E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

The Tribulations of Customer Service with Opera

Over the last few days I have been relatively quiet on this blog, more than anything else because I have been doing plenty of thinking, along with drafting a bunch of blog entries, on venturing to re-design and redefine the corporate workplace as we know it seeing the huge impact social computing is causing on how we get work done. I already ventured to share some of those insights on previous blog posts, as you may have already noticed, but I’m now ready to share plenty more. So it’s time to pick up my regular blogging schedule and get down to business. How about if we take a look at the state of one of the most powerful use cases and success stories behind social networking and social media out there, Customer Service, and see whether we have got another winner or not… Hummm … not really. Colour me an skeptic then: “I cannot go to the Opera, because I have forsworn all expense which does not end in pleasing me” [by Charles Townshend]

For a good number of years, actually, for as long as I remember, my all time favourite default Web browser has been Opera. I know that may sound as pure heresy by those who live on Internet Explorer, FireFox or Chrome, for that matter, but, it’s true. I have always been in love with that browser from the very first moment that I used it on Windows and now on Mac. Something that I cannot say for any of the others, as they have taught me, over the course of the years, to not trust them much for doing an effective job or for making my Web work any easier. Opera did though.

For those folks who may not be familiar with Opera it’s that massive swiss knife-like Web browser that allows you to do a bunch of various different tasks and activities without leaving the application itself: email (Ha! Before you run into the wrong conclusions, like when I mentioned this over on Twitter, I still use *personal* email for private exchanges, specially, with those folks who loathe social networking tools or for those other who haven’t bought into it just yet, but it’s still my personal email, not work related); newsgroups and forums; Internet Relay Chat (a.k.a. I.R.C.); RSS / Atom newsfeeds; torrents, etc. etc. It’s all you need in a browser to help you become a powerful knowledge Web worker. And it works. It *does* certainly work. Till you lose 7 years of history. 

That’s right! Last week, I got a prompt to upgrade Opera v 11.62 to v 11.63 on the Mac through the Mac App Store. Free upgrade, as usual, rightly embedded into the App Store experience for the first time *ever* and ready to take the plunge. And there I went, and there I lost 7 years of both personal and some work related stuff. Ouch!!! The upgrade went all right, or so I thought. No glitches noticed and in a matter of minutes I was upgraded. The problem though became apparent when, after starting the browser, I could have access to everything (Bookmarks, links, speed-dial options, etc. etc.), except the Mail folder. The folder that contained all of those personal private email messages, several hundreds, if not thousands, of RSS feed items, newsgroups, forum posts, and so forth. All of that completely wiped out. Gone! 1.76GB of data smashed as if they never happened. 

Initially, I thought that the folder may have just been misplaced, or it may have been located elsewhere, but when trying to use Grand Perspective and WhatSize I just couldn’t locate that 1.76GB of disk space anywhere. Just anywhere. I looked and looked for a couple of days and nothing to be found. All deleted. Wiped out. Completely. No more available and slowly entering into panic mode at that time! One of the reasons why I have delayed blogging about it because you know how it goes as one of the golden rules for blogging: never blog when you are upset or angry. But I was. I *certainly* was. Right there, last week, I was prompted to upgrade to a new version of my all time favourite browser and right there it managed to destroy that trustworthy relationship of the last 7 years. Panic mode growing stronger by the minute. So I turned to Opera’s customer service hoping they might be able to help out. But, no, they couldn’t. In fact, they didn’t. Or worse, they never ever even responded! Talking about the power of Social Media in providing good customer support / service… Not!

I opened a Forum post at the Opera Forums for Mac users. 4 days later I’m waiting for the first response / reply from any of the support folks from Opera itself. Nothing has happened so far. So in an effort to get back to normal, I decided to reach out to them on Twitter and experience their customer support through social media channels. Just as inexistent, and still waiting for a response through a Mention, Forum Reply or whatever else. Yet, nothing: 

.@opera I could do with some further help on this thread > is.gd/A8JTde please? So far not much support offered Thanks!

