It's A Waiting Game

 

It’s A Waiting Game

The Mairie always provides a new year lunch for free for the old folks in the village sometime in January and, for me, that is usually the only event of significance before March. It was, as usual, a good meal with a prawn, smoked salmon, ham and salad starter followed by roast pork in a mushroom sauce, cheese, dessert and wine “à volonté”. Hats off to the Mairie and members of the village council who served it. After that………..what, until March? I’m waiting for potatoes to appear in the garden shops so that I can buy some for my allotment; they’ll need a month for sprouting before I can plant them. At the same time onions should be available for planting. So basically nothing happens until I can start work on the allotment. I could do some clearing of debris there in the interim but that depends on the weather. So passing the time reduces to reading, listening to music or watching TV. It feels like an age but really that’s not so bad, is it?

(Don’t) Contact Us

I don’t know how many people have tried to contact the organisation behind a website and found it a frustrating experience but I certainly have many times. Contact Us can generally be taken to mean Please Don’t. Forging relationships with customers? Well, if you are buying, otherwise…...(who needs customers?). It’s all part of removing staff (and cost) from the process. Customer service? That’s a term that applies only to the sales staff. I’ve tried to interest relevant magazines in the issue, particularly from the point of view of old and limited fogies like, with no success. Isn’ t there a helpline phone number? Of course there is, if you can find it, but how long can you hang on the ine before you die? And if you have a specific problem there is probably a menu that will include all options except the one you want. So, an ELSE clause, an “other” option? Dream on.

I have had a bee in my bonnet about user testing for as long as I can remember until I recently found out that UX specialists are employed (sometimes). UX specialists are trained to examine the user experience on a website. That’s great, even if they don’t measure up to my benchmark of a 90 year-old granny living in Kazakhstan who has just been given a PC for her 90^th birthday and wants to buy a present on-line for her grandchild in England. But what is the remit of these UX specialists? Are they allowed to investigate and test beyond sales? There seems little if any evidence that that is the case. So do we just have to suffer and get on with it? Well, it seems to me that there is a gap in the market there; and if there is a gap in the market there could be an opportunity for someone to exploit it. Nationwide has only recently woken up to how to exploit its position as a mutual, doing so in a manner that no other bank in the UK can copy. So there is hope, even if it is tenuous. In the meantime I’m waiting, waiting for some organisation to meet my Kazakhstan granny test.