Moving very soon...

We are coming shortly with a new website and e-zine which will link to a number of exciting sites around the globe. The growth in traffic and readers to this primitive full article only viewing format has been heartening. The problem is, as great a starting point Blogger has been, we need a format that gives the roughly 2,000 viewers visiting over the last month, the chance to more quickly browse and decide which features you want to view.

Like this little car passing the Ferrari, we have a big mountain to climb and even bigger dreams. We will not rest until this is the most entertaining, informative, interactive, 2-way and fun conversational space on the Web.

Our time with The Western Mail seems to be ending. Condensing stories and profiles of real risk-taking entrepreneurs and calling out poor performers to 600-words was never a strength and, in my opinion, robs readers of the richness of the story. The current US Presidential campaign is showing people will read and listen for longer than 10-seconds. UK media are litigation gun-shy about opinions. Misbehaving corporations have figured that out so rather than answering tough questions, legal teams worry about lawsuits. I'm convinced people want to see more than Britney Spears or Heather Mills.

When throwaway lines are taken as verbatim, humour is lost to sarcasm and everything except one's own behaviour is held under the light it's time to say thanks for the memories and hasta la vista. When one over-worries about the squeaky wheel, the family jewels just walk out the front door. I'd worry more about a 10% drop in circulation year-on-year during a month when the national side was winning the 6-Nations European rugby crown. Then again, I'm just a guest here in this country who was warned about writing there. And a US Congressman friend said, "never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel." Sage advice so best of luck to all.

I'll never though accept prejudice without first finding out for myself in every instances. Tilting at windmills, maybe... someone has to. Some days we'll get it right, some days not so but we will always be unpredictable.

We're getting ready for Pennsylvania, interviewing several interesting mean dna women and as customers demand better service, we will still call Sir Terry Tesco, BT Ben and others out on their company's behaviours.

Thanks for joining in on the ride. There will be the occasional post but mostly we will spend the next two weeks getting ready for the move.

Easter – Made in China

Easter morning the kids scurried around the house in search of sweets. They excitedly rushed around the house to find chocolate eggs and bunnies, jellied eggs, frosted cookies and a false-bottomed plastic form in their Peter Rabbit Collection bucket showing only 50% of the product one thought was there.

I walked into the local Tesco on Saturday, where there was a sea of green Easter product boxes. The common denominator was the length they had travelled.

The Peter Rabbit Collection was made in China. It travelled to Kinnerton Confectionary in Pymble near Sydney before being shipped to the UK and then sent by truck to each local Tesco store.

Conservatively, using statute air miles distances from infoplease.com, these eggs flew or were shipped then trucked some 15,600 miles from Shanghai to Sydney to a store just outside of Cardiff. We have no idea how far inland from Shanghai they were produced which could add up to another 2,000 trucking miles. The cookies appear to have travelled a slightly shorter distance, only 11,000 miles.

The Kindercare chocolate surprise egg products are as much a mystery as their content prize. Their packaging only says they were “imported” by a UK business but not from where – very clever indeed. The eggs have a plastic toy embedded inside and one might safely assume that those toys are made in China? We don’t know.

Only Thornton’s eggs were UK produced.

To add insult to this carbon footprint, each cookie was individually shrink-wrapped and sealed in plastic (requiring a knife or scissors to open), set in a form fitting plastic tray, sealed with two additional layers of plastic film and slid into a cardboard box sealed with plastic sticky tape.

And, the cookies and jelly eggs were produced 100+ days ago (before Christmas ’07) to begin their long journey across the ocean. According to them, they will remain edible until Christmas of 2008. What kind of preservatives are needed to keep something baked with flour, sugar and eggs edible for that long a period of time?

Was there not a single UK-based commercial baker that could produce three cookies for .59 - .99 pence?

Are we content having any company say it’s cheaper to produce and ship them across oceans than to truck 100-200 miles from a UK baker?

What are these doing to the environment?

What do these do to the health our children? We have more and more cases of severe nut allergies than I remember. How good can it be to have so many preservatives ingested into their bodies?