— Luis Suarez (@elsua) April 19, 2012

I know at this point in time most of you folks may have been thinking that I’m making too much of a fuss with all of this, since I could just fire up my most recent copy of my data stored in my Time Machine, copy it across and move along. I did do that already and I managed to recover almost entirely from it, having lost only two weeks of data, but I still think it’s beyond the point. If I am a customer, and end-user of your product, and I have run into trouble because of an upgrade you are advising me to take upon, the least I’m going to expect is for you to be there when I need you. When I need your help to get me back in business, because something may well go wrong, like it did. What I was not expecting at all was not perhaps a feedback comment that I had too much of bad luck, but the fact that there hasn’t been a single reaction, *at all*. Again, talking about customer service in the era of Social Media engaging through social channels. Colour me skeptic once again, because it’s just not happening!

And Opera is not just the only recent occurrence of this lack of customer service through social channels. In the past, and just through my own personal experiences, although my good friend Euan Semple has also got a recent, rather interesting, upsetting story on poor quality customer service from an ISP provider: Orange, other businesses like Delta Airlines, Movistar, Swisscom & NH Hotels have been running into the same issues of poor customer service and they have never gotten in touch. Months have gone by without anything happening and, at this point in time, I won’t expect a response either. And the same would apply for Opera. Thus just like I did with all of those businesses (No longer flying with Delta, no longer supporting Movistar, no longer staying at NH Hotels who employ Swisscom as their wi-fi providers), over the weekend I recovered fully from the huge mess the upgrade caused and I have now stopped using Opera altogether and have moved on to RSS feed readers, specific mail clients (Sparrow), and both FireFox and Chrome as my new browsers. 

Now, I know I won’t be trusting them to do the right job, since they never have done it properly in the first place, the browsers, I mean, but I already know that. I’m on guard with both of them and keeping an eye on my data to ensure it’s all there in a consistent manner. However, I trusted Opera. I have trusted it for over 7 years to do the right thing and it has done so all along, but for one instance where a big mess was caused the last thing I expected was a lack of response. Not a single comment, not a single reaction. Sorry, but that hurts. Customer loyalty takes years to build effectively, just as much as trust does, but it just takes a split second to destroy and to not recover it again. So time for me to move on and don’t look back, since they have done so just the same. 

I can imagine that plenty of businesses are buying into the whole mantra of using social media to be closer to their customers and help support them accordingly. The thing though is that you eventually need to do that. If you are going to be there, be there, be willing to actively listen to not only the wonderful, positive feedback that you get from your customers about your products, but also the rough commentary, the constructive feedback that people share kindly with you without expecting any kind of compensation except than you fixing your own problems with your products so that they can be happy customers again. If you are only willing to listen through social media to the kool-aid and how great your products are, you are just use social technologies as another marketing thingy, whatever name you would want to insert there, and we all know how much we, dear customers, loathe that kind of cheating behaviour. End result? What I started this blog post with: 

“I cannot go to the Opera, because I have forsworn all expense which does not end in pleasing me”

Addressing Social Networking Gripes with Shared Value

I am sure that if I would go and ask you folks about naming over here some of your pet peeves from traditional collaborative and knowledge sharing tools, you would probably be getting on a roll for a good while and share all of those gripes you have been exposed to and that you wish something could be done about them. I am sure that if I would go ahead and ask you the very same question for social networking tools, they may not well be the same pet peeves, but I am certain you could name quite a few of them as well. No doubt! Well, that’s exactly what the folks from Dice News did just recently, while at SXSW, by interviewing a whole bunch of people about that topic. Calling it rather revealing, thought-provoking, mind-bloggling and sobering would probably fall short altogether. Just think of it, what’s your social media pet peeve? Ready?

