Archive for category That's Life
Healthcare Reform Starts To Get Funny – Finally
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, Politics, That's Life on September 29th, 2009
Now that this summer’s townhall scream-a-thons are over, can we get on with the business of mocking both sides of the healthcare reform debate? Thanks to Daniel Lyons for posting this on his blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tnhVwgrPBg
A Tale of Two Customer Service Experiences
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, That's Life on August 24th, 2009
In these recessionary times companies would do well to remember that retaining their existing customers is a far less costly activity than attracting newbies. My experience has been that it is not unusual for new customer acquisition costs to run 4x (or more) the cost to hold onto what they’ve already paid for. Case in point is a recent experience with sports equipment rack manufacturer, Thule.
I had spent about $400 for a Thule bike rack a few years back – not an insignificant price for an accessory that did an awful job of enhancing the appearance of my vehicle, but a pretty good job of holding bikes. This thing weighed enough to induce a round of Advil shots every time I installed it into the hitch of the SUV. A good product with a lifetime warranty. Long story short, a fairly important part, i.e., the part that keeps the bikes from swinging wildly from side-to-side, failed during a recent roadtrip (more on that in upcoming posts).
Thule’s website provides a customer service link and a form post that allows you to submit questions and requests for help. I filled out the form and received an email back from a Customer Service Representative in about a day. So far, so good. The rep seemed a little fuzzy on which rack I had and what part had failed. Their CRM system required that any reply messages be written inside of some text brackets within the body of the email rather than allowing me to simply reply. I found this out after a couple of failed attempts to provide additional info.
Because your reply will be automatically processed, you MUST enter your reply
in the space below. Text entered into any other part of this message
will be discarded.
[===> Please enter your reply below this line <===]
[===> Please enter your reply above this line <===]
If your issue remains unresolved, please update this question at
http://thule.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/thule.cfg/php/enduser/acct_login.php?p_userid=xslkjlksdk.com&p_next_page=myq_upd.php&p_iid=87338&p_created=sdddfddddd” target=”_blank”>http://thule.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/thule.cfg/php/enduser/acct_login.php?p_userid=sdkjxlkekjkl.com&p_next_page=myq_upd.php&p_iid=873922&p_created=124932666
Note to businesses – don’t ask me to do things in a way that is completely inconsistent with what most customers expect. I know your CRM wants replies a certain way, but that’s good for you, not for me. Still no ability to figure out which model rack so I asked if sending a photo would help. The CSR went around the system and provided a direct email address where I could send pictures. That was good, but this is what came back…
…we don’t make it anymore. We don’t have the knob you are requesting available
That was it. No more emails, no additional advice on where to find the part – not so much as a discount coupon for a new rack. In other words, “see you later sucker!” I then went to REI where I had purchased the rack 4 years earlier thinking that they might have a spare part. Their CRM system was a human being that told me to bring the rack back to the store and they would issue a refund. She explained that their customer service policy is to guarantee unconditional satisfaction. Thule’s warranty is described as “lifetime*” – the asterisk apparently means that if they still make it or have an extra part laying around the warehouse, they’ll be happy to help. The REI service rep said that “Thule will have to deal with us on this” – I suspect that when what must be your largest retail customer drops a 4-year old broken bike rack in your lap your response is “Thank you.”
So what’s the end result? REI has me for life. The replacement rack will come from somebody other than Thule and I’m writing this as a way to spread the word that doing customer service right is the best economic solution. Perhaps Thule will regain me as a customer someday, but it’s going to cost them much more than before.