It certainly gave us pause…

Now, enjoy those Easter candies.

Ooops?

Just silly. No No No!

Put your cash in your mattress? Yes! Yes! Yes!

19 March Video Companion

I'm Here for Ashley

Grab a cuppa and take a 37-minute break that may touch you. Read and follow along here. It will open in another window.

Where there’s sport there’s big money

NEXT week spring training wraps and harkens an annual rite, baseball’s Opening Day, with the US regular season beginning in Tokyo!

Its annual 2,450-game slog towards October’s World Series, which, most duly note, isn’t a “world” series since only one team resides outside the US. But when you’re arrogant enough to foist so many commercials on viewers that they extend a two-hour break into a four-hour marathon, have £800m in television contracts, have players earning £15-20m before endorsements and merchandising generates £3bn to watch grown men chase a white ball … it may not be “World”, but it ain’t half bad either.

I’m convinced rugby and soccer never made it commercially in the US because TV execs could not figure out how to stop the clock every 10 minutes to sell something. But sport is a great international equaliser.

Wales sits on the cusp of ending an 81-year FA Cup drought and as a long-suffering baseball fan who waited 86 years for my Boston Red Sox to win a championship, I can report the sweetness of winning is worth the wait.

The sports differ but our common tie is the long-term suffering.

Sadly though, very early in my career, I helped to create suffering of a different kind.

Had I known then we were planting the early seeds for six-figure kit-naming rights contracts, eight-to-nine-figure stadium naming deals, merchandising that places team logos on every object imaginable and, the ultimate indignity… a £5 stadium pint of lager, I would, hand on heart, have just said NO!

Instead we now face the marketing madness of 2010 Ryder Cup corporate entertainment packages requiring a first-born child as collateral and locals letting homes for the week at 1970s house purchase prices and that’s before anyone starts on 2012 Olympic events in Wales.

It started benignly enough. My employer, The Bank of Boston was presented with an enticing deal. Jan Volk, GM of the NBA’s Boston Celtics wanted us to buy four end-zone banners at £5,000 a year for 10 years.

As bankers, we mulled it over, had our lawyers insert opt-out/review clauses (for us only) at years two, four and seven because, in the true spirit and definition of a banker … someone who lends you his umbrella when the sun shines and ask for it back when it rains… we wanted surety. Every year Jan (and his successor) wanted to re-negotiate our steal, er, deal. Today, stadium naming rights start at £125m (spread over 10-20 years) with New York’s baseball stadium opening in 2009 set to bludgeon that record.

The PGA tour called the same year Tiger Woods hit his first golf ball on The Mike Douglas Show (our Parkinson). Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson and Gary Player were starting to age and Arnold Palmer, well, he was born old. They wanted us to pay the equivalent of a Tiger-era fourth-place cheque, £175,000, to sponsor their event (you know it now as the £3,500,000 Deutsche Bank Championship, the last tournament before the Ryder Cup and £17m FedEx Cup crowning Tour Championship). £150,000 provided the purse for 72 golfers, the rest was to entertain clients. Sadly, £25,000 won’t get you inside the ropes, let alone buy a corporate VIP tent.

The NBA’s Miami Heat were the hot new franchise in 1988. As part of the marketing team, we knew the basketball product would be abysmal the first two seasons, so we set about creating events.

Audience participation was key as the team won 16 of 82 games played that first year and sold out every game.

I returned 13 years later to DJ-choreographed player introductions set to Phil Collins’s Tonight which included six strategically placed flame throwers pushing plumes 30ft skyward as my waitress brought a catered meal to my seat/table.

My head hung in shame over my Pinot Grigio and Caesar Salad sitting in that £200 seat for that evening.

As apeared in The Western Mail

P.S. The Western Mail ran this sports article a week earlier than expected and the sub-editor dropped the Wales tie-in. Below are the missing 3 sentences to the end of the aricle.

"So I naturally shuddered watching the video… “Cardiff’s New Stadium, future home to the Cardiff Blues and Cardiff City FC, announce the launch of the new 2,250 seat members’ club/corporate hospitality facilities, which are set to appeal to Welsh businesses and generate millions of pounds of revenue for the clubs.”