Hang on for a minute though. Let’s go first and have a look into what some of the folks who were interviewed briefly by Dice News said about what were their main gripes with regards to social networking tools and the Social Web in general. Here’s the embedded video clip that lasts for a little bit under two minutes and which can surely make up as well for some really good fun to kick-off another week at work! Get your bingo cards out as well to see how many of those pet peeves you get to experience during the course of the day and check them all off! Oh, and don’t cheat!! This one is going to hurt a bit! Here it comes:

Frightening, don’t you think? I am not sure what you folks would think about this one, but when I watched it for the first time I just couldn’t help identifying a good number of the same reasons why I stopped using corporate email at work living “A World Without Email” over four years ago, without opening up another can of worms along on my pet peeves on corporate email itself, thinking we could do better, much better, with social technologies, to help make us much more effective and productive at what we do at work, and yet we are finding out, probably through the hard way, that’s everything, but helping us out!

I am sure that at this point in time you may be wondering what would be my main gripes, right? Well, at the moment, and judging by my own user experience over the course of the years I guess I could just nail it down, for me, to three different items:

• Social technologies themselves: I mean, when was the last time you were 100% happy and content with the potential and your overall end-user experience from any of the external social networking tools out there, as well as your favourite Enterprise Social Software platform? If you have been reading this blog for a little while now, you can see how I still think we are at the infancy of defining truly inspiring, engaging, rewarding social technologies experiences and, when we do we seem to nail it, we mess up with other things like privacy, security, copyright infringements, and whatever else. And we are back to square one.
• Think of social networking as just another marketing channel: This just would apply not only to Marketing and Communications, for which it’s a given, as I am sure you would agree with it if you have been exposed to either of those groups in social channels, as they themselves call them. Well, no, this is out for everyone who thinks that social tools are just another means of blasting out messages, their messages, broadcasting them along with very little interaction along the way. If anything, social networking is all about building strong personal business relationships, networks of people with a common interest, a common passion, wanting to do things better at their jobs, while still having fun, and still learning along the way. Remember “Life in perpetual beta?” Well, 10 years later, it’s still about conversations!
• Distraction: This is probably the one that most of us would feel identified with big time and probably right so, because the amount of noise one gets exposed to over the course of the day on the Social Web is starting to become mind-boggling, if not too worrying! Never mind my cry-out from a few weeks back about embracing a much more focused and purposeful social networking experience. We still aren’t there yet! Therefore, we need to work harder, smarter, on it.

And we probably won’t be able to address it and fix it properly during the course of 2012 either, as my good friend, Bill Johnston, annotated a couple of days back on a brilliant tweet he shared over at his stream:

IMHO, we will look back at 2010-2012 as period of mass distraction on the social web, vs. 2013 relationship building & focus on shared value

— Bill Johnston (@billjohnston) April 2, 2012

Spot on! That’s what I will certainly be looking into over the course of the next few months, so that when 2013 kicks in, I’ll be ready, if you can ever say that for the Social Web, because you are never ready. It’s a constant learning experience where every day there are dozens of new precious gems you get exposed to that you didn’t know were going to help or benefit you, and, yet, there they are for you to embrace them and make you better at what you do, if you can find them amongst that noise, that is.

So, a little bit of homework for us social networkers out there, I would think, if we would want to turn the tide around of bumping into more and more pet peeves around social technologies, and our consistent and growing abuse of them! We may as well start doing something about it, before it’s too late and break them like we have done with *cough* email *cough* over the course of the years. Now, I am not going to propose what folks can do, or should do, about it, since I have always felt it’s a very personal opinion, and experience, engaging with social networking tools, which is also the main reason why I have never believed in best practices for social networking in the first place, nor for knowledge work, for that matter! There aren’t any! What works for some people may not work for others, so where is the “best” in that? (More on this topic on an upcoming blog post, not to worry… hehe).

What I’m planning on doing myself though is continue to focus and redefine the purpose of my social presence, both internal and external, with simple activities like doing a bit of virtual hygiene of the social tools I rely the most on, like Twitter and Google Plus, for instance, so that over time I can continue to fine tune the overall experience, reduce the noise to a certain degree, and bring back that building of personal business relationships that Bill mentioned on that tweet, but, specially, focus, even more, on that shared value, because, at the end of the day social networking for business is all about: the value add (that shared value) you can provide to those who care about you and your business. And that all starts by asking yourself how can I help you today to become better at what you do?