The Best Movie of 2009…
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Politics, That's Life on July 13th, 2009
First, let me start by admitting that I am a sucker for any movie that presents itself as a realistic portrayal (kind of an oxymoron, I know) of the horrors of war. I’m not sure why – perhaps because through the accident of excellent timing, I haven’t had to experience the real thing. Vietnam was tearing the country apart while I was in grade school; the recently departed Robert McNamara was a name and a face that I saw on the evening news. I understood his historical role but was too young to have been at risk for what the country (and he) came to recognize as a colossal failure of American foreign policy. Desert Storm came far later than the age at which I might have considered the military as a career option. The subsequent actions in both Afghanistan and Iraq – well, let’s just say that I’m more concerned about the possibility of my 12-year old risking his life if those conflicts continue for another decade. Watching movies like Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Apocalypse Now and Black Hawk Down provides a bit of insight into the experience that I’ve been fortunate enough to miss. I understand two things – that friends and family that have served the country over the course of the past 70 years have seen and experienced things that have made a profound impact on them, and that we as a society owe them a debt of gratitude for everything that we hold dear.
The history of the 20th century is defined by major conflicts across the globe; geo-political tectonic shifts in world order, halting the horrors of Hitler, the proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam, the nuclear brinksmanship of the Cold War and the re-emergence of ethnic civil wars in the Baltics and Africa, all speak to war as huge tidal struggles. When you read the books of Stephen E. Ambrose (Band of Brothers, Citizen Soldiers), war is a very personal and intimate set of struggles; those of individual survival, loss and fear. The challenge of the movie genre is to represent either the epic nature of the conflict or the more personal experience.
In The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal have focused on the very personal and immediate worlds of three members of an Army bomb disposal squad deployed in 2004 in Baghdad during the height of the Sunni insurgency. IED’s are hidden in piles of garbage, parked cars, buried in the sand, strapped to men and in one particularly horrifying instance, implanted in a child. Why the expert and possibly reckless Staff Sergeant James is in Iraq with his colleagues Sanborn and Eldridge is not a question that is ever answered. The narrative is the countdown to the end of their deployment, i.e., how to not die in the month or so before they get to go home. The tension during the 2 hours of the movie is almost unbearable, the sensation of claustrophobia, danger and unrelenting desert heat is palpable. This is a taut and hyper-kinetic movie with three dimensional characters that we care about. Every street and building is populated with potential enemies, every foray in the Humvee into the streets of the city carries the risk of death. The dialogue is smart and real – it carries alternately the bravado, fear, resignation and determination of the characters. The performance of Jeremy Renner is deserving of an Oscar or Golden Globe as is the direction of Bigelow. This is a great movie but is not for the faint of heart.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDHGF4tDdKc
Baseball – Early Innings 2009
Posted by Bob Kumagai in That's Life on June 11th, 2009
It (baseball) is a haunted game in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before.
It’s early June and the Rockies are already out of the pennant race – so what else is new? Managers and players come and go but America’s most enduring love affair is still with the game of baseball. As Ken Burns noted in his 1994 documentary (and in the quote above), we assess all that we see today through the lens of what has come before. That may be why the issue of steroid use is bigger for baseball fans than almost any other sport (with the significant exception of cycling). This is a conversation with Sports Illustrated writer Selena Roberts and America’s best sportscaster, Bob Costas. They talk about A-Rod, the love for the game and why we may need to re-evaluate our black & white perspective on baseball’s steroid era.
An Anniversary Dinner at Il Fornaio
Posted by Bob Kumagai in That's Life, food on June 2nd, 2009
Not all dinners out are created equally. The good folks at the Il Fornaio in the Denver Tech Center made that abundantly clear last night as my wife and I celebrated our 23rd anniversary. In this particular case, the food was fine – not great, but really pretty good. What made for a lovely evening was the attentive and warm service – thank you Cesar. The dining room was nearly empty – the restaurant is a pretty big house with the outdoor patio empty due to the nasty weather and only a large party in a private room and perhaps a half-dozen other tables filled. The number of staff was close to the number of guests. Monday night is always quiet in the restaurant business but with the worries over the economy keeping people at home and away from both white tablecloth as well as quick service joints, it was really quiet.
Il Fornaio is a chain of 21 restaurants across the country – they do a nice job of providing America’s suburbs with a reasonable alternative to the dreck that gets slung at most Italian-concept products (you know who you are). I’m not going to suggest that it compares favorably with Luca d’Italia or Barolo as Denver’s best, but on any given Monday, the bread is crunchy, the pasta al dente and wine list is good.
