Beware the king’s new clothes

From Opinion column issue 62 – Early spring 2012

You can almost hear the sigh of relief sweeping through the retail business. Shoppers love click and collect! The high street is saved! Footfall is coming back! The e-commerce nightmare is over.

Well, if you believe that, you’re missing a fundamental point. People like buying goods online, whether on their computer, their iPad or their phone. That’s the bottom line. Home shopping is here to stay.

Getting those goods into people’s hands is an essential element – but a separate element. Some people clearly like picking up their goods in stores. The shopping experience is still an important part of their lives, and click and collect adds a valuable extra dimension to it.

But a lot of others are using click and collect because they’ve realised it’s the only sure way of getting their goods. You’ve failed them with every other delivery method, and this is their last resort.

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You could be nice about it

From Editor's Rant column issue 62 – Early spring 2012

A heart-stopping frenzy of buzzing on the entry phone, lasting at least ten seconds. A curt, almost angry announcement on the intercom: "Delivery." A frantic scrabble down six flights of stairs from our top flat. The delivery man on the doorstep with parcel under his arm, an impatient look on his face and a battered-looking handheld terminal already thrust forward.

My unrecognisable signature on the recessed, microscopic screen, which is barely accessible anyway between the steeply chamfered sides of the bezel. "Sorry, that doesn’t look much like …"

"What’s your surname?"

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Snow, and the art of the possible

From Opinion column issue 61 – Autumn 2011

Will it snow?

Well, a Met Office spokesman interviewed by the BBC lately gave a shrewd response: "Yes, it will definitely snow somewhere in the UK this winter."

By which he was gently pointing out that no amount of technology can actually predict what the weather will be like with any certainty for more than about a week ahead.

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We live in a flat - Part 2

From Editor's Rant column issue 61 – Autumn 2011

OK, so here’s the scenario. We KNOW that online retailers’ automatic address capture systems often drop either the street address or the building name from their record, so when we were buying an product from a major department store chain a few days ago, we made sure we entered both these items on the same line.

Fine. The retail site quoted back our address exactly as we typed it in. Then next thing, we get an email from the carrier. "We tried to deliver, but you were out." NO WE WEREN’T!!

However, we found that the address quoted in the carrier’s email was hopelessly garbled: flat name (but no number), street number (but no street), then just "London". Oh, and a postcode. Clearly the retailer’s data record got mangled in translation by the carrier’s, and that was the result.

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We live in a FLAT!

We live in a flat. Have you heard of the concept? When it comes to entering addresses on a lot of shopping web sites, one would have to conclude not.

These days many sites try to save time and improve address accuracy by asking you to enter just your house name or number and the postcode rather than your entire address. They then perform a lookup on this information, and populate the other address fields from a database.

But about half the time this doesn’t work for flats. Here’s the problem: flats have two address lines where other addresses have one. The first is the flat name and number, the second is the street address and street number. Address lookup systems don’t seem to understand this.

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Who exactly is better off?

From Editor's Rant column issue 58 – Winter 2010-11

Discounting the current recession (if only we could), we’re currently living in a wealthier world than ever before – or so we’re often told.

Why is it, then, that twenty years ago I could phone my bank or my local electrical retailer and speak to someone on the spot at that actual location, whereas now I have to negotiate my way through all sorts of levels obfuscation and complexity, only to reach someone with no local knowledge at a contact centre in some other part of the country (or even across the world).

One has to assume that centralising and handing off customer contact has brought suppliers massive savings in local staff, but who actually benefits? Presumably the retailer or bank and its shareholders do, in the form of increased profits; and possibly we do as consumers, through getting more competitive prices for the things they sell.

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Reintermediation: is it now unstoppable?

From Opinion column issue 58 – Winter 2010-11

Does anybody remember the world before Microsoft Windows? We had DOS – black-screened and uninviting. But what it did offer was the freedom for software developers to make their applications look and function any way they liked. There were no interface standards for them to follow; everything was exciting and new.

Then Windows and the Mac OS swept all this away, and mostly we welcomed their consistent way of doing things. You didn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you used them, or require your friends to be using the same software as you before you could interact with them. Few would want a return to the jungle that was DOS.

Rewind to the present day, and something similar seems to be happening on a far larger scale in all our interactions with the internet. We search on Google, we look things up on Wikipedia, we network on Facebook or LinkedIn, we tweet on Twitter. Using these resources is comfortable and reassuring, and no one seems keen to turn the clock back.

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