All I can say is, my bad.

And when the next brochure arrives selling you those club boxes, £10 pound plates of bangers and mash and £6 pints to wash it all down with, you know who to blame and, oh yeah, RUUUUNNNN!!!!!"

Make sense now? That's the newspaper biz, happens to us all. Memo to self: need to stockpile a few more articles for just such an emergency...

Keith Olbermann on the Ferraro Furore

When the line is crossed, it needs to be called. This was how he closed last evening's "Countdown" show.

It had to be very tough for him to do because he was an early critic of George W. Bush and the war (still signs off every broadcast with the words "that's it for Countdown on _______, the 1,xxxth day since Victory was Declared in Iraq").

Both Clintons very publicly supported his right to say what he was saying at the same time the far (out) right was decrying him as unpatriotic for saying it.

Can I Have Some Ketchup with that Candidate Please?

I feel like I’m watching one of those retro cartoons where the two characters are being slowly nibbled away from the ground up until the only thing left will be two talking heads and one of them disappears.

Yes, it is the most exciting and dramatic campaign in the history of modern US politics. Every Tuesday night, millions from around the globe watch the results and ad nauseum analysis on CNN and… the longer this intramural contest continues, the more damage it will do to the Democratic Party in the fall.

While convinced either candidate could defeat John McCain and have long enough coattails to sweep in a Democratic majority capable of bringing real change, the loss of either supporter’s camp will be devastating and many could stay home or cross-over to vote for McCain than support “the villain,” which is how the winner will be portrayed by the losers.

Yes, it was another impressive win for Barack Obama. Yes, we are about talking the historically racially un-enlightened American Deep South. Yes, Barack Obama took 90% of the black vote and 25% of the white. I am though quite disturbed though by two trends.

1. The radical right wing nut jobs are taking pot shots and because they are fighting internally no one is blunting them. Congressman Stephen King (no relation to the book author, we would not want to sully HIS good name) of Iowa said yesterday “Al Qaeda is rooting for Barack Obama” and that “the radical Islamists and their supporters will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11th. Because they will declare victory in this war on terror.” And that was his supposedly more balanced reply after being given a chance to recant.

2. The tenacious clinging though of the Clinton camp created two disturbing poll numbers. Obama supporters are 75% against Clinton and vice versa. The increasing polarisation means the longer this goes on, the more likely half the voters are to stay home in November.

Waiting six more weeks or longer will kill whoever is left standing. Just once, could a Clinton do something for the good of the party vs. themselves?

Weekly Video Companion

I really do wish I could do something about the audio pop at the beginning of each clip. Trust me in that I begin by saying, "Hello and welcome to Outside the Boundaries". Hey at least the clutter behind me is gone and I actually look into the camera. I'm not the YouTube old guy with a million hits and... we'll see what happens.

The Rochester Story - Part Two

The story ended just the other day with UPS again failing to deliver (yes, I know, a horrible pun) on their promise to refund the duty payment because, "they decided you are not entitled to the refund check as originally stated by them on 1/28/08."

And they decided also neither to tell their customer (Casual Male Group) nor me.

This is another unpleasant aspect of the slippery slide of customer service. I can use what ever rule book I choose to, especially to say no, not tell anyone involved and then hide behind the rule book a month later without ever needing to offer either an apology to a very large customer or an excuse because it's our policy ?!?!???

Holly's response, "I have issued you a credit this morning of $50.00 USD. I did not want you waiting any longer for money that is rightfully due you. I will address this issue with UPS. I hope this is an acceptable resolution for you."

Now, perhaps you understand why this company leads my hit parade.

It's not just Holly, below is a letter from their CEO David Levin. Theirs is a top-down commitment to service.

Are you listening BT Ben?



Click on the image to enlarge.

Why I am now soft putty in this wonderful sales woman’s hands

CASUAL Male Group’s Rochester Big and Tall chain has had my custom for 20 years. As my girth crept upwards, the US firm’s selection is hard to duplicate.

