Thoughts in Time

JOIN THIS FACEBOOK GROUP: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=12256012493 

IKEA told me that the only way I can complain or possibly get compensation for getting mistreated is by writing to some address in the UK.  That’s no fun, I’d rather find everyone else who IKEA has treated this way and get us together through Facebook.  If you’ve been treated poorly by IKEA, join this group - or if you just want to show a big stuffy corporation that doesn’t value service that customers do matter and that it might be worthwhile to listen to customers rather telling them they “need to write to blah blah UK to register a complaint”, JOIN THIS GROUP- http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=12256012493
The rest of the story….

IKEA had told us they would deliver our cabinets on Tuesday(for the first parts of the story see here, here, and here).  Remember, I ordered this stuff in the middle JANUARY.  On Tuesday, we never got the delivery, and finally were told that “they were at your place at 7:30AM, but didn’t know which flat the raised ground floor one was and were afraid to ring the wrong bell so they left” -

Are you serious?  How incompetent can one company (or it’s outsourced delivery reps) be?  So, Kellee called them and  they promised that they would then deliver our order before Saturday, or at the worst, first thing on Saturday (before 9AM).  It’s now Saturday at 5:20… Do we have the order? Of course not.

At about 3, I get a call from DHL saying IKEA has moved the order to some other courier (no reason known).  Sorry, they can’t tell me who or what’s going on - I have to call IKEA.

I call IKEA.  The girl says “I don’t know why your order is being switched from courier to another - there aren’t any problems on your route” - I run out of pay as you go minutes on my Orange phone, and thus get cut off.

top up phone minutes (remembering that IKEA has cost me something like 10-15 pounds between the times I’ve now spoken to them through this drama)

I call back.  A new girl asks me to hold on while she finds out what’s going on. Remembering the pence ticking away as I’m on hold, I respectfully decline, asking her to call me back.  A couple minutes later, I get a call back. “Don’t worry, all the orders will be delivered tonight, including yours. They’re just running late.”

Me…” So, you expect me to sit around all evening as well?  I’ve got family visiting from the US and wanted to take them out.”

“her - I really do apologize”

At this point, I started asking for compensation.  She said they can’t do anything beyond giving me the delivery cost back (which they already had done when they messed it up last time.  I said that wasn’t good enough. I asked to speak to a supervisor.  She put me on hold and came back saying the supervisor said that’s all they can do.

At this point, I was getting very agitated.  I ask again to speak to the supervisor. I’m told I can’t do that.  I ask for a supervisor’s name -I’m told I can’t have it.  I’m told that what I’ll need to do is write to their customer response team (they mistreat customers so often they have staff dedicated to this!)… I try to explain my position to the rep in a way that personalizes it…”what if IKEA told you to come in to work today at 9, had you sit until 5, then said - oops, we don’t need you, we’re not paying you, and your only recourse is to write to some office in Ipswich”… She says - “sorry, I can’t do anything else”.

This is where I explain that I can. I can write about it online, I can start a facebook group, I can become a pain that is going to cost them well north of whatever compensation they could have provided (I would have been happy with even a 50 pound voucher). She has nothing to say, so I hang up.

So here I am - IKEA, you are the first company to make me a determined detractor. I will share this story with anyone who cares to listen, and it has gotten me so annoyed that not only have setup a facebook group, but I’ve budgetd $25 towards buying ads on facebook to spread the word about that group.  That’s right, your service has been so bad that I’m choosing to spend money to tell people how bad it is.  And all this could have been avoided with some reasonable service and someone at IKEA taking responsibility when things did go badly.

I just had th strangest call.  I ordered some stuff from staples online in the UK about a week ago.  They said they would deliver it. It’s never shown up.  I called them to find out what was going on. The rep couldn’t find the order.  I checked online and it’s in my order history. He says “that happens sometimes, check your credit card statement. We probably didn’t charge you so we’ve erased the order.”

me….”HUH? So it’s like it doesn’t exist although it’s in your system?”

Him “Yes, sorry.  You can either re-order through me or put in a new order online”

Unbelievable - almost as bad as IKEA…

ECogra is an organization that promotes gaming regulation and assurance. They also do research around player behavior.  The results of their latest study have just been published.  It’s not surprising that the results include that most people who gamble online are looking for entertainment. After all, treated appropriately, gambling is a form of play / entertainment and it is for this reason that we participate in it.  Another point they make is that people who gamble online are also fairly active on message boards, one measure of social interaction. Again, this isn’t surprising to me as part of games and entertainment is the social interaction which is often involved.  Usually, when we talk about playing games, we implicitly mean with other people. In the real world gambling arena, this is well accounted for, and most adults visit gambling establishments with friends for a session of social entertainment.  Online, this is an experience which hasn’t been well replicated (yet), however I think that will change - as the eCogra survey points to, people who play online do want interaction with others.

