Avoid Worldwide Cameras Centre at Peninsula Plaza for its Unethical Service!

For those who have been following my blog for some time, you would probably know how highly I regard service as a competitive edge to any business, especially the frontline type which face the consumers. Hence, when I got caught in a terrible, unethical act by Worldwide Cameras Centre at Peninsula Plaza over the weekend, I thought it was only right to do what I can to warn other netizens to prevent them from falling prey. I believe that the democratized power the Internet can help to bring them to justice so this is just a little bit on my part :

(Just take this as a Public Service Announcement, stay tuned for more regular posting coming up soon!)

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The Story:

Basically, I was trying to buy 4 boxes of Polaroid film from the shop on Sunday afternoon. I managed to see the box of film I needed and so pointed it out to the shopkeeper to enquire about the pricing and he told me that it was $35 per box. I was fine with that pricing as its more or less the average I've seen around so I said I'll take 4 boxes. But he had no stock in the shop so he got his colleague to run back to their nearby stock room to pick it up.

During this time, since we were waiting, I paid up (foolishly) for the 4 boxes I wanted as I needed to go somewhere else after that.

Then, when the colleague came back, he passed me 2 boxes instead, claiming then he understood that I wanted 4 packs and not 4 boxes! (Polaroid 600 series film normally comes in 1 box of 2 packs/cartridges) and would not budge on giving me a refund.

No matter how I spoke to the staff, who were ever so friendly a moment ago, they just gave a cold shoulder and even ignored me to serve the other customers.Later, I even called the manager of the shop (a certain Mr. Ling) saying that I wanted to either get a refund or lodge a complaint and all he did was to tell me mockingly to "go ahead and complain if I want to".

Luckily, the difference in amount wasn't too much but I'm definitely taking this as a lesson. But, I thought it was appropriate to bring this up to caution people a little as I believe in the power of word of mouth.Caveat Emptor!

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Worldwide Cameras Centre
111 North Bridge Road, #01-38,
Penisula Plaza, Singapore 179098

(Along the main road facing Funan)
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And to Mr. Ling and your merry men, let me say “Nemo me impune lacessit!”

(Also on : http://forums.clubsnap.org/showthread.php?t=218801 )

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30th August Update : Boo yeah, It seems that I have been tomorrow-ed! Would just like to add on that this one goes out to all the other unfortunate consumers also who have been suffering in silence after getting mistreated by unethical retailers. So join me to spread the bad word about such bad service!

Startup Success 2006 Video

Found this video of Churchill Club’s August 17, 2006 event -- “Startup Success 2006” from Guy's blog. In it, the 5 panelists discuss at what it takes to build a successful startup as well as the critical success factors involved in doing so.

Moderator: Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures

Speakers:

• Lauren Elliott, Founder, Personal News Network

• Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder and CEO, LinkedIn

• Joe Kraus, Co-Founder and CEO, JotSpot

• Daniel Mattes, Co-Founder and CTO, Jajah

• Alex Welch, Co-Founder and CEO, Photobucket
  

A good discussion but just that it focuses more on tech startups, but hey, its from SV after all!

[from : Guy Kawasaki's Blog ]

Singapore's Wealthiest People - How rich are they?

Forbes recently released a list of the wealthiest Singaporeans this year. Sadly, I don't believe seeing any article that came with graphical representation of the data so I cracked up a quick chart to see how the folks at the top compare with one another (in US$) :

But for most probably a billion bucks (or five) would be so far out that we can't really get a fix on the magnitude of the sum.

So here's pretty much a gradual scale of what that amount feels like :

• Living in Royal Suite in Burj Al Arab in Dubai for 10 years -- US$ 25 M
• Treating everyone in Singapore to the movies (on weekend) -- US$ 31.5M
  
• Buying a the most expensive yatch, Utopia -- US$ 103M
• Producing Star Wars Episode I, II and II -- US$ 350 M
  
• Changing a Vertu Phone everyday for 10 years -- US$ 730 M
• Total Worth of Manchester United -- US$ 1,186 M
  
• Total Sponsorship of Olympics from 2001-2004 -- US$ 1,450 M
  
• Giving a Segway to every single SAF Soldier -- US$ 1,800 M
• Buying a Learjet 31A business jet -- US$ 2,409 M
• Sierra Leone's 2005 GDP (PPP) -- US$ 4,921 M
  

(Based on figures from Forbes / Wikipedia)

Perhaps I'll look at visualising the data later ... Pretty keen on working on something like that but gave up on that in order to post this earlier....

[Source : Today Article, 24 Aug : Meet Singapore's Richest]

Singapore's Service Levels

Here come an interesting set of figures from the local papers today. Basically, it was a survey to find out how well our Singapore sales staff are doing on these 7 factors -- Appearance, Ambience, Attitude, Acquisition, Assistance, After Sales and Approach.

