All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551
or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser. There is a space between my name and the minus sign and NO space before 'caldwell' to eliminate the name 'caldwell' in the Google listings
I am not on YouTube or social media
Cadwell NOT Caldwell
Horses for Courses
[ 5 minute read ]
Opinion
Different Strokes for Different Folks
I started a couple of business in a bid to trick myself into feeling free from constraints imposed by other people. I know I was foolish to consider that one can do that. Studying marketing, even in a peripheral sense, has told me that the customer is a stakeholder in business decisions. I allude to this when I sneak up behind shop staff stacking shelves and get in their way when they turn for another tray of something.
'It would be a good job, if it wasn't for the customers, eh?'
Hardly any of the staff get it. Why would they? I suppose it is an insider joke and I am much closer to Jean-Paul Sartre 'Hell is other people.' than they are. If I don't like something I have tended to put some effort into trying to understand it, so I studied Customer Service, primarily because it has always been me who has had to deal with customers, but also because I am nearly always dissatisfied with other businesses customer service responses, right from the outset.
I still have an A3 sheet of paper with 'CARES' on it Blu-Tacked to my office wall (my office is also the library and my living room). Sometimes, I take all the furniture and books out, strip the walls of all the pithy quotes and bits of useful but almost redundant information and place a dining table in the office/library/living room, and I eat breakfast in there. I don't do that; I am simply good at ignoring my environment. In that I am not much different to many people who skip the prep work when they decorate their homes. You might only need to visit my garden to see how my attention is layered. If a video of me in the garden was played backwards you would see me removing stuff as I should have done in living life forwards. Any long living creature in my garden watching me notices that I only ever add to the disorder, if it ignores the bonfire I had last year, but the ashes are still in heap and not scattered on the hastily dug soil. I don't even 'double-dig', I half-dig.
CARES
Communication - Clearly communicate the process and set expectations
Accountability - Take responsibility for fixing the problem or getting an answer
Responsiveness - Don't make the customer wait for your communication or a solution
Empathy - Acknowledge the impact the situation has on the customer
Solution - At the end 0f the day make sure to solve the issue or answer the question
Of course, if someone is working from that list while talking to a customer something has gone horribly wrong. In all the years of being self-employed and a business owner I have only had three dissatisfied customers:
An actor woman pretended that one of her pictures was damaged by the protective glass being broken. Anything that resembled a picture or painting always received the utmost care when we handled it. My business frequently took art pieces to the Tate and other galleries in SE1. Insured or otherwise no-one was about to mis-handle the actor's picture, so when she cried. 'Oh!' and bit her bottom lip I knew why she no longer worked in London as an actor. She was not convincing. I mean actors are supposed to be able to suspend belief, right?
A man was horrified that his glass table was smashed before it was placed into one of my vans. I was the person on that job.
'You have insurance, don't you?'
'Of course, but they won't pay out because I told you that I needed two of my team to fetch the table for you and you insisted that you wanted to save money and the security guard at your business property would help to lift the table. He failed to do it correctly and the table broke. The fault lies squarely with your decision and the security guard's inability to understand the circumstances.'
They may well have paid out if I lied, but who wants to lie to have their policy cost more?
The third was an employee issue. He turned up forty-five late but not before the customer phoned me to make sure someone was coming. That employee cost me over five hundred pounds. I waived the whole cost for the customer because she was both Chinese and a graduate moving from halls of residence. Word of mouth is sometimes crucial for generating more bookings and I had experience of just how polite and honourable the Mandarin-speaking Chinese can be, and of course, a good lot of her university friends were aware of who she had booked. The die was cast and my business never got another booking from any university staff in the UK or any graduates at the UEA (University of East Anglia) in Norwich.
The moral to this last story is 'Never do your brother a favour by giving him some employment.'
You can set up cast-iron processes to avoid future problems but some fool will hit them with a big hammer and the brittle mould will shatter. Circumventing standard operating procedures will, in my experience ultimately bring about failure. Well, I say that but the reality is, I suggest, if we are led by a ring in our nose along a path that is considered to be appropriate for all occasions and circumstances we are no better than a wayward pig driven from one place to another or, I suppose an ox with a ring in its nose. It is the farmer who has a purpose in mind and the animal has no choice. The farmer wants to corral the animals and the animals are wanting new experiences.
'Right! Job done! We have got them from being stupid piglets over there to big pigs over there. Now they have a value and are marketable!'
I read a post on a English Literature forum that said. 'I am looking forward to start reading the set books. I suppose I shall have to change my reading list once the module starts in October.'
I was tempted to write a reply. 'The module started the day you were accepted and were enrolled on the module.' However, there seems to be no right way to learn and I am foolish to think that anyone will fail because they follow a set calendar of study. However, I can't help thinking of the Archaeology graduate I met in London who negated everything I repeated from a conversation I had with a PhD graduate, the day before, who focused on Romano-Britain. He had explained stuff to me which the graduate simply did not comprehend or accept and all I could hear was the graduate's lecturers carefully and patiently explaining stuff that everyone else had independently arrived at. There was, of course, a good deal of prejudice involved.
'Woo hoo! I have finished my degree. I have joined an elite group. This ragged man is not in my group. What does he know?'
Horses for courses and different strokes for different folks, I suppose. You do it your way and I will do it my way and let us all hope that no-one calls us out as being charlatans.
