Adam Rabinowitz's Blog, page 4

Big ups to Jo’burg Metro!

I must extend a huge Thumbs Up to Jo’burg Metro.

Today I drove through kilometers of roadworks where the road had been reduced to a single lane, and the miles and miles of backed up traffic was directed through several traffic lights that weren’t working, causing the traffic to slow even further.

Where were Jo’burg Metro? Setting up a roadblock about a hundred metres from where the traffic eventually flowed freely, on the opposite side of the road, to inspect people’s license discs and drivers licenses. Of course they stopped the 99% of law abiding road users in the hopes of catching the 1% of offenders who probably just forgot to check their licenses of discs.

If Jo’burg Metro had been on the roads between the hours of 6am and 9am they would have been able to stop some real offenders in the form of taxi drivers who shoot red robots both before they change green and after, drive on anything that resembles a hard surface including (but not limited to) yellow lines, grass, islands inbetween lanes, sidewalks – but of course that would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Our JMPD prefer a challenge.

On the way home this evening, I sat for about 10 minutes getting through the intersection of Sandton Drive and William Nicol, where the lights were out and there were four lanes of backed up traffic in each of eight different directions, but not a single JMPD pointsman in sight. They were, of course, setting up a road block to check the 99% of law abiding road users about a kilometer up the road on William Nicol northbound.

So comforting to know that JMPD are keeping law and order on the roads.

The thin line between delight and disaster

There’s a very thin line between Customer Delight and Customer Disaster.  Which side of the line will you fall on?

I recently (almost) finished renovating my kitchen. We chose Weizter kitchens for two reasons over the other company we had shortlisted. Firstly, they offered us exactly what we wanted – bamboo counter tops, and high gloss white finishes; and secondly, and probably more important, they were cheaper.  Their sales pitch was brilliant. We weren’t even going to consider them, but we had made the appointment with the rep and let him carry on with the meeting. He set up his laptop, knocked together a design in front of us, and banged out a quote which was way out of the ballpark. Then he gave us the deal clencher. If we signed then and there, we would get some ridiculously huge discount which put our dream kitchen within our budget. He had us.

Now, we sit with an almost dream kitchen, and lot of ill feeling towards the company that delayed our kitchen by three weeks before the expected installation date, and a further two months after the installation was supposed to have been finished, and we sit with a kitchen that looks at the same time beautiful, yet unfinished.

After the numerous phone calls I made to Weizter that were never returned to tell someone with sufficient authority about my frustrations with an incomplete job, I finally managed to get the elusive CEO on the line, but only by calling under the pretence of wanting to build a very expensive new house with a handsome budget for a new kitchen.  That was the only time I ever spoke to the CEO. The rest of the time, she hid behind reps and installation managers. So where did it all go wrong?

In technical terms, Weizter kitchens runs entirely off their Bill of Materials. Essentially, a very dissatisfied and almost vengeful customer was created because the company has three distinct departments that seem to have a chasm in their communications with one another – Sales, Production and Installation.  Sales engages with the client, and employs the very persuasive technique of getting the customer to sign what looks like a very attractive, one-time offer. Then it’s off to production to make up the cabinets and counter tops, and finally to installations to put everything together at your home. However, the golden thread here is that internally, the different silo’s within Weizter kitchens talk to each other by means of one key document – The Bill of Materials.

The customer’s requirements is translated into a schedule of what components the production department needs to make up. This is the Bill of Materials. A simple kitchen counter made of a beautiful bamboo finish, and a cabinet with a cupboard and two drawers could result in a dozen entries on the bill of materials. Shown to the customer, the latter would have to be somewhat of a technical expert to interpret and translate that the items on the Bill of Materials translates to the kitchen counter with a cupboard and drawers that they agreed to on a diagram. Yet, the customer must sign off the Bill of Materials before the job goes into production.

And here is the fine line between Customer Excellence and Customer Disaster. Both are delivered in the simple Moment of Truth when you stand proudly back and say to the customer, “Here is what you asked for.” That moment is either followed by a customer jumping for joy ready to sing your praises to the world, or a frowning, confused and dismayed customer shaking his head sadly saying, “But this isn’t what I asked for.”

