The Lynx Effect live - and how they missed a trick

The sun's come out, the sound of (possibly Angry) birds fills the air, and windows are starting to creak open  - yes, Spring is here, and with it advertising's silly season. One campaign I've enjoyed is for deodorant brand Lynx - it's amusing, always fresh, and doesn't take itself too seriously. (Well, you can't take yourself too seriously if you're under £3 at Boot's.) Here's one of the ads....

The campaign's concept revolves around the supposed irresistibility of Lynx to women. Well, I can't see it myself, but at least the ads are fun - and they're extending the concept in several ways, like this real-life event in London's Victoria Station where a team pasted in some footage of an angel "falling to earth" on top of a bit of film footage featuring ordinary (perhaps not even Lynx-wearing) male commuters.

Adds a nice bit of brightness to the morning commute, doesn't it? But here's our view at Rapide: they missed a trick here. It appears the Lynx people sent a team to the station to do the technical stuff. What if they'd gone one step further - and made it fully mobile, with a app (perhaps on Apple's iPhone) that recognised the "hotspot" if filmed using the phone's camera, and did all the stripping-in of the falling angels itself?

This would have added something, I think - letting the people get involved in their own filming. It would also have scaled up well - instead of a single day at a single station, the app could have been rolled out at hundreds of stations, shopping centres, sports clubs.... or anywhere! The technology (it's similar to QR codes) already exists, so it wouldn't have been much of a step - and could have been a great investment.

Nonetheless... well done, Lynx, for bringing a smile to our day!

Sailing through the freeze: our fondest moments of 2010

Happy Holidays, everybody! I'm looking back on 2010 on the last day of the year... and I'm proud to say my friends at Rapide have had their best year ever. What's interesting is that if you take all the exciting things happening in mobile... they've also happened to Rapide! Here's my little run-down of some of them.

1. Growing like crazy... in the UK 82% of people now have mobile phones, 45% of them "smartphones" - with things like Internet access, video and multimedia, and applications on top of the phone functionality.For apps developers, the market's set to grow at over 60%  a year between now and 2014 - not just number of users and apps available, but the actual, real, folding green banknotes people are prepared to spend on them. There's no vote of customer satisfaction better than actual money now, is there?

And the same's happened at Rapide! Lots of new starters mean the office is getting a bit crowded these days, but nobody's complaining; we serve over a third of the FTSE-100 and our basic business, SMS marketing programmes on their behalf to employees and customers, grew by much the same big percentage - we now arrange over 3m text messages a month plus assorted other services from conference calls to voice broadcasts. The best bit, though, is that we haven't lost the "family feel" plenty of visitors to the University of Warwick Science Park comment on. And that's something we're determined to keep, however big we become.

2. Radical summer highs.... 2010 was the year network operators across the year saw bandwidth usage explode; voice bandwidth now takes up only a small percentage of total cellular traffic, and rightly so. Rapide believes mobile sites will be fundamentally different to "mainstream" web sites - often single-function or an application rather than a miniature version of a large site - and tied into infrastructural mobile services like SMS rather than just the web paradigm. (Oops, apologies for using a word like "paradigm" - that's one of my New Year's Resolutions dealt with...)

While talking of explosions, people are still talking about Rapide's trip to Las Vegas; it's possible they're still talking about it in Vegas, too. Including a couple of things we'd prefer to keep quiet about. (Who was it saw the sun rise from the top of a building they shouldn't really have been at the top of, I wonder?) But a bit of work got done too: the team came back with various ideas and projects that bubbled up in North America, and our new version of the Rant & Rave sentiment analysis engine is awesome. Really, it is. Ask anyone at Rapide for a demo.

3. ... and battling winter lows. Much like other parts of the UK, the Rapide office had a cold-related disaster related to frozen pipes and flooding. The best bit though - and the thing that kept a smile on MD Nigel Shanahan's face - was that even a flooded floor didn't interrupt customer service for one second. I won't blow our own trumpet too much here, but let's just say the processes worked, backups functioned, and not a single client was inconvenienced. (Although we can't say the same for one IT guy who whizzed into the office at 3am...) Even the Prime Minster supports it!


So we're looking forward to a terrific 2011 - and we'll keep you posted of new developments at our three new blogs on Mobile Marketing, Customer Feedback, and Employee Engagement: click through for a look (they've all got RSS feeds too.) Thank you for being part of Rapide's year!

