What can you really rely upon? The morning news from the BBC or CNN? Though I do remember during a big storm in 1988 the BBC news was broadcast from the Play school studio.
In general though the gap between my perception and expectation of a product and reality grows ever larger. Our company has business continuity insurance which I specifically took out in case our broadband line was cut for a long period of time as it was in 2002 when a over enthusiastic digger took out 5 metres of cable right outside our Moorgate exchange in London. When it failed again in 2008 I rang the insurance company to find that since the fault this time was mere incompetence at the exchange rather than an over enthusiastic digger I was not covered. Of course I under stand exclusions but my business was disrupted I had paid for cover but I was not covered.
Everyone has similar stories your mobile phone stolen from the glove compartment of a locked car was not covered but would have been if it had been locked in the boot of the car. Our laptops are covered onsite at a multinational BUT only if someone breaks into the building.
Running a growing small business we have to jump a series of organizational hoops to ensure that we can operate. For most organizations you can reply upon the most basic health and safety precautions in the office the fire alarms are tested and the cables are PAT tested but do you really believe the rest of the programme. Do you really believe the advert for the employer that claims to be an equal opportunity employer regardless of age, sex or race? Do you really believe that the water or Gas utility values your call when you can get through on the sales line in five seconds but be left hanging all day on with a request for service.
The larger a organization becomes the more they should value their reputation but usually the more difficult it is to get any one to honour their commitment or compensate you for any failings in the system.
I heard a story once that in Stalinist Russia bureaucrats decided to centralize shoe repairs from a busy street with shoe repair key cutting kiosks seemingly every 400 metres. In the new regime you handed the keys in locally but they were all taken to a central factory for repair. Quite quickly however, it all fell apart customers would return to the kiosk to pick up their shoes and find their pair had been mixed up and a shrug from the kiosk owner who would claim that it was not his responsibility.
It starts to make me think that if someone is personally responsible for a service you get better results if that kiosk owner values his or her reputation and livelihood and fears from the local competition. Inevitably that makes me feel that there must come a point in an enterprise where despite all the customer service courses and management chains to ensure a sense of personal responsibility it all goes horribly wrong.
Just got a call from one of the trainers. I had forgotten to order books for a Dreamweaver course in Colchester and ordered books from Amazon at about 3:00 PM the previous day and they had already arrived. The big corporation with their procedures had made up for a small company lack of checks and procedures. It’s a complex story to get the right checks and balances to ensure that the customer story (and their shoes) does not get lost as an organization gets larger and that each person in the chain goes the extra mile to get the story back on plot. http://www.mousetraining.co.uk/adobe-training-courses/adobe-dreamweaver-training-courses.html