Let’s bring back the focus on the WE, and move on from the ME. We will all be much better off. I can guarantee you all that!

40-Hour Work Week – The Magic of Sustainable Growth

Over the course of time you come to realise how there are a number of different articles published out there that you know are going to have a higher impact than others on how you perceive various different things, whether personal or work related. But what happens when you stumble on perhaps the most essential and critical article you have come across in a long while that manages to question a good number of the things we have been taking for granted at work for years? An article that dares to question how the business world has been functioning and operating over the course of decades by claiming, loud and clear, how companies keep ignoring 150 years of invaluable and precious research on how we become most effective and productive while at work. Are you prepared to be challenged, too, about your core work beliefs? Really? Are you sure? I mean, are you really sure? I can tell you it’s going to hurt, but maybe we need it that way, as one of those massive, unprecedented wake-up calls that may mark the beginning of something new and rather powerful: a smarter knowledge workforce.

A few days back I bumped into this very intriguing and rather helpful article put together by Jessica Stillman under the rather provocative title of “Why Working More Than 40 Hours a Week is Useless” where she points us out to a superb piece of writing done by Sara Robinson at Salon under the suggestive heading of “Bring back the 40-hour work week” where she questions something that I am sure most of us knew, deep inside, from all along, but that very few have dared to even bring up as a topic of conversation. Specially, at work. Basically, when was the last time you worked 40 hours a week? Or, more importantly, does working more than 40 hours per week make you more effective and productive at what you do? Well, Sara claims on that article that, contrary to what we may all believe in, it doesn’t. In fact, working over 40 hours per week is the most unproductive thing you can do to damage not only your work or your colleagues’ work, but also yourself, as a knowledge worker AND as a human being. And she has got 150 years of powerful research to back up that argument!

Whoahh! What do you say to that? I mean, really, what can you say to that? Right there, after having gone through that absolutely stunning piece (Long entry, for sure, but well worth reading every single word of it!), I came to the conclusion that in the 15 plus years I have been working in the corporate world I have never managed to make only 40 hours a week. And, notice how I am using the word manage, because I feel it fits in quite nicely in the whole context of how we have been taught over the course of decades that if you are only working those 40 hours a week you are just basically being underutilised and pretty much lazing around (Perhaps, nowadays even by checking out all of those social networking sites!). Well, it’s actually quite the opposite! You have just been abused left and right by the system into making you believe that working overtime is not only an expected behavior, but a desired one! By our employers, of course! But here’s the twist, by ourselves, knowledge workers, equally so, too! And that’s where things have gone horribly wrong. Apparently.

I can strongly recommend you make the time today to read through Sara’s dissertation, as I am sure you will then be thanking her for sharing it across in the first place and for being capable of opening your eyes, and brain!, to the unthinkable, specially, in today’s current financial turmoil: you don’t need, you shouldn’t have!, to work more than 40 hours a week to be effective and productive. So stop doing that today! Stop working those unpaid hours that research has proved don’t contribute much to your overall performance, or to the overall business outcomes!, and for a good number of reasons. Stop working longer hours than you should and you will even feel much better as a result of it eventually. Although it looks like things were not like that a while back.

Sara mentions how this work behaviour, and expectation!, probably, comes from something that’s been implanted in our work brain from all along. To quote:

[…] But you push on anyway, because everybody knows that working crazy hours is what it takes to prove that you’re “passionate” and “productive” and “a team player” — the kind of person who might just have a chance to survive the next round of layoffs.

But you eventually find out, through the hard way, you don’t survive it. And then what? That’s exactly what Sara covers successfully in her write-up. Like I have mentioned above, it’s a rather long column that she has put together, but in it she covers, in-depth, where the traditional 40 hour per week work schedule comes from (From the most of the unexpected places, I can tell you!), how and why it was established on that timeframe and how the whole concept of working overtime and staying productive is a myth. A myth we have been told to believe in all along, but that it doesn’t have any scientific validation it actually works. It doesn’t. At all. It makes us all sloppier at what we do. It drains our physical body, our brain, our capacity to collaborate, share our knowledge, innovative and think clearly; it damages not only our very own health, but also our very own healthy, and much needed!, relationships with the outside-out-of-work world: family, friends and relatives, etc. etc.