A very handy man

I've never much enjoyed having workmen in. You have to be very lucky to get one who doesn't suck his breath in over his teeth while shaking his head sadly as he quotes a price. Or taken the plunging neckline principle and applied it to the back of his trousers. And worst of all is when you first phone them to book an appointment: most work for themselves, which means that when they answer they're generally halfway up a ladder, or driving their white van at warp speed to their next customer. It's one of those few situations when you're actually glad to get a Call Centre on the line. And sometimes - just sometimes - it's a pleasant experience when you do.

I'm talking about a company called 0800-Handyman, and it's the subject of my blog this week.

What they do is quite simple: they have lots and lots of workmen, from carpenters to plumbers to electricians, and give you a single number to call when you want work done around the house. Many of them are multi-skilled, so you can get more than one thing done at once. (Apparently I needed a CORGI engineer to plug in my cooker, and I half-expected well-bred dogs to appear at my door brandishing screwdrivers.) And the prices are very reasonable. But the best thing for me was simply the way they take your call. No grunts, no background noise of a Transit, just a trained Call Centre Agent who listens to your problem. That's what it's all about.

First off, you get through to a real live person very quickly. Just like First Direct. And the person's armed with all the common problems workmen encounter, so they can be taken care of straightaway. For example, they don't ask what type of electrical connection you have in the cooker area. They ask: "Was there a cooker there before?" That tells them what they need to know, without asking for knowledge I don't have.

Second, they understood that every customer is different. I wasn't talking to a script robot, I was having a real conversation with a real person. He even noted that a previous workman, visiting my neighbour, had experienced problems with the gate and was it fixed yet? So many little things that can destroy your plans on the day, were taken care of during that first call.

Best of all - he gave me proper information. No hedging and fudging - we agreed an exact time slot for the work and what it would cost. When a problem arose - the area around my cooker's very tight and getting in there to reach the wires and stuff needs a bit of planning - he even suggested I email over a photo of the area, just so he could check everything would be ok. How many Call Centre agents give you their email address to work with? How nice.

And when the confirmation came through, it echoed my exact words and contained a proper description of the work. Not a "flange bracket" in sight*.

The call took less than ten minutes, to arrange a fairly long list of little things around my house, and I ended the call feeling I'd genuinely achieved something - none of the frustration you feel after phoning most commercial organisations. 0800-Handyman really seems to believe its Call Centre is a profit centre rather than a cost centre. (Those Rapide people wrote a paper on this very subject recently - click there to download it.)

And yes, the workmen actually did arrive (and leave) on time. What a great Call Centre experience!

* "Flange bracket" is a term plumbers use on invoices when they want to bump the price up a bit. If you've ever paid for a flange bracket, you've paid too much - thanks to Rant for this tip.

Press nothing to speak to a human! A tale of First Direct

When it comes to Call Centres, one company stands out year after year: the online bank First Direct. I've been a customer of these people for a LOT of years now - it was my first bank, in fact - and I've got so many positive stories about this HSBC-owned gem that I'm amazed I haven't raved about them before. Well, it's time to fix that!

You see, the Rapide people have asked me to blog about Call Centres, and - umm, in general they're not things I tend to rave about. In fact, I dread having to call a Call Centre. All that waiting in line and pressing options you're not quite sure about. I don't mind paying my bills using automated IVR systems, even if it does involve punching Visa card numbers into my keypad: that's easy enough. The problem with Call Centres is when you need them to do something just a little bit out of the ordinary. That's where so many Call Centre processes simply "break".

I don't know if you're a First Direct customer, but if you are, you'll know their processes are designed not to break. There's always somebody with the authority to solve your problem - and 9 times out of 10, that person will be the one who first answers the phone (at least according to this review of First Direct). Take this example.

Recently I noticed a very strange transaction on my statement. An amount I didn't recognise. For a start, it was a cheque - remember those? - and secondly it'd blown my balance below zero, which as you know leads to all sorts of charges and fees you can't afford suddenly sending you into debt the following month. (First Direct levies lots of these, unfortunately - it may be a nice bank, but it's still a bank.)  So I did something I haven't done in years: phoned the freephone number! In fear and trepidation.

Once I'd got through - it took all of two rings - a nice young man with a Leeds accent answered. I explained the problem, and he did something very rare for a Call Centre agent: he listened.

Now, this is an out-of-the-ordinary problem. The difference is that at First Direct they don't try to fit your problem into an existing process (like the story of a festivalgoer my brother Rant recently related) - for them, it's ACTION STATIONS until they solve it!