Their hallmark is providing exceptional one-to-one in-store service through dedicated and knowledgeable men’s fashion experts.

The online business though falls short because web business is often the poor relation of many a retail organisation and, like many, they cannot determine if items are in stock as various systems process orders differently.

Living abroad the last decade, I’ve become reliant on their online sales group since few EU merchants handle, as the Singaporean stalls merchant so indelicately yelled, “I have King Kong size!”

Which although direct, indeed true and convulsed me at the time with laughter, failed to win my heart or the sale, but I digress.

Every year, an email announces the big year-end sale and their system again accepted payment and confirmed my online order for merchandise... no longer in stock.

While some feel the answer is to never make a service mistake, the real answer is, how does your business recover when one is made?

Mistakes happen. So how do you empower your people to resolve them because the smile, shrug, policy recitation and blank stare, “what do you want me to do?” expression is not any more acceptable than spending time pointing internal fingers (your choice of digit) by way of explanation to me as the customer?

Like most businessmen circa 1995, I owned two types of clothing, dress suits with requisite neckties/nooses and my everyday knockabout rags.

The dotcom era brought casual Fridays so we had to buy entire smart casual wardrobes to dress down in style.

As an old girlfriend said to a salesman, “his taste is in his mouth”. It was learn to shop sensibly or die trying.

I filled my online Rochester cart and 36-hours later received an email saying all items were not available, so my order was cancelled.

I dialled the service department and reached supervisor Holly Roe.

She began by saying, “Oh, I’m so glad you called back. I had a bad phone number and was about to send an email.”

I gently released one set of my fingernails embedded angrily in the ceiling – She wanted to call me?

Holly said, “I’m very sorry, it must be so frustrating, please accept my apologies. Here is what I think we should do but I wanted to first get your thoughts.”

The other set of fingernails retracted and I dropped clumsily into my desk chair. I explained this seems an annual occurrence, why take my money if there is no merchandise?

“I don’t know but I’m going to find out for you. It sounds as though refunding your money is not the best option, so I will personally search the warehouse to find similar items, then you can then tell me how to proceed.

“Also we’ll refund the $36 shipping (£19) and when all is to your satisfaction, I will place an additional $50 (£27) on your credit card for the inconvenience.” (Deafening silence, followed by my meek and quiet “OK”.)

Sir Terry Tesco, are you listening?

I spend £12,000 annually with you. Your online group do a good job at swift refunds which do not solve my missing merchandise problem, but I always have to take the first step and pay to call you! We’ll devote another column to in-store treatment.

I am now putty in this woman’s hands.

Suddenly (insert your choice of horror movie theme music) duty and paperwork errors between UPS, US and UK delay my order six weeks. Have no fear, Holly is here.

With the patience of Job’s wife she manoeuvres the international morass, avoids diplomatic incident and all is resolved, but not before giving me a further refund of excess duties of £36 and browbeating UPS into refunding my £29 cheque and she even found and had an over-long pair of pants hemmed two inches to fit me!

Many would argue my order lost money for Rochester, something many a supervisor almost anywhere would be browbeaten over. Holly understood that over the lifetime of a 20-year relationship, I’ve spent thousands there. Losing $160 (£82) by fixing this was an investment in keeping a long-standing relationship thriving. She’s been well trained to recover situations.

So what would you do? Are your people empowered or procedure-bound when it comes to helping a customer? What recovery system do you have in place?

The market, especially in tough times, will demand you address this.

Why? Regardless of whether I live in Wales or Washington, there’s an Asda opening next month, Waitrose began delivering recently to my neighbourhood and we have choices.

We just need to start exercising them.

As appeared in The Western Mail

Still Waiting to Hear from BT Ben...

although I did have a long conversation with a lady in his office today. That has to be one of the most thankless jobs in the world, handling complaints that go to the Office of the Chairman.