In her commentary, Sara gets to build up the case how the 40 hour a week work schedule got started with the labour based workforce, and how when we made the transition into the knowledge based work we pretty much ignored that good practice thinking we could demand more of our knowledge workers, because, you know, after all, they are no longer working hard with their hands, but with their brains, so there is this assumption you can get more out of that than whatever you have thought about it. In reality, it’s worse! Apparently, knowledge workers can only produce good quality work in a range of 6 to 7 hours per day. No more. Yes, I know! Really!!

I didn’t know that myself either! Fascinating! But it gets even better, because she then gets to build the case of when, how and why did we destroy the healthy and rather productive 40-hour week. Now, this particular section from her piece I find it really disturbing and rather uncomforting, because, in a way, she comes to claim how we, ourselves, knowledge workers, were the ones who demolished such well established industry standard of only working a certain amount of hours, before our work and output both start deteriorating. Very sobering piece for everyone out there to read through, ponder, reflect, and evaluate whether you yourself feel that you have contributed to it. I know for myself I surely have and having read the whole thing I’m glad I have now got an opportunity to do something about it.

That’s just what she gets to cover next with some very powerful and inspiring counterarguments. “Can we bring it back?” Should we bring it back? That we is not only knowledge workers themselves, but employers alike. According to her, for employees:

“[…] The fundamental realization is that an employer who asks for more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week is stealing something vital and precious from you. Every extra hour at work is going to cost you, big time, in some other critical area of your life. How will you make up the lost time? Will you ditch dinner and grab some fast food? Skip the workout? Miss the kids’ game this week? Sleep less? (Sex? What’s that?) And how many consecutive days can you keep making that trade-off before you are weakened in some permanent and substantial way? (Probably not as many as you think.) Changing this situation starts with the knowledge that an hour of overtime is a very real, material taking from our long-term well-being — and salaried workers aren’t even compensated for it“

For employers, she adds:

“[…] the shift will be much harder, because it will require a wholesale change in some of the most basic assumptions of our business culture. Two generations of managers have now come of age believing that a “good manager” is one who can keep those butts in those chairs for as many hours as possible. This assumption is implicit in how important words like “productivity” and “motivation” are defined in today’s workplaces. A manager who can get the same amount of work out of people in fewer hours isn’t rewarded for her manifest skill at bringing out the best in people. Rather, she’s assumed to be underworking her team, who could clearly do even more if she’d simply demand more hours from them. If the crew is working 40 hours a week, she’ll be told to up it to 50. If they’re already at 50, management will want to get them in on nights and weekends, and turn it into 60. And if she balks — knowing that actual productivity will suffer if she complies — she won’t get promoted“

Goodness! I am not sure what you folks would think about those two quotes, but I fear that she has described, tremendously well, and rather accurately, how the business world operates today, in 2012!!, and even more so when you start considering the current financial crisis and how precarious working conditions have become in most countries. So how can we rebel against that? How can we change the tide and revert back to what research over the course of 150 years has proved that it works just all right? I bet most of you out there would feel it’s not an easy task. Sara would agree with you on this regard, I would think. In fact, she offers a good number of options, and potential solutions, that would be worth while considering and pondering further. Go and read those, while over here I am going to take the liberty of adding a couple of suggestions myself on how we, both employers and knowledge workers, can get things back on track and into the right direction if we would want to survive further in this 21st century Knowledge Economy.

For employers:

Stop measuring the performance of your employee knowledge workforce by the amount of hours they put together on completing tasks or by their sheer physical presence at the office. Instead, measure the deliverables, the outcomes, the outputs, what they eventually provide as value-add to the company, i.e. to your customers, and if they can do that in, say, 4 hours, don’t add on them new tasks or additional work to do. Remember, there used to be a time when knowledge workers worked in a single project, with a single team, with a single mission and a specific set of goals. Bring that back, since you can only stretch productivity up to so much, before it takes a big hit on your overall business, which I am sure is the last thing you would want to do.

