Angry People

A recent study, reported by the BBC, details how mobile phone records have been used to track 100,000 mobile phone users movements over 6 months.

One conclusion of the study was:

…patterns of people’s movements, over short and long distances, were very similar: people tend to return to the same few places over and over again.

Are you a creature of habit, a robot, a mindless automaton? Did you choose your actions mindfully this morning when you got up and went to work, or did you do the same thing you always do, possibly while your mind was in idle, distracted by music from your iPod or the daily trash newspaper.

Now, are you ready for this… tracking mobile phones if for our own benefit you know… it’s a dangerous world out there. If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear does not wash anymore. It’s a dangerous world - be afraid! To help keep you save from threats like avian flu pandemic’s, we’ll track human movement to predict its spread.

With scientific information like that, and experts to articulate it in the media, we’ll be only to happy to lose our freedom of movement to stay safe.

Expect pandemic and ensuing curfew any time soon folks - in fact, probably right after the economy collapses.

Enjoy the sun while it lasts, sports fans

Seth Godin has written an interesting post about how angry people are different. In it he reminds us that dealing with an angry person is not the same as someone who is not angry. While this may seem fairly obvious I’m sure we can all think back to times when we are speaking with someone at a call centre who, through no fault of their own, can provide you with only a scripted response to your complaint about their shitty product or service.

While strategies for dealing with angry people are useful for everyone to know, if you want to provide the best customer service and see these people as opportunities, you have best make sure your staff are trained. This ignores the fact that they might have a genuine grievance or be particularly attached to their anger. Some people just want to be angry, and these are the ones that should be ignored.

As for the rest, think leading and pacing. The examples Seth quotes, such as:

“You cancelled my flight!” is angry, thus…
“That’s our policy sir, read the ticket,” is obviously a lousy marketing ploy.

Delivered in a calm and controlled voice only exacerbate the situation to for most people. What would be better is a reply matched in volume and tone:

“We cancelled your flight! That’s terrible, goddammit!” followed by slightly slower and quieter “I bet you really want to get treated like a valued customer?”

“Damn right I do” says customer, a little taken back by shouting employee who seems angry but just agreed with him.

“Well just take a seat here and give us a chance to make it up to you.” Hints at a freebie. Now customer is getting attention and maybe what they want.

If you can lead them to a point where they are calm enough to tell you what the real problem is, and offer them something for their trouble, you may be able to turn them from someone who was going to badmouth your business to all their mates (maybe the whole internet) to someone who becomes an advocate of the great service they got.

The opportunity here is not just to create an advocate but to find out what caused them to become angry in the first place - is it something you can do something about, even if it’s not your fault. If people come to you angry and go away feeling good you’re going to get a lot of attention!

The essence of the original post really comes down to this - know how to recognise angry people and have strategies ready to deal with them.

As the “credit crunch” continues to bite, and the daily news carries stories of apparently wealthy, middle class professionals turning to debt advisor’s in their droves, we are surrounded by advertising from all manner of financial institutions asking us to hand over our money.

The four banks that come most readily to mind are Halifax, ING Direct, Kaupthing Edge and IceSave. Halifax are now using their successful television advertising with a savings focus . To tell the truth I find their TV spots great for brand awareness but I can’t remember the specifics of the ads and would have to seek detail elsewhere.

The other three are really pushing savings accounts; Kaupthing Edge, whose high interest savings accounts deliver the best interest rates in the UK, has maintained it’s rates even after the bank of England dropped theirs and states they will remain 0.3% over the BoE base rate until 2012. Their advertising in the UK seems targeted to glossy supplements and magazines and have a clear focus - we offer the best deal.

ING Direct has some high profile television advertising highlighting all their products, and they are pleasant to the senses, as opposed to the slightly jarring Halifax commercials. Their adverts portray their brand as simple and develop trust consumer.

There is a clear winner in mindshare, though to a very small demographic (people using my local station), which is the outside display ad for IceSave which is directly in front of me as I walk to the station each morning. I’ll try and add a picture.

So here’s the thing - the media tells us there is a credit crunch and everyone is falling into debt because of ‘cost of living’ type price increases and at the same time, the banks are asking us to give them our spare cash! How does that work out?

It seems that along with the paradox that only people with money are allowed to borrow - now only people with money are allowed to benefit from the best savings rates.

So why are the banks suddenly keen to reward us with interest rates reminiscent of  the late eighties/early nineties? How do the banks make their money - from mortgages and interest on car loans and credit cards… not likely, that’s only pocket change. They need your money because they use it to play on the futures markets to make the big money. If they start getting too many debts and defaults this reduces the amount of money (a multiple of their assets) that they are allowed to play with on the futures markets. To keep their hand in the game they need to get some hard cash in the vault and minimize their risks.

If you have spare cash, and can afford to save, now is the time to get the best savings deals but from my own research I would suggest not putting more than the government guaranteed £35000 in any one account - unless you are banking with one of the truly international banks like HSBC.

Tags: financial

Having a quick squizz at the news over lunch, I found some stories that tickled me enough to motivate me to write. Today we have stories about how TV adverts are only accidentally loud, green issues to support intensive farming and logo recognition to catch criminal hoodies by their designer tracksuits.

The BBC Magazine story, titled why are the adverts so loud reports:

The Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP), the body responsible for writing the TV Advertising Code, has published a new rule on sound levels.

