Great: Getting Recognition for Being a Good Customer

Capers is a local home furnishings and accessories shop; they are launching a new gift card program. What is REMARKABLE is that instead of sending me gimmicky marketing blah blah touting their new program, overburdening my mailbox and likely getting no attention or reaction, they use it as an opportunity to thank me and engage me. The thoughtful hand written note and $20 gift card completely surprised me and made me feel like a valued customer.

The extra care to recognize that I have many choices and that I choose to support them and shop with them (lucky for me they have GREAT stuff) makes the context genuine. Beyond my renewed loyalty and continued patronage, it has inspired me to write about it on my blog and link to other bloggers who I think might be interested - which I hope will result in additional business and recognition for them.

What a great way for them to build loyalty! Likely much less expensive and much more effective than traditional ads or mailers.

Good: Technology and the Future

Wow! How would this change the way you work? How about computing at home?



I would like to think I would finally get my photo albums organized and distributed. I would also update my blog more and go deeper with social media. I think it would encourage more of my friends to participate as well. It would definitely make work more fun! Our website would be amazing. I can imagine using this technology in place of our current whiteboards - drawing, pulling videos and photos, integrating everything together and syncing to a laptop for a client presentation...I wonder how far away this really is from mainstream?

If your imagination isn't running wild yet, click here for a more "commercial" video put out by the Microsoft Surface team.

Great: Conversation on Compassion

Compassion - Everyone has it, but it's easy to get caught up in day-to-day and forget how important it is to exercise compassion in every action we take. When compassion is exercised it tends to spread and grow and a ripple is set in motion - it's so cool. Everything improves - attitudes, productivity, relationships, confidence, etc.

How about compassion in the workplace? That was the discussion for the Seeds of Compassion luncheon and panel discussion I attended on Monday. The Dalai Lama was the honored guest and it was amazing how simple he made it all seem - but he was right! Do good in business, and business will grow. There were other very amazing speakers as well - executives from Starbucks, Costco, and a professor from Bentley College - they all shared the same philosophy (with concrete examples) that said, if the company does right by it's people, it's customers, it's community - the company will be great often outrivaling it's competition (more on competition and compassion later).

It's so true. When I think about examples of companies I interact with in my own life - the ones that try to improve by cutting costs, raising prices without added benefits, etc suffer and eventually lose my business. The ones that have great employees who love their jobs and actually care, the ones that respect their relationship with me and do not abuse it by overburdening my mailbox with junk or gouging my checkbook every chance they get...those are companies that do well, have done well and will continue to do well. If everyone would just learn that corporate does not need to be anti-compassion the world would really be a better place!

Good: Vacation - disconnected from work

I don't want this blog to ever be "rantish". While it's good to have a voice and I hope companies are listening and internalizing the good feedback out there, it's annoying when blogs only contain rants/complaints. So now, I want to write something good. Because my life is VERY good and I have no real complaints. Everyone should be so lucky!

Recently I was fortunate enough to celebrate my 5th wedding anniversary in Hawaii. We got married there with immediate family in tow and the intention of reuniting every 5 years. We're all spread out now and "vacation" often gets eaten by bouncing from home to home where, while wonderful, someone is always laden with the hosting responsibility.

I won't go into details here because while wonderful and important to me, they won't necessarily translate with due justice to others...you have to do your own thing you know? What I will say, is how odd I think it is to return to work after vacation and have people in complete bewilderment that I was able to escape for over a week without checking voicemail or email.

How sad. Your vacation is your vacation and you've earned it. I like to think that I'm communicating with my team and surrounding myself by competent people that share my philosophy on customer service thus the world will not stop if I disconnect. So, put that autoresponder out there and leave it all behind - and don't let anyone make you feel guilty about it!

Immerse yourself in your vacation so you can come back refreshed and relaxed (it's funny how it makes you realize none of it really matters anyways! Not sure if that's a good thing or not, but I kind of like it!)

Ugly: More on Apple's Movie Rental Program

I've now rented and downloaded two (over-priced) movie rentals which I've not watched. Here's the deal - apparently our iPod (purchased a year ago or less) doesn't work with the movie rentals feature and the error gives me no rhyme, reason or next step to watch my rental. This is what I find out AFTER:
- wasting a bunch of time trying to load the movie on my iPod (no error, just nothing happened)
- reading through all the materials about iPod and Apple's movie rental program (nowhere could I see what versions work/don't work)
- waiting for an update to release to hopefully fix the issue.

I hesitated to write this post because, I feel like I'm probably missing something...BUT, Apple's whole thing is about being intuitive...so, they've set themselves up. When it takes me more than 10 minutes to figure out something isn't working and then multiple attempts to find out it's not going to work for me - I'm upset, because my expectation is that this should be fairly easy.

Further frustration. Though I didn't want to spend time on the phone with customer service/tech support, I wanted to get to the bottom of my problem. So I called. Bigger problem, when I had the time to spend with tech support it was outside of regular business hours so, I couldn't get any help. Sheesh. And, since I downloaded the movie on our Mac, my only choice now is to watch it there (sitting on an uncomfortable bar stool because my hubby doesn't want us carrying our Mac all over the house) or go buy the cable to hook it to our TV (more steps for me to take). BECAUSE even though my laptop is authenticated with my iTunes info, I've never been able to find out how to open my full purchased library on both machines - it only shows purchases made on the individual machine. I think I should be able to see the rental in iTunes on my laptop because I could easily hook that to the TV and watch my rental.

Anyways, for this and other reasons which I may or may not write about, our household is questioning our jump into the Apple world...our first experience stepping out of the Windows world was a GREAT one. Our Nano was so intuitive and iTunes was so easy to use, reasonably priced, and never gave us any trouble. Our experience with our iPod has been less "great" and it's getting progressively worse with our iMac...we're not sure what to do with it, we can't open certain attachments in our email or even view some HTML emails (not just from anyone, but from AK Airlines), we need multiple browsers because Safari doesn't always work with everything, and we both feel like the learning curve is steeper than we were "sold" and we don't have the tolerance to stick with it. Also, it's added complexity to our "network" rather than simplifying (we can't use our iPod or Nano from OS to OS without wiping it even though it's iTunes either way - I would think we're beyond the whole OS compatibility problem).

Result: we're not using the machine and tools to the fullest and thus Apple is not building the respect needed to keep us loyal customers. Technology changes so fast -I know for us, we're looking to be loyal and put all our trust in one provider that makes things easy for us (I just want to use the stuff - I'm past the point of caring to understand it).

This is a huge opportunity for the right provider/partnership...Google isn't there yet. Microsoft isn't there yet. Apple isn't there yet. I'm a fan of competition, but the right partnerships between these three for the sake of growing consumer use could really be the ticket. A "platform agnostic" experience...where everything works everywhere, no one supreme ruler...I know that's in part dependent on developers, and the big players are trying...sort of...but, the time is now, before the technology surpasses the average consumers ability to grasp its potential for them.

As a consumer, I'm forced to spend too much of my time floundering around trying to keep up. I want to use it all, but I feel like I'm falling behind and integrating everything is becoming too overwhelming...and I used to be one of the savvy ones.