Also, it would help if businesses would, finally, understand that their knowledge workforce are, actually, people, knowledge workers, and not just some resources or assets that they can shuffle around freely at their will. Those knowledge workers have got many more better things to do than being treated like those resources you can place here or there at your own leisure, just because you feel you are entitled to. Well, may be not. There is a formula out there that’s been around since the 19th century (in Britain) that pretty much describes it rather nicely: “eight [hours] for work, eight for sleep and eight for what we will.” It’s still a formula that works. It’s a formula that needs to come back, because, as Sara mentions: ”[…] the bottom line is that people who have enough time to eat, sleep, play a little, exercise and maintain their relationships don’t have much need of their help” (Their as in industries and branches of medicine devoted to handling workplace stress).

For employees:

It’s going to be even harder and tougher altogether. I am sure you folks would have a good number of suggestions of what we, both employers and employees, could do about this important topic (And I would love to learn more about them in the comments!), but I sense that one of the key, important things that we could do, as knowledge workers ourselves, in order to make this happen, is to, finally, put a stop to that silly attitude of competing against each other to see and prove who is better in order to claim that well deserved promotion. When we all know, in most cases, no matter how hard you work, how competitive you have become with your colleagues, by protecting and hoarding your knowledge, assets, skills and expertise, or by how much you have managed to put down your peers so that you can stand out that, there is a great chance that you won’t get promoted. And then? Where does that leave you? … Exactly!

Yes, you may get promoted, but you may not. The thing is that while I’m writing these words there is a single key concept out there (And it is not slacking off work, nor stop working altogether, just in case you were thinking about that! heh) that we need to have plenty more of in our corporate world to help us understand how we are much much better off helping each other than fighting each other. Everyone out there would probably want to become an executive or a senior technical leader at some point in time, but, time and time again, in the age of the Sharing Economy, in the age of interconnectedness, of earning their trust by merit (More than anything else you may have done in the past!), of transparency, of engagement, of passion, of intrapreneurship, even, etc. etc. I can imagine how fighting others is not going to be very helpful, never has, eventually!, nor will it help you advance that much faster. And, definitely, stopping others from excelling at what they do, so you can come on top, will take a whole lot more than 40 hours a week. Indeed, in order for us to revert back into that 40 hour a week work mentality where we continuously aim at helping each other becoming better at what we already do, we need plenty more of Servant Leadership. At all levels, but starting with you, not everyone else, but you.

So, eventually, I couldn’t have agreed more with Sara’s conclusion on what’s at stake over here, in today’s business world, if we don’t take any action about it and just move on with what we think is the workplace of the future. I sense it’s got to be better than this, much better than this, because what’s at stake right now, and in the next few years, is our mere survival as knowledge workers, as human beings:

“For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies [Or any company], and the future of the country [any country], this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done. Our bosses are depleting resources from of the human capital pool without replenishing them. They are taking time, energy and resources that rightfully belong to us, and are part of our national common wealth“

A few times in the past I have been talking over here in this blog about striking for smart work and sustainable growth in our knowledge based societies and after reading Sara’s last few words from her conclusion I can only say it’s now our job, our duty, perhaps, to make it happen, and the sooner, the better; we probably cannot even wait much longer, specially (to quote her:) … “If we’re going to talk about creating a more sustainable world, let’s start by talking about how to live low-stress, balanced work lives that leave us refreshed, strong and able to carry on as economic contributors for a full four or five decades, instead of burned out and broken by a too-early middle age. A full, productive 40-year career starts with full, productive 40-hour weeks. And nobody should be able to take that away from us, not even for the sake of a paycheck” [Emphasis mine to which I would add as well that it's probably not even worth it any longer. It never was in the first place]

So, have a good guess into what I’m going to start doing from next week onwards …

How about you?