1. Robotic customer service

    I rang up PayPal a few days ago over a dispute, and TV licensing today over a renewal. Both times I was met with a robotic system that plays a pre-recorded voice asking a question, then it requires me to say answers and then it would interpret these and ask another question until everything has been answered.

    I find it odd that a company would opt for a computer system over a person, and was happy to realise that you could say ‘agent’ any time after the first three questions on PayPal’s customer service line and speak to a real person.

    People complain about customer service being based in India, but it’s nothing compared with no human interaction at all.

    Discuss This Article »

  4. Music Lessons

    Seth Godin just posted a rare video of himself doing a full presentation. This presentation is on the music business and takes place at Columbia Records.

    The video messes up around eight minutes in, but is a fantastic listen in the background. If you haven’t read or don’t own a book by Seth Godin and are serious about business, I suggest you go about buying Purple Cow and giving it a read.

    Update: Seth has taken the video down due to it stopping itself eight minutes in, but has placed up a PDF transcript of the talk online which is well worth a read.

    2 Comments »

  5. Renting books

    Consider the situation: Student’s receive reading lists of fifty books to read for an assignment. Their local University library has five of each book, and there’s two hundred plus students on the course. Worse than this, but these books are needed by the people on the second year of the course too. So ultimately we have even less an amount of books for these student’s to borrow for their assignments.

    Why not have a de-centralised rental system that competes directly with these libraries? Even if you go to your university library, city library and local library – there’s still not enough to go through everyone. Put it online and deliver books straight to those student’s homes for a fee, it doesn’t even have to be directly to a student’s home: just deliver it to the university and have them pick it up there.

    It could easily be per book, per month or per student term. Better yet, don’t aim directly at student’s and just have a student plan that student’s can actually afford.

    I’m not talking eBooks, but the real thing you hold in your hand and can scan copies of for references. You’re solving the national university problem based around the lack of books, and you’re going to have casual readers that want a book or two a month as well. The market would be completely begging for this solution.

    The option to buy could be implemented if needed and you could even let people send in their own books to increase your library, giving them credit or money for doing so. Especially when we’re talking old educational books some students don’t need to own after leaving university.

    Get it done Amazon.

    3 Comments »

  6. Sign up to learn more

    “We love freelancers, to find out why, sign up for free to learn more”
    “We can offer you the best extreme ironing forum on the planet, sign up to learn more”
    “This service will rock your knickers off, sign up to learn more”

    Why do certain sites suggest you sign up to learn more about the service? In an age of open information and tour’s to anything that’s worth signing up for, it’s time all sites adapted these techniques to give power to their statements.

    I want an extreme ironing forum and you say your forum is the best, give me five reasons why to back up your statement and you’ve probably sold me. Tell me to sign up to learn why, and I’ve gone onto the next forum in the search results list.

    2 Comments »

  7. BT Business, you’re not worth the money

    For the newcomers, BT Business provide the broadband and phone line for businesses, with the key promotion being that you get much better support.

    I don’t want to get into a rant, but in my opinion BT Business represents one of the worst organised companies I’ve ever come across. To back this opinion up, here’s only a select few of the problems I’ve encountered so far in my 7-8 months with them:

    • Four times larger bills than normal broadband users
    • The only apparent reason for this being English speaking customer service representatives who answer within ten minutes and not Indian speaking customer service representatives who answer with two hours (both on 0845 numbers)
    • Having to be forwarded to a different department at least once every time I ring up because there are only 2-3 numbers listed on the back of each bill, and the website is utterly useless at suggesting what number to call
    • Being forwarded to the wrong department 50% of the time
    • Despite originally ordering from one sales guy, I have two separate accounts: one for phone and one for broadband
    • They both have different people to ring up separately to change any details
    • For each there’s a department that will change your address, a department to change your card details, and a department to change your company name. Not to mention the sales, faults, technical and other useless departments for each of these accounts
    • Engineers that come out to install the broadband are from a different company altogether, Open Reach
    • They have to deal with Indian call centres
    • They can’t directly ring up BT and put in an order for anything, but they can ring up and say they’ve completed a job

    Back when I was much younger, BT used to be a company I looked at in awe. Now days it seems they’ve done everything they can to ruin what was a fantastic customer experience ten years ago.