If you’re a student who goes to a Higher One client school, you can open a checking account, have money in it, and be using your MasterCard Debit Card in say 3 to 5 minutes.  Now, we were pretty innovative about how we use online databases, etc. to do CIP documentation.  So, I didn’t expect to be able to do something similar here in the UK.  However, I did expect to be able to go to a branch and get a “current account” (as demand deposit type accounts are called here) in one stop.  Also, I wasn’t going in as a customer off the street to Barclays, I was referred to their premier group, by the premier group at bank of america.  I was able to work with someone at the branch to fill out all the know your customer forms they needed. I had to give copies of my passport, drivers license, sign about 10 times, and after all that I was told that since I wanted it to be a join account, I had to get the same stuff from Kellee.

Monday - the day we got in (afer I didn’t sleep at all on the flight), I took Kel over the branch and after waiting 15 minutes so we could see the same bank employee (I asked another one quickly to help and it was clear that she wouldn not figure it out quickly).  Kellee got everything signed and verified…and …we were told that 5-10 business days from now we would have an account…oh yeah, and for tax planning reasons I’m going to have to go through this again to get accounts for my trust.  wow - I hope that this isn’t the speed with which everything move here!

Had a great team dinner tonight with Johannes, Logan, Araz, and Per (who’s joining us officially soon).  Represented at the table were Austria, Denmark, Iran, the United States, and South Africa.   Great Indian food and good conversation.  It’s exciting to see more and more of the key team come together as we keep things moving forward.  The place was in Soho - which reminded me very much of soho in NYC (I guess this one came first though?).  regardless, I can understand why most of the media companies in London are based in that area.

I like working with a group with such diverse backgrounds.  It means that we all have different experiences to draw from and thus will challenge one another’s thinking.  As Peter Drucker talks about in “The Effective Executive” - if there’s no disagreement, then the decision hasn’t been thoroughly though through. It is only with differening opinions that one can best think through a problem and come to the best decision.  Having different cultures, backgrounds and experiences I believe is a key input to startup success.   In fact, there was a study I read about at some point that quantitatively measured the heterogeneity of a team and examined whether homogenous teams (simliar people) or heterogeneous teams (different people) were most effective. It found that the teams composed of the most diverse members were the most succesful in rapidly changing industries… which are usually those where startups are focused!

That’s essentially the message I got from MaxJet this morning.  I was excited about my flight on MaxJet - an all business class cross atlantic service.  Flights for my next required trip to the UK had been so expensive that I’d decided to pay in the difference personally to fly MaxJet rather than coach on a typical carrier.  Oh well, after a little searching, I found that new seats had opened up on Virgin and that I could fly cheaper Premium Economy the dates that I wanted to fly than flying economy (someone tell me how that happens), and overall will save quite a bit versus my original ticket.  Airline ticket availability and price fluctuations still baffle me.

Anyways - Merry Christmas to all. Best wishes for this holiday season and for the coming new year.

There is nothing more exciting than the first usable version of a new product…. We are going into Alpha with Friendent’s product (name and logo to be revealed with Private Beta).  I’ve been playing around with it and although it’s clear that it’s an alpha, our team has done an amazing job and one can really feel the vision coming together. We’re doing testing with our close team, then will be opening up to close friends and trusted advisors in the next week.  Great work by Logan, Patrick, William, Rob, and our entire product / technology team!

Haven’t blogged for a while. I’ve been really busy.  I’ve started a new company (Friendent), and am happy to let everyone know that I just self published my first book, Starting Hands.  You can take a look or buy a copy here:

Starting Hands 

Unfortunately, because it is full color and self published, the price is a little high.  Hope people like it.  I am planning on publishing the full book online as an e-book for free at startinghands.com - when I get around to it.  Please add it to your reading list. 

VC Adventure: Clarity

I couldn’t agree more with this post. Business to business marketers are notoriously bad about this.

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » ProfileLinker Takes Meebo Approach to Social Networking

Here’s an idea that I discussed with some friends at Yale about a year ago… Glad to see that someone has implemented it. I agree with Michael that the challenge will be how to build relationships with the MySpaces of the world while still building their traffic. It also puts MySpace in an interesting situation. A user will want to use a service like this to manage their online profiles, and is there anything in MySpace’s T&C that prohibits use of a tool to manage one’s profile? If they do restrict it, for me as a user, I might well choose to just not keep a presence there as I would rather use a service that makes it easy for me to maintain. Easy maintenance provides more value for me and the people in my network. In a sense, some sites are already doing this a bit by enabling you to have your personal blog feed as part of your profile. Why not let you also pull other data in as well from another location? I wonder if their fear of dropping pageviews will cause the big players to put up fences, enabling a new company to create a foothold. Thinking about how I have a Linked In Profile, MySpace Profile, Friendster Profile, and Facebook Profile, I’ll be using ProfileLinker soon .