In 1981 I sat two cubicles away from George Harland, the most even tempered person on the planet. He was the bank's Vice President handling complaint calls that came into the President's office. He never once raised his voice in the two years I was there and I often wondered where he went at the end of each day... whether he locked himself in his car and primal screamed his way home or crawled inside of a bottle from the pressure. He was never flustered and you could often hear the other end of the phone line buzzing in his ear. At a law firm in LA I joked with the IT guy who received grief from everyone (and we know solicitors to be of low ego strength and full of patience) that I was being extra nice to him because when he came into the office with the AK-47 I wanted him to briefly flash - "Denis - friend," and move on to the next target.

The BT conversation started as most do, quite tensely as there was the public face of a very public department defending the actions of the company by... explaining their policy. Having done some executive coaching, I felt in the unique position of letting her wind herself down. I was long past attempting to gain a financial settlement and really now just trying to get some answers and a conversation/dialogue with Ben.

After getting past bouts of "no sir, you are twisting my words, that is not what I meant at all," I hung in until we eventualy peeled away the outer shell and engaged in a meaningful discussion. The turning point was when even she admitted the recorded voice stating "we are VERY BUSY" was infuriating.

Indeed the people I feel most sorry for inside BT are the career employees of 10-30 years who remain consummate professinals and remember the days when a single person could and would work their way through the system to resolve an issue completely for a customer.

Since most of our conversation was off the record, I will honour that. There was a wistfulness to her tone I also heard in the voices of dedicated service team members like Chris and David in Sheffield and each engineer who visited the house. All truly wanted to get to the bottom of the problem and felt completely flummoxed by the system.

So my question remains, it is indeed broken, what can be done to fix it in a way that people have responsibility to help a customer? Calling those poor young kids in India who have one hand tied behind their back reading help screens, people working under such metrics pressure to handle x number of calls per hour to obtain passing grades for swiftly passing a call along but getting no credit or are chastised for taking the time to actually resolve an issue or indeed think logically may be efficient, but it does not earn points. We live in a call centre mentality world that does nothing to help where we are as customers.

I asked her if there was a way to have a dialogue with Ben as it seemed these were important questions. She said she would file her report on the conversation and pass my request onward. Here's hoping we get there.

I feel a bit like Michael Moore trying to interview then GM chair Roger Smith in the film Roger and Me. Stay tuned.

Obama Speech in San Antonio after Texas/Ohio Primaries

Fast Forward to 13:05 minutes where Barack Obama begins to speak of the 81-year old man from Uganda and understand my post below and why this is such an important election to the US and the rest of the world.

It’s Déjà vu All Over Again

For my 10-years as an American living abroad, I’ve had to explain my country’s inability to “get elections right”. In 2000 no one could understand why nine people in black robes ended Florida’s ballot count handing victory to George W. Bush. It was even stranger in ’04 trying to explain why, despite such near unanimous global loathing, he was re-elected by the narrowest of margins because of irregularities in Florida and Ohio. Last night Ohio was again the spoiler as American politics spun further down the rabbit hole prolonging the fight and virtually assuring that a 71-year old Bush apologist will likely win in November as the Democratic Party shows an remarkable ability to eat its young.

The 5 keys to last night…

The Karl Rove (former Bush Advisor) School of Attack Adverts.
A fear-mongering telly advert appeared this weekend in Ohio showing a beautiful sleeping baby and an ominous ringing phone whilst the announcer gravely intoned “it’s 3 am at the White House… there’s a global crisis, who do you want answering that phone?” (They were oblivious to the phone ringing unanswered for 7 rings, but I digress).

Can anyone imagine Alistair Darling running this type of an advert against Gordon Brown to wrest control over the leadership of their own party? That is what is happening in the Democratic primary. Going negative was usually reserved for attacks against your opponent in the general election (sadly, I can see either Gordon or David using this tactic in ’10 or ’11, as you seem to be learning well from the US).

How on earth will this party unite behind their standard bearer for the fall and no, there will not be another “Al Gore moment” where he rides in on his hybrid stallion to save the day and lead the party.