So he went into action. While I was on hold, he talked to his Fraud department, who have instant access to cheques and other paperwork on their screens. A couple of minutes later he was back.. and, in incredulous tones....

"Ms Rave, the cheque seems to bear your signature... and it's to Mr [deleted] in the same pen... but the date on the cheque is 2006!"

Well, there's a thing. It was indeed my cheque, for a friend's new baby (who's now a bouncing four-year-old!) Somehow, the cheque had been presented and cashed very recently. Now, the bank shouldn't really have cleared it - they must have missed the handwritten date - but ultimately, we'd solved the problem. Except for one thing...

"Ok, well that's sent your balance below zero hasn't it? Let's see what we can do about that..."

Now this is what I call a Call Centre! He's not just dealing with the issue itself, but with the unintended consequences of the issue. Very unusually for a Call Centre, the agent was able to make certain decisions regarding the cancellation of charges himself, without needing to clear it up the chain. In the end, that call was all I needed to answer my problem.

It's easy to understand why: at First Direct, things like call-handling-time aren't performance indicators. Because what matters to them is the satisfaction of the customer. And that's all that really matters.

Those nice people at Rapide recently wrote an interesting paper on Call Centres - why not take 30 seconds to ask for a download?

Being nosy with my Parker's

I told you last week about my new car - and I'm still very pleased with it! But today's blog is about one of the things everyone should use when they're buying a secondhand car. Have you heard of Parkers?

Well, you probably have - but I hadn't, until one of the Rapiders told me to use it. (The IT folk at Heron House are quite expert when it comes to cars, you know.) It's a source of information on second-hand cars used by - well, just about everyone really. It's full of things like the prices each model sells for, the things to watch out for when certain cars reach a certain mileage, that sort of thing. For someone not expert on cars - like me - it was as useful as a box of matches if you're on a camping trip without two Boy Scouts to rub together.

Let's be a bit more specific: on all the cars I looked about before buying my hatchback, I used their SMS Price Check. All you do is text in the car's numberplate in a certain format, and in moments you get back exactly the figures you need to help your decision. It feels a bit nosy, but hey, this is my bank balance at stake here!

(Just a note before we get into the text messaging part: no, this isn't a service operated by Rapide. We just think it's really good - a fantastic use of SMS to give people the information they want at exactly the moment they want it. And we know a thing or two about text messaging, I can tell you.)

Image property of Parkers

I used it on every car I went to look at. After three or four viewings of different cars of various ages, I started to get a pretty good idea whether the sticker price was fair or not. (All you do is text "PRICE" to 80806 with the car's registration number and mileage figure - it costs a couple of pounds, but that's a small price to pay to find out whether someone's pulling a fast one on you, isn't it.)

The big point I'm making, of course, is that the information you need is RIGHT THERE. Just as you're looking at the car, you can get this sense-check sent to your mobile, in less time than it takes the dealer to say "One careful owner". It's informative, reassuring, and available according to your schedule, not anyone else's. Everything you need in a 160-character message.

I thought I'd blog about this because it illustrates all the best bits of customer engagement: it's there at the right "moment", works when you're in the "mood" to receive such info, and it's delivered through the "mode", your mobile handset. The Rapide people actually wrote a White Paper mentioning these three important things this month - click here to download it at their website. And thank you, Parkers, for a great service!

The four rings of kindness: a story about Audi

Back from Rapide's company trip to Vegas, and there's some more exciting news from Coventry: I've just bought a new car! A nice hatchback from one of the big brands - think one ring short of the Olympic logo.

Well - the car hadn't been driven for a while before I bought it, and a few days after I got it home a warning light came on. Oh dear. Murphy's Law of buying a secondhand car I suppose, but it was a bit of a key moment - I'm not very good with mechanical things - and I was out in the countryside, so I got a bit worried about having a problem so early on.

We're all about customer service issues at Rapide, so let's see how the boys from Bavaria solved this one...

My first stop was the leather-bound binder in the glovebox, containing the manual and other documents. Amazingly for a secondhand car, all the documents were present and correct, thank you Mr One Careful Previous Owner. First observation: Audi's manual copy - telling you all about the car and what the buttons and switches do - is really, really good. I spent a few minutes discovering how to tune the radio to my favourite station, then remembered what I was there for: that scary orange warning light.

There was a number. A freephone number for a dedicated Audi person at the AA (Automobile Association, not Alcoholics Anonymous of course). I didn't hold out much hope - surely it was the car's former owner who was the AA member?

But amazingly, after I explained my situation, they said they could help. And this was at 3pm, out in the countryside, on a Sunday afternoon!

