Category Archives: Business

| Business

Your call is annoying to us

The Gazette’s Roberto Rocha has an interview with call centre unions (these exist?) as part of his Your Call Is Important To Us series. It’s not really earthshattering what they’re saying (the workers are overworked, underpaid, underappreciated and abused), but it gives us a glimpse into what the real problem is with tech support: compartmentalization.

These big companies like it if every problem you call about can fit into one of their little boxes. Change of address, termination of service, adding or removing features. Each one can have its little three-step guide and a trained monkey to go through it. Training is fast and you can outsource the job to any country with English speakers and a low minimum wage.

A lot of the time it works out. Most calls are about common problems, and it saves everyone time if they’re dealt with quickly and efficiently. Many can even be dealt with using a computer, which saves money for the company and saves headaches for the customer who doesn’t have to spend so much time on hold and can perform the tasks on off-hours.

The problem comes in unusual situations. The company has billed you twice for the same service. You’re getting billed for someone else’s account. You cancelled the service three years ago or were never a customer but now you’re getting threats from someone to pay up. When these things come up, the automated menus are useless, as are the outsourced Indian call centre workers who don’t understand your euphemisms.

In a perfect world, these calls would be “escalated” to a manager or supervisor with more training and more latitude and decision-making power to deal with your problem. But customer service is afraid – deathly afraid – to escalate calls no matter how complicated they may seem. Supervisors are either “on holiday” or otherwise unavailable (usually a lie), and there’s no one you can bring the matter to. You’re screwed. And though the person on the other end has sympathy (assuming they even understand your problem), their job is to make it as hard as possible for you to take your matter up with important people, to keep their bottom line in check.

Unusual situations are annoying pests that these companies want swatted. The system (which includes things like constantly repeating your problem to different agents every time you call) is designed to get you to give up and stop wasting their money.

| Business, In the news

Which Canadian journalists, after having invented, over 25 years ago, a board game which features confusingly-long trivia questions, have just successfully defended a lawsuit against them that was launched in 1994?

The case of David H. Wall vs. Christopher Haney and Scott Abbott may finally be settled.

For those who need a refresher, Wall sued Haney and Abbott, the creators of the Trivial Pursuit board game, in 1994, claiming Haney stole the idea for the game from Wall. Wall was hitchhiking one day when Haney picked him up (or so Wall says) and that’s when Wall apparently laid out in explicit detail how the game would work, enough that Haney stole his idea. Right.

A Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge dismissed Wall’s case, pointing out that Wall doesn’t have a single shred of evidence beyond his self-serving testimony to support his claim.

This isn’t the first lawsuit Trivial Pursuit’s creators have faced. In 1984 they were sued by the creator of the Trivia Encyclopedia for copying their questions and answers. They admitted to it (they were caught red-handed copying a made-up question), but argued that facts cannot be copyrighted. A judge agreed and dismissed that case too.

The Trivial Pursuit origin story always interests me because it was created by a CP sports editor and a Gazette photo editor. According to Gazette lore (read: old-timers’ occasional rants), the two went around seeking investors from among their journalistic buddies, and most chose to hold on to their money. The phrase “I could be retired by now” would inevitably follow, along with wet grunts and smoke-filled phlegm.

Now they can go on to regretting the past two and a half decades of their lives.

| Business, Media

Le Soleil: We don’t outsource (wink, wink)

Oh snap: Quebec City’s Le Soleil is not pulling any punches in its campaign to steal as many readers as possible from the Journal de Québec, whose workers are on the street and whose content is being generated elsewhere.

Perhaps this will make both sides realize that no matter how this goes, the real winner will be their competition.

Speaking of the workers, they’re calling a one-day boycott of the Journal a success without any evidence it was followed or made an impact.

| Business

Some tales of customer service woe

Roberto Rocha’s Your Call is Important to Us series is off to a … start. His blog has received five comments so far, and all but one are about Bell. He even has a cute little video explaining how the series will work for those with ADD who can’t read the article or blog posts.

In honour of the series, here are a couple of tales of my own about recent experiences with customer service:

Continue reading →

| Business

More quid-pro-diploma at Concordia

Concordia University has released its list of honorary doctorates for this year. As usual, it includes some genuinely noteworthy members of the community who should be recognized for their work: Howard Alper, research chemist; Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, archbishop; Grant Munro, filmmaker.

But, sadly, the list also contains people who are on there mainly because of their financial contributions: André Desmarais of Power Corp, who has given quite a bit to the university; and Donald McNaughton, who was a major fundraiser for over two decades.

It’s not that I think people who give their time and money to Concordia shouldn’t be honoured for it. Despite what some conspiracy-theorists may think, this is still mainly a selfless, altruistic act. But shouldn’t we be separating those who have done important things in this world from those who have so much money to spread around that they can buy an honorary degree?

I think it’s time to come up with some other method of honouring those who contribute financially to universities.

| Business

Consumer reporting: finally

The Gazette’s Roberto Rocha (who is now giving free publicity to reviewing gadgets sent to him) made a vague statement about getting people involved in his reporting. Apparently the result is a new consumer rights segment called “Your Call Is Important To Us”.

It’s about time the Gazette gets back to reporting on customer service disasters. For that at least they deserve credit.