Alienating the Already Alienated
Millions of voters who feel disenfranchised by the grumpy old white men each party continues to propose as standard bearer will remain disenfranchised. Voters came out this year in numbers of 40-50% over anything previously seen in every state. The multi-coloured pastiche of faces standing behind candidate Obama will disappear in November if the choice is more of the same (only this time we’ll have a grumpy white woman?). These young people comprise some 15% of all new voters. They are jaded to begin with, feel the “adults” have fouled both the environment and political system and these results would only confirm their doubts. Go negative, whether it is factual or not, scare people and win?

Fuzzy Math Skills
800+ super delegates, not the voters determining who wins this election would be a travesty. Handing the nomination to either candidate via a smoke-filled room will guarantee a Republican fall victory. Hillary must win more than 60% of the remaining delegates from here until June to just pull even. Regardless of the harm she does to the party, she will stay the course even as Obama wins the remaining contests in March and put her eggs in another must-win Rust Belt state – Pennsylvania – in April.

Florida, Michigan and the Courts
These two states broke their party’s rules by moving their primaries to before Super Tuesday and (aside from kicking themselves as they could be king or queen-makers) the party bosses punished them by refusing to seat their delegates at the convention. (Imagine Birmingham and Yorkshire not being seated at a Tory party conference?)

They held primaries but no one campaigned and indeed Obama was not even on Michigan’s ballot. Now the courts may decide to either: seat these two states delgates, order a new election or anything in between. Too, the Obama camp went to court last night and obtained a court order allowing those standing in long voting queues in urban Cleveland to vote. So there will probably be a lawsuit there because a heavy turnout could cost Mrs. Clinton 1-2 delegates in Ohio.

Eating their Young
The Democrats have a remarkable ability to eat their young and last night was no exception. In his speech last night, Obama issued words of warning where he said the whole world is watching this election and how we treat each other. Spurious e-mail campaigns calling him Muslim, questioning his patriotism, a photo of him in Africa in tribal garb, attack ads, and other general silliness are usually the purview of the opposition party. The world cannot afford four more years of staying the course in Iraq because of yet another tainted American election decided by courts rather than voters.

The show goes on. Party unity in November is fleeting and Barack Obama, who has run an admirable campaign for his message of hope, must “go negative” to win. President Reagan ran a campaign called “Morning in America” and it showed him as sunny and optimistic.

This morning in America it’s cloudy, muddled and stormy.

Video Companion for 4 March

I've always felt there was a better way to reach people than static nature of wordy web blogs. There is a missing element of two-way communication because by its nature, the Web wants you to stop and read what I have to say as you plough your way through a mountain of words. A main urpose of this blog going forard is to engae in dialogue about issues of the day and help folks get behind the 750-900 words they see in the paper, magazine or online.

That is why for most upcoming stories there will be a video sement provided with additional background information on how a story came onto the radar screen and published in the Western Mail or wherever. This is an admittedly rudimentary attempt that will become more refined as my skill level improves with time.

Please let me know and hey, if you want to use YouTube to comment, I look forward to posting it and talking here.

Postscript to Today's Western Mail Article (below)

News editors often make cuts to submitted content because of space considerations. Sion Barry is one of the better and more thoughtful business editors I've worked with and missing from the BT article was the postscript which appears below accompanied by a letter from BT, received late Saturday and opened on Sunday, after Monday's paper was put to bed.

I really wanted to believe BT's press officer Mr. Jason Mann. He was very convincing and spoke from a deep conviction about everything they are trying to do at BT. Indeed, I've sat in a similar chair trying to stop fallout from the collapse of BCCI staining my then firm Price Waterhouse. I could not tolerate journalists who neither "fact-checked" nor cared enough to get the quotes right. In this case it was the system not helping him each step along the way and therein lies the problem.

There were several excellent and frustrated mid-level BT employees and managers with whom I spoke at each step along the way during the nine weeks. All were desperate to resolve the issue and yet the organisation is not structured to help even its own engineers who wait in the same call-in queues customers do.

In the words of many a person trying to find something to laugh at in the midst of a tragedy, I wish it were otherwise but thank you BT, I could not make up material this good... this article nearly wrote itself.

