Someone complained to the Gazette about video cameras in the men’s room at Cours Mont Royal. Apparently, according to the proprietor, the cameras aren’t running, due to that minor matter of it being illegal to film someone in a bathroom.
But they say it’s working, deterring illegal acts like drug dealing, vandalism, gay sex, peeing on the floor, and, of course, forgetting to wash one’s hands.
I just hope Jeff Goldblum doesn’t get his hands on it.
Canoe is on a big hiring spree, putting up two dozen jobs in 24 hours. Everything from customer service agent to managers for entire web properties. If you’re bilingual and have marketing and management experience, this might be your lucky day.
Maybe you can convince them to fix their messy websites.
So Mike Boone had his wireless problems solved. (I guess it wasn’t his laptop after all) As you might expect, he got the gold-plated service after news of his problems with Sympatico hit the news stands. A personal call from the vice-president of customer relations (after numerous calls to regular tech support got him nowhere), no-questions-asked delivery of a new modem, and when that didn’t work, same-day on-site tech support.
When was the last time you called Bell and the guy said “Hold on, I’ll be right over”?
Naturally, the guy was clueless about Macs (been there). But the problem was solved.
To Boone’s credit, of course, he freely admits the obvious: that he got special treatment because he’s a newspaper columnist. And he’s going to use the regular-people method next time, to show he’s still Mikey from the Block and hasn’t sold out to The Man.
Patrick points us to a blog post from Alec Saunders refuting another blog post from Mark Goldberg which criticized a Gazette editorial based on an op-ed from Michael Geist on wireless rate plans in Canada. (Phew.)
The argument is over the inflated prices of data rate plans in Canada. The U.S., home to the iPhone, offers crazy-cheap plans for both voice and data, while here we have three wireless providers who offer expensive daytime service and through-the-roof prices for data transfer. (This is why I never surf the Internet from my phone.)
I won’t add comments, since they’re already criticizing each other. Suffice it to say Geist’s point still stands, and the blogs are debating irrelevant minutiae.
Roberto Rocha’s “interactive series” on customer service has come to an end, a full two articles after it began, with a feature story in today’s Gazette. It quotes readers who have been screwed over by customer service, as well as a few industry experts.
The Gazette claims the series is a breakthrough an innovative, paradigm-breaking exercise in “participatory journalism” and “crowdsourcing”, because it asks for readers to provide their stories, and the reporter blogs about his interviews before writing his articles.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen no evidence of either participatory journalism or crowdsourcing here. Instead, my earlier criticisms seem perfectly justified. There’s nothing new here. Asking readers for their stories has been done since the dawn of time. In fact, columnist Jim Mennie has used the tactic successfully many times. And while blogging about interviews is a good idea, the first anyone saw of the finished product was when it appeared in the paper this morning. No drafts were published online to get the “crowdsourcers” to comment, correct, improve or update it.
The story comes with a navel-gazing meta-sidebar about how the series worked and how (real) participatory journalism can change the way businesses operate. There’s also a version published on Roberto’s blog. The two contain an important difference: The blog version talks about where the series failed and what areas need improvement. One was unavoidable: Roberto left for a week to cover the Governor-General’s visit to Brazil. The other is a problem with the Gazette in general: It wasn’t publicized enough and too few people got involved (more on that below). A conspiracy theorist might question why these important paragraphs were removed from the paper version, but I’m sure it was just edited out for space.
The story is also supplemented with an online video (like all CanWest videos, there’s no built-in way to easily link to them, so I have to use my computer-science skillz to hack a link together). The video is another example of newspapers misunderstanding the Internet. It’s nothing more than a talking head (Roberto) supplemented with B-roll of him walking down a hallway and using his computer. There’s nothing here (besides knowing what Roberto’s voice sounds like) that needs video and couldn’t be simply read in text form.
Roberto’s claim that the project wasn’t publicized enough was, I think, misguided. Sure, there was only the single article written about it, but it’s been hyped on the website and on Page A2 of the paper almost every day since. The problem is with the Gazette’s website in general.
As for my opinion on the state of customer service, I think it’s horrible, and it’s not going to get better. Roberto and the companies talk a great talk about how they’ve “owned up” to the problems and are “correcting” their mistakes. But talk is cheap. It costs nothing to apologize.
The reality is that large companies couldn’t care less about you. If you have an unusual situation that requires more than a few minutes of their time, you’re costing them money. The old threats of “I’ll never do business with you again” and “I’ll go to the press” are meaningless now. They don’t care if a few bad apples (who would otherwise bother their expensive customer service centres) end their service and go to a competitor. There’s plenty of other fish in the sea. And going to the media, which is a horrible nightmare for small businesses, doesn’t bother the big companies because they know their competitors have reputations that are just as bad.
Besides, nobody checks out customer service before signing up. They check prices. That’s why the small fries, who have great customer service but slightly higher prices, soon find themselves going out of business.
