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!