What we found last night was a quiet and comfortable place to relax, be treated thoughtfully and graciously, and a warm and rich meal to celebrate a married life pretty well-lived so far. I hope that things pick up a bit for Cesar and his restaurant – I’d like to come back.
Cubs Fans – The Misery Continues
Posted by Bob Kumagai in That's Life on May 6th, 2009
My college friend, Paulie, grew up in the north Chicago suburbs, living and dying with his beloved Cubs. He often described being a Cubs fan as akin to a second marriage – the triumph of hope over experience. Now 101 years later, the unending nightmare continues – this time through the butchering of “Take Me Out To The Ballgame”, eh, sung by D-List actress Denise Richards. A native of nearby Downer’s Grove, IL, Ms. Richards probably has her heart in the right place – but so did Steve Bartman before he was run out of town for what was arguably a more damaging effort to “help”.
Harry Caray is rolling in his grave.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S77mIxm75PA
WNTW Wednesday
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Technology, That's Life on April 29th, 2009
John Daly's wardrobe gone wild
Music Monday, Follow Friday – must every day of the week be an alliterative axiom expressed on Twitter?
The answer is, of course, yes. The millions of new Twidiots that Ashton and Oprah introduced to the web’s latest BFF will soon be running out of ideas for their 140 character musings on daily life. The unstructured nature of Twitter has served to render most folks mute on all but the most mundane topics. It seems that we all need additional guidance. In recognition of this, I suggest that the middle day of the work week be dubbed “What Not To Wear Wednesday“. Rather than prattling endlessly on what you’re eating, whatever you TIVO’d last night or the transformative power of social media, let’s agree to align around what we Americans do best; tear-down and criticize celebrities.
I submit for my inaugural WNTN Wednesday professional golfer, gambler, and man-about-the-trailer-park, John Daly. Now it is no secret that golfers don’t always display the best in their choice of apparel. It’s part tradition and part too much time in the sun that has contributed to generations of duffers sporting some ill-advised wardrobe choices. Today, John arrived at a Spanish golf tournament event wearing what Jay Busbee called a “retina searing outfit that can charitably be described as “Upholstery Gone Wild.”
Any single element of this ensemble could qualify for a fashion intervention from my 15-year old daughter, but the impressive thing is the bold combination of neon orange shirt, white shoes, and well, those extraordinary pants. Well done Mr. Daly. You may be slamming the trunk by Friday afternoon, but you have won the golf world’s heart.
Pontiac – The End Of The Road
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, That's Life on April 25th, 2009
1978 Trans-Am
GM plans to announce that it is closing down the Pontiac brand, sending another iconic name of the Detroit auto industry to the scrapheap. It’s no surprise really (any Pontiac owners out there? Didn’t think so.), as the brand has been in the marketing wilderness for close to 20 years. If you are old enough to remember a time before cell phones, you probably remember those 70’s and 80’s era Firebird Trans-Ams. Smokey And The Bandit. Knight Rider (Pre-Baywatch David Hasselhoff, those were the days). Was there a teenage boy alive in 1978 that didn’t dream of driving a black Trans-Am with Farrah Fawcett in the passenger seat?
A decade earlier, Pontiac had defined the muscle car with the 1964 GTO. I was still in short pants and my high-school-age cousin could drive, played guitar in a band and worked on cars in his backyard. He had a used GTO – bright blue with white vinyl seats, a 389 engine and an “8-ball” shift knob. It was when the Pontiac brand really did mean performance.
Twenty years later it became just another GM platform that could distribute re-badged Chevrolets, Buicks and Oldsmobiles. By 2000 Pontiac had become so completely neutered, its claim to fame was the abysmal Aztec – the poster child for lousy GM design. The brand now represented crappy rental cars, awkward minivans and uninspired design. During the last decade, Pontiac’s brand became even worse – it became utterly irrelevant.
As Pontiac drives off into the sunset to join Oldsmobile in the history books, I’ll think back on my uncle’s ‘72 Grand Prix with the gas-guzzling, 4-barrel V8 that shot down the highway like a rocket. Before we understood what OPEC meant. Before Baywatch. Before a Pontiac was the rental car that you prayed you wouldn’t have to drive. Good night, KITT.