From a strict cost-benefit analysis, it’s better to provide crappy customer service (but have your PR guys talk about how you’re improving to the media) and lower prices than to raise prices and have qualified, local people answer the phone.
And that’s not going to change until more people start demanding better.
Journal de Québec employees have taken to the picket lines for the first time since they went off the job in April. (Previously, they argued, the office’s remote location would not have gotten them much publicity, and they were working on the strike paper MediaMatinQuebec.)
Kevin Dougherty’s Gazette story also mentions that a major JDQ advertiser has stopped putting ads until the strike is over.
Casey McKinnon, my future wife the co-host of Galacticast (which promises to have a new show some time in the next eon) is speaking out about being burned by PodTech.
It’s a good lesson for techy startup companies who think that because they’re cool they don’t have to treat people with the same professionalism that other companies do.
Ripping off a photographer is a prime example. I’ve heard countless stories of small magazines asking for people to provide high-quality content free in exchange for only the “publicity” they would get from having their name beside it, and perhaps one day getting a few dollars.
Not having enough money to properly get your startup off the ground is one thing. But PodTech isn’t poor, it’s just lazy.
UPDATE: Credit where it’s due. Scoble has responded both here and on Casey’s post. It doesn’t negate the criticisms, but it mitigates them somewhat. Hopefully PodTech’s act will improve as a result.
Every time gasoline prices rise by one per cent or more, we get the SUV-driving public’s arms up in the air complaining, and opportunistic politicians climbing over themselves to do something about it.
So I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that the Quebec government is considering price caps on gasoline prices. Sure, artificially limiting the price of gas will only encourage consumption and that can only be bad for the environment, but then the gas-guzzling public doesn’t care about the environment when maintaining it inconveniences them.
This news is especially funny considering what’s going on in Zimbabwe. There, ruling moron Robert Mugabe, trying to control his country’s 9,000 per cent inflation due to his idiotic economic policies, has simply decreed that the price of everything in his country be cut in half.
As anyone with half a brain will tell you, when you force someone to sell stuff at less than they bought it for, they’ll stop selling it. So now gas stations are dry as the country continues its economic freefall.
Hopefully at some point the Quebec government will learn that copying Zimbabwean economic policy is an idiotic thing to do. Even if that means it’ll please the idiots.
Nicolas Ritoux, my francophone counterpart who freelances for La Presse, has a long post on his blog about a super-secret new project he’s working on with Evan Prodromou. Probably more interesting is that he’s no longer writing, throwing his weight behind this super-secret project that we don’t know anything about (other than the fact that it’ll be bilingual).
The announcement will be on the agenda along with a demo at DemoCamp on July 24. Evan certainly has the experience in startups. We’ll see how good an idea it is when we actually hear the idea.
A Winnipeg Free Press story today quotes NDP MP Pat Martin saying we should do away with the penny once and for all.
I’m finding it hard to disagree with him. Things that accept coins no longer accept pennies, whether they’re laundry machines, bus fare boxes, vending machines or video lottery terminals. Businesses grab rolls of them from the bank, they hand them out to us when we pay cash, and the worthless pieces of copper-plated steel stay in our wallets, pockets and coin purses until we can find some way to get rid of them.
It’s just a waste of everyone’s time. As it is when I get pennies back at the cash I dump them into those take-a-penny leave-a-penny things, not because I want to be nice, but because I don’t know what else to do with them.
Elsewhere online: Don’t believe my common-sense argument? Read this fact-filled paper on the subject (PDF).
95 cents baby! Screw the manufacturing export industry, national pride is charging forward!
I passed by the St. Hubert Plaza sidewalk sale today. It was raining, so most of the stock not protected by glass awnings had to be covered in tarps. But most of the businesses are out there, with big sales ($5 schoolbags, $10 wedding dresses) and even some good old-fashioned hollering from excited businessmen. It’s nice to see that associated with something other than strip clubs.
St. Hubert Street is closed to cars between Jean-Talon and Bellechasse (Jean-Talon and Beaubien metros), today until Sunday July 8.
Microsoft is making fun of us. Apparently, with the Expos gone, the Olympic Stadium is worth nothing to them, so they’re “giving it away free” on Xbox Live Marketplace. Marketplace, for those who are unaware, is a brilliant invention of the online entertainment industry, getting normally semi-intelligent people to spend real money to get fake money to buy fake things.
But even these gullible patsies can’t be convinced to use their fake money to buy the Big O.
It’s official: The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan is buying Bell Canada for $51.7 billion.
(I wish my pension plan had that kind of cash to throw around. Sadly, my union is still in negotiations with Fagstein WorldMedia Ltd. and it doesn’t look good.)
It has the advantage of being a Canadian offer (though with minority American interests), and yet not being a takeover by a rival telecommunications firm. So we’ll still have all this competition with a whopping three providers.
I’m sure with this new owner, Bell will concentrate on providing quality customer service, even if that extra mile might interfere with their bottom line in the short term.
Right.