But his description of its innovativeness has me worried:

We say it’s innovative because it breaks the traditional paradigm of reporting. Rather than it being an in-house production of a reporter’s own research, it invites readers to take part in its creation.

His next paragraph basically sums up what this means:

We want you to help us write this series.

Perhaps I missed something in reading the blog post, but I don’t see anything innovative here. People providing newspapers with stories about how they got screwed over by The Man is hardly new. In fact, it’s how this stuff has been done for decades. There’s nothing “wiki” about it.

Unless the plan involves readers editing the stories collaboratively, I think it comes down to someone either misunderstanding what wiki is all about or overhyping a simple newspaper series by employing Web 2.0 buzzwords.

We’ll see which when the series is launched on Saturday.

| Business, Media

Newspapers are a sinking ship – and have only themselves to blame

Peter Hadekel has an article last week (I’m catching up on my paper-reading) about how Osprey Media’s purchase by Quebecor is good news for newspapers.

I have to disagree. Not because I think it’s a bad sign, but rather because of news like this: Large increases in online ad revenue far from offsets gigantic drops in print advertising.

Now I’m not going to pretend like newspapers are going to cease to exist. They still serve a useful function. We still have print advertising in this world, and there’s really no more convenient way to get news while commuting to work than bringing the paper with you.

But that doesn’t mean these papers are going to remain the news powerhouses they are now, to say nothing of returning to the days when they were actually important in our lives.

The reason is partly to do with new technology, 24-hour TV news, and the Internet. But just as important are the huge cutbacks to news gathering that make readers wonder what it is exactly they’re paying for.

Among the bone-headed ideas that for some reason newspaper publishers think aren’t alienating their readers:

  • Increased use of wire copy in an age where just about any wire service story can be accessed for free online. National, international, entertainment and business coverage is becoming saturated with AP, Reuters, Bloomberg and AFP copy, and the pool of local reporters is shrinking. Papers lose their individual voice, and there’s nothing interesting in these pages you can’t just as easily learn from watching the hourly news update on CNN.
  • Giving lip-service to online properties.
    • Stories that aren’t subscriber-locked are hidden behind a massively-complicated navigation system, and surrounded by ads to the point where you can barely find them. As a result, bloggers and others who share stories with their friends link directly to “printer-friendly” versions, thereby robbing companies of online ad revenue.
    • Online classified sites all suck hard compared to Craigslist (some even arrogantly ask for money to have your ad included in their database).
    • Nobody seems to know how to do online multimedia properly. They send their reporters untrained with a video camera to shoot pointless, uninteresting video which they throw up unedited just so they can pat themselves on the back and say they’re clued in to the online world. The web infrastructure used with these photo galleries, audio slideshows and video clips provide no means to link to them directly and therefore no way for people to point them out to friends.
    • Stories posted online contain no clickable links whatsoever, and related stories aren’t linked to each other. Formatting issues like accents and soft returns are left unfixed, and anything with even the slightest bit of unusual formatting in the print edition looks like an unreadable mess online.
  • Infotainment, like reporting the previous night’s American Idol results (as if anyone who cared enough about the show would not have either watched it or gotten the news elsewhere), is on the rise at the expense of real journalism.
  • Elimination of foreign bureaus means many international issues are covered with fewer and fewer voices, with no analysis of what these events mean for you.
  • Shrinking newspaper space means more stories are covered in 50-word briefs, and the one thing newspapers provide that TV and radio don’t — detail — is lost.
  • Copy editing positions are being eliminated, resulting in glaring mistakes in newspaper copy and a lessening of newspapers’ reputations.
  • Opinion pieces are written up by old conservative economists and political has-beens instead of fresh-faced thinkers with bold new ideas.
  • An increased reliance on freelance writers means more interesting stories, but only of the sort that can be put together in a day. Stories that take longer to create, including those of beat writers, are left on the back burner to rot.
  • Papers spend millions on marketing campaigns and TV ads instead of improving quality.
  • Media convergence has meant a decrease in critical reporting of related media. Reporters and editors are either afraid to criticize their corporate bosses or are told outright not to say things that would make the company look bad. Newspapers write articles about TV shows for networks owned by their parent company. Readers see right through these things, and lose trust in their journalists.
| Business, On the Net

How hard is it to do online classifieds right?

Along with Quebecor’s acquisition of Osprey comes news that they’ve launched yet another online classifieds website. The Gazette’s Roberto Rocha correctly points out that they have stiff competition from everyone else out there. Some are run by big media companies, and others don’t suck.

I’m forever confused as to why big newspaper owners put out such horrible online classified sites. They senselessly limit their audience to just those areas where they own newspapers. They charge ridiculously high fees for simple ads online when others give away the space for free. They make their websites crazy-complicated while the incredibly popular Craigslist keeps it simple.

I mean, if you’re trying to outdo Craigslist, wouldn’t you at least want to copy some of their good ideas?

Continue reading →

| Business

What does an overpriced potato peeler taste like?

In the area of senseless branding idea comes Têtes à claques, the drink. Their excuse is as laughable as it is transparent: Well, there was this drink shown in one episode. So now, those same people who want to smell like Britney Spears will want to drink that yellow juice that came out of the pilot.

And yet, the franchise must be doing something right, since it’s worth $12 million now.