All too often, that Moment happens far too deep into the delivery process.

Any company with even a vague slant towards excellent customer service would have dissected its processes and analyzed where the potential gaps in Customer Expectation exist, and in Weizter’s case, it all points squarely to the infamous Bill  of Materials. Delivery hinges on a document that the customer cannot understand.  Had the company adopted a more customer centric approach, the signing off of the Bill of Materials would take place across a table from the sales rep and production manager together with the customer, and each would explain carefully to the other exactly what they understand will result in the ultimate delivery.  It is a simple matter of translation, making sure that anything considered technical or difficult to understand by the customer is thrashed out  between the people that will be involved in the delivery.  The salesman should be saying to the customer, “Is this what you asked for?” pointing to the diagram that the customer understands, which represents his dream kitchen.  The production manager should then pull out the technical document – the Bill of Materials, and say, “If that is what I am to deliver, then I need to see X, Y and Z on the Bill of Materials.  Let’s take a look and see if it’s all here.” And on that basis, when the customer signs off on the only document that means anything in the production and installation process, production will make up what the customer wants, and the customer authorizes work on the right components before it’s too late in the process to correct anything.

As it happens, I have made it my life’s mission to ensure that anyone I know and can influence never has to endure the irritation, frustration, and disappointment that I did when I used Weizter kitchens. Following a botched installation that at the time of writing this has extended 60 days past it’s promised delivery date and is still incomplete, I have been told in these exact words when I demanded to speak with the CEO: “The CEO will never speak to you, of that you can be sure.”

What CEO of a company runs with their tails between their legs away from angry customers? It is at the point of crisis that a company’s reputation is made or broken. In this case, smashed to pieces, in my eyes. If you are the CEO of a company, your role is to maintain the brand, confront potentially damming problems, and quell brand damaging fires.

Well, Michelle from Weizter, this is your chance to step out from beneath the skirts of your salesman, whom it seems is responsible for many Moments of Failure in this disastrous job.

It only makes me feel marginally better to know that three close friends building houses this year will not be using Weizter, but alas, there are still plenty people out there who will fall prey to this incompetent firm, and despite their incompetence, the company will remain in business.

To be fair, I must add that I did get a phone call from Weizter that I did not initiate during this process. It was to ask me if they could come to the house and collect a very expensive piece of bamboo counter top that they had delivered in error and left on site.

Write something

I’m a lot of things. Entrepreneur, Educator and Novelist. Unfortunately novelist doesn’t start with “E” or it would sound trade-markable. I meet a lot of people in my various roles (except the novelist one), and so many people say the same thing. “I’ve always wanted to…”

Last weekend, I was unceremoniously handed a box of all my remaining personal effects that had been gathering dust in different corners of my ex-wife’s house. What I found in there was a treasure trove of memories going back twenty years or more. My most valued find was a folder full of handwritten pages. It was a short story I thought I’d lost forever when my laptop was stolen a few years back.  I opened an old dusty folder- the kind they give you when you sign up for those useless societies at university, and it makes the first-years look all important in class having a fancy folder to keep your blank paper in. Well, there, in this dusty old folder, among sheets of sketches, and pages of handwritten jottings, was the original of the short story I’d written twenty years ago.

I was thrilled to recover the original story, but more so, I was reminded that I had always wanted to be a writer. Yet, somewhere along the way, I’d lost that dream.

It was only when Annie, my wife, prodded me to finish the book I was toying with at the time. My creative folder on my hard drive had about twenty or more folders, each with notes, pages, chapters, of books that were never finished. She bought me a smartpen for my birthday, and that was probably the second thing that helped me finally finish that book. I remember sitting in my study writing the final words of “Lost Soul – Immortality”, and throwing my hands up in the air in triumph. Of course the hard work of getting it published was still to come.

My second book followed less than a year later. “Porter’s Rule: Slave to the City” will be released by GWL Publishers in March 2015.

So, to all those out there who, like so many I’ve met, have always wanted to…I have to ask you the one simple question you’ve been avoiding asking yourself. Why haven’t you?

Porter’s Rule: Slave to the City