely missing here. The community is very much involved and interested in the products it develops and how it they should work and function. It’s interested in its new GNOME 3 and the GNOME shell desktop interface. It’s interested in software development and program features.

Equally, of course, Canonical, funded by Mark Shuttleworth, is very interested in the  community because that is its research and development department. The fundamental question missing, is that in all of these arguments and disputes, is anybody actually asking ..

‘What does the customer want?’

To be frank, the customer doesn’t care about our product. The customer doesn’t care about what’s going on with our software development. If we want to have a main stream Linux distribution that is utilised by the general populous on every PC desktop, quite frankly we are going to have to give the customer what they want. So, that means giving them a user interface that they want to enjoy and experience. That user interface is going to have to be different to Windows and different to Apple. It’s going to have to be distinctive in its own way, otherwise why would the user possibly want to change?

Does the new Unity desktop achieve that ?

Of course the desktop needs to be a very useable interface, functional and simple to use. It simply is not good enough to expect a customer to type in command line instructions into a terminal, when the want to install new software.  We need to be able to create an operating system that can be installed onto PC's by default in retail stores like PC World so that customers come along and look at that interface and see it as a viable product that is interesting and exciting to buy. That, in some ways, is where Android has been successful, where Linux has consistently failed over the last ten years. Android has managed to get itself installed by default mobile devices a platform that it’s managed to give the user an experience that they understand and that they can use simply.

Is Mark Shuttleworth deliberately trying to create these ructions in the community? Probably not, I am sure that Mark has been trying, as have the Canonical team, really hard to work with The GNOME Foundation and other people to get the product right. What’s typical of the Open Source Community is that inside the community we are so product orientated and interested very much in the software, we are forgetting to look at it from the customer’s point of view.

Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth and the team are trying to create a product that the customer wants to use because it fits the customers’ needs. He is concerning himself with, ‘What does the customer want?’ and that is what is creating this chasm. Cannonical is trying to deliver a product to market, where as the Gnome foundation is trying to deliver to its own objectives which are internal to its existing community and user base.

I think what is needed is a little bit more tolerance by the community and a little bit more understanding of the commercial perspectives if we are to reach our end goal together. If we are not able to reach that level of understanding, then we are going to see more projects getting forked and divided. Community software developers will benefit from understanding that the customer doesn’t give a damn about the product development or its internal, they just want to get something that functions and satisfy their needs.