P.S. My February bill arrived the day after the fault was resolved and I spoke to the 150 lady about the charge for diverting calls to my mobile. (It seemed strange to me that a fault not of my making requiring calls to be diverted would not be something BT would pay for?) She read from her rule book… “I could have either the diversion or the line rental refunded but not both.” When I started somewhat disturbed to hysterical laughter she became a human being… then I spoke for 27-minutes to her colleague in India.

Indeed my calls to various BT departments over the life of this incident totalled more than six hours (you don't want to know what my billing rate for that amount of time is), the time spent entertaining BT engineers was extra.

Nine weeks of line rental costs about £47. Sijesh in India said, “I’m sorry sir but the system only authorises me to refund you £6.” He was a toughie but I negotiated him up to £10. When I asked if this was BT’s final offer, he bumped it up to £15.

When I asked him if I stayed further on the line might we get closer to the amount owed he said, "no, £15 was the 'absolute maximum'” and “a letter will be forthcoming.”

Even if we throw away the lost time, I’m still out £32.

Save the letter, I’ll take a cheque please.

P.P.S. On Saturday afternoon, this letter arrived, happy to confirm that my credit of £2.80 has gone into my account, again sending me to bt.com and clearly trying to sell me more services.

I dunno, where daily provision of basic telephony seems a challenge, does anyone know why I would consider additional services?

Again, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

What if you experienced life from our end of the phone?

Dear Ben,

I want to thank your team for resolving a nagging problem. I read your profile in KLM’s magazine and was touched by your personal service commitment. Your senior people do a good job of handling customer issues… of course I might also jump if an order came down from the corporate office.

I tried to call you, but the switchboard transferred me to your press office. I became concerned efforts by them on my behalf might seem improper. I repeated my real questions were about BT’s internal communications process. It was then that BT’s fault management policy was explained and how quickly you move to ensure all service is promptly restored.

I was surprised when the engineer scheduled to arrive 24 hours later, was here less than one hour later. He explained he needed to climb 1.5 kilometres of telephone poles to resolve this nine-week-old problem. An initial cable was replaced on February 4 but a lightning strike nearby caused other issues.

I had a follow-up conversation with your press office and a few questions came up; can every BT customer receive this level of service?

They marked the main fault as resolved on the 4th yet no one checked if things were sorted here. For three weeks I quietly fumed, waiting, as instructed, for it to clear and paying for a service I could not use. How can a fault show as resolved without checking with the customer?

Since you own the lines, you used to “pay” for my customer query calls. Not over the last nine weeks. But I was pleased to learn BT is doing away with their own 0845/0870 inbound numbers and will again provide free customer service calls.

Since you created the 0870 beast though, what can you do to influence other companies who continue to charge Me to talk to Them about My account?

While grateful my phone is operational, what about that engineer who magically appeared? From whose doorstep was he pulled because of the “squeaky” wheel? Can you assure me someone else did not endure a cancelled call to service me?

151 is the main BT faults entry point. Mention the keyword “broadband” under your breath and bingo! Call this 0845 number for your passage to India where young kids read computer help screens in the middle of the night. Have you ever found the specific answer to your question via a help screen? Might you consider dedicating resources to 151 to ensure satisfaction?

Please ensure strong blood- pressure medication and snacks are by your desk as it will involve anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour with the likelihood of 1-2 dropped connections midway through, meaning you get to start all over again. They have my number on the screen, could someone please figure out we were not finished and call me back? You would win a lot of hearts and minds with that simple gesture, it’s not like you’re paying for the call.

It may take a while, but like Walt Disney, what if you experienced life from our end of the phone. My least favourite is the disembodied, recorded woman’s voice chiding me with – “we are very busy” (I’m not?) who then tries to get me to go to bt.com.

Ben, can we at least agree to have your folks just stop, listen, examine the data in front of them, raise their hand and say, “I’m going to take responsibility, get to the bottom of your issue, resolve it and I won’t end this call or clear my screen until you are satisfied it is done.”

What a wonderful world that would be.

As appeared in The Western Mail