Little GTO, you’re really lookin’ fine
Three deuces and a four-speed and a 389
Listen to her tachin’ up now, listen to her why-ee-eye-ine
C’mon and turn it on, wind it up, blow it out GTO
Twitter Tweaks
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, Technology, That's Life, food on April 21st, 2009
It figures. Just when everyone felt the need to have a Facebook page, along comes Twitter to remind you that you are, in fact, well behind the curve. I knew Facebook had reached the popular culture tipping point of practical necessity when my mother-in-law (who is an avid Skype video call user) wondered aloud whether it was necessary to use Facebook to keep in touch with her grandkids. It is. Whether grandma really wants to see the day-to-day drama of the high schoolers or the photographic evidence of the altered states at college is another story.
Now Twitter has grown past the early-adopters and moved into the mass media. At 8 million users and some ridiculous amount of growth every day, the question of whether anyone really wants to read that you’re standing on line at the grocery, or that the french toast is ‘yummy’, has been rendered moot. If enough of your friends and colleagues are using a technology, so must you lest you be tagged a “Luddite“. Now the question is what to post, at what frequency and in which media. The difficulty of managing the non-stop stream of links to interesting articles, ruminations on current events, and promotional announcements has led to the proliferation of tools like Hootsuite, Twhirl, Tweetdeck, and a thousand more. Today’s new flavor is Twibes, where you can throw your remaining individuality into the bin and join (or create) a group of like-minded folks. It’s the segmentation of Twitter and is built-to-order for marketers to reach identifiable groups for push marketing.
What is clear is that thousands and thousands of individuals and businesses are jumping on this platform to avoid being left at the station. Only a few of the folks that I follow appear to have a clear purpose around their use of Twitter – I know I don’t. Even marketing guru Seth Godin doesn’t use Twitter (or Facebook or Flickr or MySpace), for this primary reason:
“I don’t want to use a tool unless I’m going to use it really well. Doing any of these things halfway is worse than not at all. People don’t want a mediocre interaction.”
I work in the online employment and recruiting business. Figuring out how to leverage the multitude of third-party social media tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, etc. is one of the biggest challenges we face. It is not implausible that online job boards will find themselves swept aside by changing technology in the same way that the newspaper classifieds were kicked to the curb. In the case of newspapers, it took over 150 years to have their employment ad revenue model wiped-out by craigslist and Monster. The online job boards might find that it takes far less time to be left behind. It remains to be seen whether the combined 180+ million users of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter will have an answer to Godin’s challenge of using a tool “really well” and if, at the end of the day, that really matters.
Death & Taxes – Today You’re Halfway There
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, That's Life on April 15th, 2009
April 15 is one of those dates that is seared into the American collective consciousness – right up there with December 7 and September 11. (Interestingly, these dates all have a sub-text of “disaster” – but that’s for another post.) At my house, April 15 is just the day that we scramble to get the bare minimum of information to our accountant to get the extension filed. Since taxes cause procrastination of epic proportion, it will be October before we realize, again, that we’ve been giving Uncle Sam an interest-free loan. Hard to believe that I went to business school.
While no one really enjoys pulling out the checkbook, it is a civic responsibility that we all share, so let’s get over it. It is a little Bidenesque to claim it as a patriotic duty but I think Warren Buffett has it closer to right when he calls for an overhaul of the current tax code in the interest of fairness. There isn’t anything original about complaining that it’s too complicated or is rigged to favor (or not) one industry or sector over another.
That said, take a look at Mike Jittlov’s True Origin of the 1040 page. This is a funny and instructive site that details where America got its most beloved loathed document. The original 1913 1040 form is there along with some handy calculators that show that paying taxes was indeed much simpler back in America’s salad years.
The original 1040 form
So man/woman-up and pay your fair/unfair share. As my dad and former CPA, Big Sam, says “paying taxes means you’re making money and is a better problem to have than the alternative”.