    8 Comments »

  8. Rolled launches official blog Sausage Roll

    My company Rolled Limited launched our official blog recently. This means that JHuskisson.com will go back to my opinion and articles on freelancing/general issues and Sausage Roll will become the official company blog about client launches, job openings, hostile company take overs and occasionally, articles that will help our clients and/or companies like ourselves.

    Changes are on going at Rolled and we have several great announcements over the next 1-3 months as we develop into a tighter team, establish our new brand and client services. Don’t hesistate to subscribe to the Sausage Roll RSS feed to get instant updates, or subscribe via e-mail for a morning e-mail after we post anything up.

    Discuss This Article »

  9. Quick notes about sending job applications

    About 90-95% of applicants to job applications I post up elsewhere find my blog somehow and compliment me on it in the opening paragraph of their e-mail. Given this I thought I’d throw some nugget-sized wisdom bombs in front of the eager young eyes of those applicants so they can better their application, or not bother at all.

    • If it says full-time please for the love of god don’t apply thinking it’s a freelance position. It just isn’t, ‘full-time’ and ‘freelance’ are two entirely different job types.
    • No, you can’t apply for the full-time position, waste an hour of my time talking to me and then say “so here’s the thing… I work with three others guys in…” – stop – your a company already. Next.
    • The same goes for ‘White Label’ services. Go away.
    • Applying because you like Rolled’s (or my) sense of humour? Show some of your own, it knocks you up the queue significantly. If you are going to talk like a robot, attach a video of you dancing like one to up the comedy level and recover that dreaded generic application from the dead pile.
    • Adding to the point above, show some personality. It’s very clear when you are using a template you’ve pre-prepared or slightly editing one.
    • Address the actual job, If I say I want x and x from a WordPress Developer, please tell me if you can do any of those x’s. It’s almost the point of the e-mail, the introduction and background paragraph’s are meaningless unless a paragraph addressing the job and your talent to do x and x appears. If you can do x and x extra that’s brilliant, but address the original issues.
    • “I’d like £65 an hour and I can work 9-5, I’m just out of University and have done some work for a company in London”. Use some common sense with your rates, especially if you are straight out of University or College with little experience.
    1 Comment »

  10. Wanted: UK WordPress developer, UK Front-end developer

    rolled logo Wanted: UK WordPress developer, UK Front end developer

    Before frustrated subscribers ask – yes, there will be a dedicated Rolled.at blog for this stuff eventually. I figured I’d post it up here as I’ve always received replies and better people as a result of posting here rather than on job boards.

    I’m looking to bring a WordPress developer and a Front-end developer for the team. We have a constant stream of WordPress development and are looking to work with someone based in the UK. He or she must have:

    • A sense of humour, and a love for WordPress
    • A love for a good sausage roll (the food – someone explained to me the other day it’s a very bizarre sexual position, but let’s not get into that now)
    • Inside and out knowledge of the WordPress template system
    • A knowledge of too many plug-ins to count
    • Ability to search or even build a plug-in to suit a specific need
    • Ability to solve problems rather than create them
    • Set pricing on a job-by-job basis, or a monthly fee to keep you on full-time
    • Ability to manage and meet several deadlines. Perfect knowledge of English (I’m looking for UK based people here) and someone who can communicate with clients via IM or e-mail very well.

    For the front-end developer position I’m looking for:

    • A sense of humour, and a love for CSS/XHTML
    • Ability to create XHTML Strict code in any situation, without falling back to Transitional
    • Ability to produce hack-less CSS compatible with IE6, FireFox 1-2, Safari and Opera
    • Ability to go further back in the browser time-machine if neccesary
    • Ability to re-write existing terrible ‘want to slap the person who did it, table based’ code into ‘nice and pretty’ mark-up
    • Ability to manage and meet several deadlines. Perfect knowledge of English (I’m looking for UK based people here) and someone who can communicate with clients via IM or e-mail very well.

    If I fail to receive a application by Monday-Wednesday (depending on when I have time), I will post it around several job boards instead. Applicants should format their e-mails to me as such:

    • Hi, I’m -x- from -x- and I love Sausage Rolls.
    • Here is why you should hire me: -bullet pointed list-
    • Here is my rough set per-job pricing and/or my monthly/weekly hiring fee should you want to choose between the two
    • Here’s what I can bring to Rolled which no-one else can
    • I love you man! -x- (Ok this one is optional)

    Looking forward to seeing what I get in my inbox Monday morning.

    Discuss This Article »