The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.
Randy Pausch
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Scott
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Scott
Astronauts don’t travel through space with their fingers crossed.
Chris Hadfield, Former Commander of the International Space Station -
Scott
Testing my dishwasher after I just “tried to fix it” and I think I’m more nervous than the night before I got married… #pleasedontfloodmykitchentonight
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Scott
Every day presents a new opportunity to reinforce to a customer why they chose your product or service. – Jeremy DuVall
I really enjoyed this blog post from Jeremy today because I’m a firm believer that if you’re not constantly working to improve your customers’ experience, you’re passively losing them.
Digital examples of this stand out to me all of the time…
- Frontier’s website is awful. I used to be able to browse prices and deals for upgrades on Verizon’s site whenever I wanted, but once Frontier bought out FiOS, everything shifted to their website and now I can’t even see prices without calling their 800-number. Also, for some reason their website thinks I speak Spanish and I have to translate it back to English to make my payments.
- Glassdoor’s app sometimes doesn’t remember my login credentials, so it asks me to re-enter them when I want to do a simple task like sort a list of reviews by date.
- Winn-Dixie just “upgraded” their pharmacy app and even though they added a feature to refill from a list of your prescriptions, it doesn’t work and instead now you have to enter the RX numbers one by one.
None of these things alone are enough to drive me away … but they’re enough to plant that seed in the back of my mind so that if an alternative comes along, my first thought about any of these guys is more likely to be something negative instead of a reason why I chose them in the first place.
Business 101 – You want your customers to think happy thoughts about your company when faced with your competition.
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Scott
It always pains me to see documentation left as an aside or an afterthought for any development project, yet I totally get why it happens because I do it far too often myself! You really have to make it part of your process and not something that maybe you’ll circle back to later if you have time … which you never do.
That said, I really like this methodology that I just read in a blog post by Sara Rosso from Automattic…
Work as though you’re constantly training your replacement: document, explain, and be as public as possible with decisions / discussions – leave a trace! Your colleagues will appreciate it, your team can learn and grow because of it, and you’ll (most likely) still have a job. 😮 😀 😉
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Scott
This isn’t the first time that complaints have been raised about Amazon harboring unsafe working conditions in its distribution centers…
The “being timed to pee” sounds over the top, but keep in mind that a lot of punch-the-clock-type jobs time employees down to the second for their two 15-minute breaks each day … and that’s just what takes place systematically. During my call center days, it may not have been an official policy, but we definitely had times when supervisors would keep a tally of employees that they thought were taking too long in the restroom.
I mean, it’s understandable – when you work a crappy job, hiding out in the bathroom is a great way to kill some time!
Regardless, with Amazon’s drive to be the king of shipping & distribution … especially when they’re tracking every minute detail, their model is going to support this kind of behavior and they need to act aggressively to root it out if it does stem from middle management because not for nothing but that survey where Amazon is ranked among the best places to work?
I’d bet money that’s considering their thousands of people who don’t run around on their feet filling Prime orders all day.
I hope that they do get their act in gear because I love Amazon and I’d hate to see this become yet another 21st century example of exploiting a group of people who are desperate enough for work that they’ll allow their basic rights to be taken advantage of… 🙁
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Scott
This seems kinda crazy – as an alternative to advertising, would you let a website use your computer for crypto mining???
Salon to ad blockers: Can we use your browser to mine cryptocurrency?
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Scott
Here’s a simple way that search can do better – when you search for “white house correspondents dinner” on YouTube, the first hit should be a video from the dinner itself instead of being buried behind 24 other clips of commentary about the dinner.
Scott
Mini Dream Journal – President Obama. Talking politics. Dressed as a turkey.
I’m just as confused as you are, and it was my dream!
Scott
I think the best part of my day so far has been closing all of the car-buying tabs that I’ve had open in my browser for the last month and a half. 😛
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