Totally Bizarre Customer Experience

I recently experienced how a company should not do business. Or possibly how to do business.

Here goes…exactly 1 year ago I commissioned a small furniture producer in Toronto (which shall remain nameless and you’ll see why shortly) to design and produce a couch for me. The design was based off something I had seen online so it wasn’t a huge effort to modify the design and build it. I also bought a made to order chair and ottoman from one of their stock designs.

Without going into all of the gory details, the couch and chair took 6 months to get delivered (after an intial promise of 10-12 weeks) and I finally got the ottoman last Saturday. I should point out that it wasn’t the ottoman that I ordered, but it was at least an ottoman and I took what I could get at this point.

So I pick up the ottoman at the guy’s shop (it’s a 2 person operation) and on my way out the door I spend about 20 minutes telling him very directly, in no uncertain terms, how poorly he does business. Everything from sales, to retention, production, fulfillment. Everything. He failed at nearly everything at nearly every step. I left the store thinking that my interaction with them was finished forever.However…I received an email from one of the partners the next day:

I’m not sure exactly what you do in management consulting, but we would like to propose something. Do you help businesses with customer and client management? We could use some help. I’m not sure if this is the sort of thing you do, but if it is, it would really help us out.

As a small company, we can’t afford to pay you for this service in cash; but we could offer to produce something you need much less expensively than it would otherwise cost.

I laughed out loud for a good five minutes after reading this email. Who would have thought that berating a store owner would result in this kind of offer?!

I don’t mean to imply that I’m a superstar management consultant (far from it), but what a brilliant move! At the very least they have shown that they really care about what their customers are thinking and even if nothing comes of it, I admit that I feel better about the entire experience than I would have otherwise. Did this offer “save” the customer experience? No. Would I recommend them to friends? No. But it’s better than nothing at all.

Should I consider their offer? On one hand, I’m thinking that getting involved with them again would be foolish on my part. As the old saying goes, “Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me.”

However, I passionately believe that artisans should be able to make money at their craft. I believe that this city will be better off if they are in business. And frankly, it would be a neat challenge to see if I can help them out. No guarantees that I’ll be able to, but I think it’s worth exploring.

What do you think? Should I get involved? And I’m also curious to hear about some of your more bizarre customer experiences.

VizThink08 – What a Conference!

The very first VizThink Conference was held in San Francisco at the end of January. It brought together a community of people who like to “Think Visually”. Obviously this is a very broad term with no clear definition. The risk of keeping it broad like that is that it invites a bunch of people who end up have nothing in common and the whole event is unsatisfying for everyone.

The opposite happened.

Attendees included graphic facilitators, illustrators, infographic creators, photographers, comic artists, teachers, professors, people who like to doodle, mindmappers and on and on and on. There was just enough of a “like mindedness” among the participants that we knew we had something in common, but we weren’t all the same. I’m sure you’ve been to conferences where you recognize 80% of the people and you’ve seen 90% of the talks. Not at VizThink. It was the best conference I’ve ever attended. I would introduce myself to people and 9 times out of 10 would be fascinated by what they were doing and how they were incorporating visual expression in their work.

I went because I was invited to lead one of the workshops, but there were so many good talks going on I had a really hard time deciding which ones to attend. I was almost inclined to leave my slides and some instructions at my own workshop and go check out Scott McCloud’s workshop.

Another workshop that was going on at the same time as mine was by Ryan Coleman. He talked about how to get VizThink communities going on in your own town. He’s successfully put on five of them, and he’s planning a sixth! Here’s the Facebook event, or the wiki page.

If you have a chance to attend VizThink Europe or the next one in North America, you should definitely check it out.

Curious to hear your thoughts on what makes for a great conference. Is it the attendees? The speakers? The food?

Lo Fidelity vs. Hi Fidelity

My practice as an event designer and facilitator is pretty unique. It’s not the typical way of doing business. I’m part of a team that includes an artist, DJ, website designer, photographer…it’s an experience. People come to the events having never been to one before and can’t quite believe the art, music, the pace of work, etc. In that sense, the experience is very new and “cutting edge.”

However, while the method might be cutting edge, the tools are not. We use simple whiteboards with dry erase markers (made by the fine folks at Kinetic Energies), poster boards, foam core, art supplies, etc. This contrast confuses some people, as they figure we should be using SmartBoards that automatically capture the writing, projectors, internet connections, and lots of other “techie” stuff.

The reason we don’t is because we find that all of that neat stuff becomes a distraction from the task at hand. The projectors, PowerPoint, etc. start to mediate the conversations between people and we feel as though it’s our job to provide the simplest possible environment for the right people to have the right conversations.

Welcome to Whitespace

Let me introduce myself. My name is Daniel Rose and I live and work in the bustling metropolis of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. My living/passion (and topic of this blog) is in helping large groups to solve tough, complex problems by providing event design and facilitation so that the collective wisdom of the group can generate sustainable solutions in a rapid way.

Yeah…that’s kind of a mouthful and in subsequent blogs I’ll delve into what all of that means to me and I hope that you’ll take some time to help me define it. For now I’ll touch on the title of the blog, ie. Whitespace.

Inspired by my good friends at Sente Corporation and Innovation Labs, I’m very intrigued by the idea that by getting diverse opinions and viewpoints together to tackle complex issues, the process of different knowledge sets and assumptions coming together and mixing can be the spark of innovation. That space between people is the whitespace. (Thanks to my friend Lisa Sorsa for sketching out the graphic above.) By creating opportunity for whitespace to exist, interesting conversations can occur, novel ideas can be combined and there is real potential for breakthrough ideas to happen.

The inclination in the corporate or not for profit sectors in North America is to pare down participation in meetings because it seems intuitive that the more opinions you have at the table, the less likely you are to reach consensus. While “consensus” will be the topic for a future post, my belief is that if breakthrough and innovation is the goal, there will be a greater possibility of that occurring if there is a large, diverse crowd contributing to the effort.

 Of course, it takes great skill and experience to generate and focus that energy towards valuable, tangible business outcomes and that’s where I come in!

Rather than having a discussion about “out of the box” thinking, I gently suggest to clients that what they really want is to expand the size of the box they’re playing in and by including other people, the whitespace is increased and opportunity for breakthrough innovation increases as well!