First, they put me through to an engineer who explained what the warning light meant. (Lambda sensor, if you're interested. It's a little thingy that tells you if your catalytic converter is working smoothly.) Then he asked me a series of questions - they sounded like a proper diagnostic script that'd lead to an answer; it seems they have the process down pat. Yes, the car's new to me; no, the light hasn't come on before; no the car doesn't lose power. All in nice non-technical language I didn't need to be a petrolhead to understand.

Then came the real service: being the voice of reassurance. Because what you need, at that point, is some form of positive thinking. The questions changed. He asked me: how far was I from home? When did I last refuel? Was the route I would use lonely lanes or well-trafficked motorways?

Then he sucked his breath in over his teeth (this is one issue with engineers no amount of training will ever correct) and gave me his recommendation: safe to drive for 200 miles, but book in with an Audi garage within the next seven days.

This was exactly what I needed. Solid reassurance and an informed recommendation on what to do. So I did it - OK, OK, I admit I sneaked in 250 miles rather than 200 - and the problem's now fixed at my local Audi dealership. (It wasn't cheap, but I'd got a good price on the car, so swings and roundabouts come to mind.)

And all of this on a lazy Sunday, from a company I wasn't a customer of, for a car I wasn't even yet confirmed as the owner!

This is real customer service - empowering a qualified person to take a decision (I'm still not sure whether the man was "supposed" to take my call, but he did anyway) then listening to the customer's problem and taking an informed decision on the next action. And all because they did something far too few customers do: put a real phone number, connecting to a real person, in the car where I could find it easily.

So thank you, Audi - and thank you AA, for being a business partner they should be proud of. My car's fixed now, and humming along nicely. Can't wait for the winter weather so I can see how the 4WD performs! By the way, those Rapide people have written one of their "Thought Bubbles" on this topic - download it and tell us what you think!

Stacking the decks at H&M

A volcano, a pirate ship, the New York skyline, and the Eiffel Tower are visible from where I'm bouncing up and down excitedly. Yes, the Rapide team went to  Vegas, and yours truly has been chosen to blog about it!

It's a company team-building trip, and they invited me and my brother Rant along - as well as other hangers-on, like that marketing guy that hangs around but nobody knows what he does.

Well, there are countless retail opportunities in Sin City, and I've got a bit of a confession to make...

... yes, in the midst of the world's greatest fashion boutiques... Dior and Givenchy and Chanel and a host of others... I'm spending the morning shopping in H&M!

Well, since I work for a technology company (Rapide) I suppose I should start by saying they have an excellent URL: hm.com. (How difficult would it be to secure a two-letter URL these days?) But I like H&M for another reason altogether: the "touchability" of everything. So I looked up the nearest store to our hotel, The Mirage, then bounced up to the Miracle Mile Mall that wraps around Planet Hollywood like a nice retail-stuffed doughnut.

Now, some stores do men's stuff, but H&M is really a girl's shop, isn't it. Lots of rails to shuffle through, piles of things to explore, and all the accessories to go with them ... and the prices in the USA are just as good, if not better, than back home in Britain.

And it's nice and BIG! I could easily buy their summer dresses by the armload, if I had arms. (And if I wore dresses.) The selection is HUGE. Almost too big, in fact. And that's what brings me to the bit I wanted to talk about: their website, in particular their Style Guide.

After all, there's only so far you can go with thinking "Oooh, that's nice" and just buying it. (However good that feels.) And sorting through every single rail isn't very nice to the people who have to tidy it up - it leaves the shop looking, as one of the Rapiders commented, "like a jumble sale!" by about 3pm each day.

So you need to be able to piece together a "look" that'll make heads swivel in the street. And the Style Guide gives you all the ideas to sort through, so you can make a list before you go out. (Shopping is hard work after all, isn't it! Even though all the boys think we're out having fun.)

I use the Style Guide most times I want to shop, and it works just as well for the US stores as the UK ones. The look I was going for was "zany" - there's a reason for that, but that's for another blog - and I came back from the mall with so much stuff the 747's going to groan on the flight back!

So that's why I like this place so much: the two halves work really well together, not all disjointed like many other retail sites. Lots of retailers worry about "cannibalising customers" if they split their efforts into real-world and virtual-world stores; H&M doesn't, it sees them as working together. They get the detail right, too: the site has enough content to give you loads of ideas; the stores have enough stock to "answer" them. I found everything on my (rather long) list today. And very few companies pull that off.

That's why I love H&M!