From 7 July, “advertisements must not be excessively noisy or strident.”

“The maximum subjective loudness of advertisements must be consistent and in line with the maximum loudness of programmes and junction material.”

This clarifies existing guidelines and encourages broadcasters to use a subjective loudness meter in order to ensure there is less of a perceived imbalance between ad and programme sound levels.

What exactly is a subjective loudness meter?

…brought this to the attention of ITV boss Michael Grade…

…and was told it was unintentional and due to the compressed audio files used in commercials.

So there you go. For some reason a different technical solution is used to provide sound on advertisements than for regular programming. No reason for this was provided.

A spokeswoman for ITV says this change in the quality of the audio means the adverts are not actually louder, although they may appear to be

Which is probably where the subjective loudness meter comes in. No doubt they will be used to the benefit of TV advertisers.

The government is hot on their tails with a Subjective Criminality Meter, otherwise known by its full name:

Criminalisation Of Chavs & Hoodies by Tracksuit Optical Scanning Software, or COCH-TOSS

This software works with existing CCTV, using a system developed for sports marketing companies to measure a brand’s exposure on TV.

This system - called Magellan - automatically tells firms how many times their logo appeared during coverage of a particular event, its size, prominence and the length of time on screen.

It has been adapted for use by the authorities as:

The value to police is that many young criminals wear tracksuits and jackets with distinctive logos, while obscuring their faces with hoods and hats. And they often wear these street ‘uniforms’ repeatedly as they commit different crimes.

So, a poor choice of attire may highlight your daily movements to the police for closer scrutiny but hey, if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to hide, right?

“We say to the machine, ‘there’s a Coke logo, go and find it’,” says David McIntosh, of Omniperception. “The technology is like a bloodhound. You give it a smell and it will go off looking for it.”

Tags: advertisments, privacy

Is hard work.

<Added Tue. lunchtime - by laptop!>

Last night, having attended the first of my Beginners Spanish classes at work (how cool is that?) I was sat on the 20.20 from Waterloo for half an hour, while a cable fire was extinguished outside the station. With this extra half an hour added to my journey I did what all self-disrespecting Londoners do on the train, I played with my phone.

After reading some news, and then realising that I don’t know most of the passwords for my various social networking accounts (which are stored by my browser password manager) I decided to attempt to post something here.

To cut a long story short, the exercise worked as intended in that I quickly passed the time waiting for the train to leave as well as the journey home.  On the downside, 3 words is all I managed before the train arrived at my station.

In conclusion, er… blogging by Blackberry is an excellent way to pass the time.

Tags: blackberry, blogging

Normal service will resume er… soon.

My grandfather, the a epitome of wartime gentlemanly RAF officer, was always thankful for all the gifts that life provided him, despite suffering a lot of sadness.

This weekend, while visiting the South West, I was sitting in the sun outside my caravan enjoying a cup of tea, the warmth of the sun, and the company of the Captain, when I experienced one of those natural pauses that allows a little reflection to creep in unannounced.

Having pondered for a while on the many changes in life of late, I found myself remembering my grandad (R.I.P 1998) and allowing myself a little smile. Since my divorce I have defined my life by what I did not have, almost to the exclusion of all the good stuff in front of my face.

Conventionally speaking, I am far from wealthy, but as I considered my current situation:

The Captain, of course

My beautiful 5 year old son

Long weekend in the SW once a fortnight

My friends

My health

Living in a nice house, in a good location

Car, yacht, motorbike, caravan

Good job

Personal and shared hobbies/interests

Young enough to enjoy all of the above

I thought to myself “How lucky I am!“

Tags: reflection

On Friday I had occasion to travel, a few hours at high speed, across country by train. As I have become used to travelling cattle class on a daily basis, it was a most pleasant surprise to discover that I had been booked on a Virgin train.

My companions and I had been reserved table seats, in regular class. There were plug sockets for laptops, comfortable seats, and a relatively quiet and smooth journey during which I was able to get my work done. The train arrived ahead of schedule.

On the return journey we upgraded to first class. I have never travelled First Class on Virgin Trains, but I can attest to their service being really first class. The attentiveness of the service staff, the quality of the food and drink and the comfort of the carriage collectively created a premier service, that I shall most definitely be using again and thoroughly recommend.

Tags: train, travel

While I have been limited in my ability to affect my local machine set up or change Global company I.T. policy, I have been fortunate enough to be granted a public web server, all for lil’ ol’ me.

So, even though it is out of character with this blog’s general tone, I thought I would go out of my way to praise rackspace for excellent customer service during the delivery and configuration of my linux root server.

Tags: customer service, rackspace, web hosting

Having spent a little time reflecting on the fact that my partner and I have never had a proper holiday, I went looking for some information on teh interwebs.

When I searched on Google for Virgin Holidays I was presented with Virgin as the top result, including sitelinks, and underneath the sitelinks was a site search box. I don’t remember seeing this before and so have included a screengrab for your edification:

Results from Google datacentre: 216.239.59.147

A search for [cheap holidays] in the site search box returned this query.

When I repeated this in IE the normal results were shown, with the “More results form virginholidays.co.uk >>” link instead of the search box.

Update:

This appears to be rolled out on some authority sites with sitelinks, but not all. I have just found the same effect on HMV as above.

Tags: google, search