And if you're like me, you'll probbly be wondering why they had to force all the factors to begin with 'A' , making their meaning not quite so obvious. National habit I presume. Anyway, here's the list of factors again with what they're supposed to chart (as per the papers with my comments in brackets) :

1. Appearance - Physical Grooming of the Salesperson
2. Ambience - Store Environment
3. Attitude - Warmth Enthusiasm, Rapport and responsiveness to the consumer
4. Acquisition - Method of returning customers their change or saying "Thank you" (See why I say this is 'forced' ? The last time I checked in the dictionary, acquisition meant to get and not to give. Just doesn't make sense!)
5. Assistance - How well the sales person understood the needs and preference of the customer
6. After Sales - How the sales person ended the visit (No wonder we have problems when ending the visit is as far as we are getting in terms of after sales!)
7. Approach - The reception the customer gets the moment he/she walks in.
   

And here's the data (click for larger image) :


Interestingly, we scored high for both appearance and ambience while not so well for the rest. And it seems to me like that translate into the fact that we essentially have pretty good 'hardware' (uniforms, store settings, etc ... basically things you can buy and plunk in place) but fare poorly in terms of the personal soft skills.

So, assuming that a certain firm really has this national average statistics for its stores and that it has a budget for improving service, shouldn't it be logical that its spending for improvement look something like this orange line below? :


To thicken the plot, lets further assume that life's simple and you can just sum up the improvements (which actually do add up to a 100%) onto the existing service level and voila!, there's a good chance that you can bring all factors up to over 70% (black line). Pretty decent 'A' grade for service if you ask me.

"But, you can't just add up figures like that!" you may say. Yeah, but that not the point I'm trying to bring across here. What I'm really trying to put across in this (over-simplistic) thought-experiment is this route of reasoning:

1. We have good facilities and hardware, but it seems like software's not doing too well.
2. Stop plunking more cash into asset investment and look at service and training instead.
3. Salespersons' response / behavior before, during and after customer interaction looks bad! Shouldn't this be something that can tackled with targetted training for salespeople?
   
4. Best part is, if service training is done right, it should cost less than hardware upgrades.
5. In the long run, motivation and experience play big parts so getting more experienced sales personel to mentor new hires may be a valuable way to maintain good service levels.
   

In any case, the way I see it, the statistics been done as a public good for retailers to use as a yardstick. Let's just see how many really do see this and make good of this knowledge.

As for the rest? They shouldn't even be in business.



[from : Today Newspaper Article 'Not lacking in will, just skill' - August 23, 2006]

Effective Communication

Ok, this is a oldie but goodie on why effective communication is key in what you do.

And since a picture is worth a thousand words, here the full 10,000 post on how communication can get screwed up in the software development industry.

Enjoy~


(Click to zoom in)

Programmer Meet Designer

Are you an entrepreneur who has this new web 2.0 idea but can't find the programmer to code it up for you? Or are you a designer with superb photoshop skills you want to put to use in a startup? Then I guess this site -- Programmer Meet Designer, is for you.

In their own words :

This site was created to unite programmers and designers because rarely is a person good at both programming and designing. PMD helps programmers and designers partner up to make websites and web applications that look and work great. It also lets entrepreneurs and writers find people to work with.

So at least if this works, we would be seeing less crappy website designs for cool ideas and less "we do because we can" startups.


Programmer Meet Designer [via : Lifehacker ]

Cool Advertising

In the crowded advertising arena these days, marketeers often try all ways and means to created eye-grabbing ad campaigns while the consumers typically have grown to filter these ads out of their minds.

So why not break the fourth wall and have some fun with the consumer? I'm sure most people enjoy a good chuckle...

This was probably do for it's ability to get the "huh" from guys walking past.


This I believe was a campaign for plastic surgery (read: nose jobs). Don't see how most people will get the alignment right though it is a pretty fun idea.


This ad turns unsuspecting commuters into Afro-headed music listeners of their music station!


I don't see how we will ever see this in Singapore but this one does make a humorous statement!


The world needs more of these kind of ads!


[via : would you believe it - spam mail from friends!]

3 Evil Mistakes of E-mail.

It is amazing how e-mails have come to be one of the most commonly used means of communications these days. However, in all its instant speed of transmission, many still fumble with it, making it a less than ideal tool due to erroneous mistakes when it comes to crafting an e-mail.

Specifically, I've come across 3 big evils that e-mail users actually stumble over, and these actually cause so much confusion and delay that they negate the benefits of technology. They are (with pictures to boot):

1) Information Overload

Sometimes, due to the fact that we try to squeeze too many different, non-complementary ideas and notions into the same sentence or paragraph, readers become confused or in some casesirritated because they may not be able to quickly pick out key points atthe first glance when they are in a hurry or more commonly lose track of what the idea the sentence was trying to bring across at first just like this very sentence illustrates. Phew, get the point? I pretty much lost myself halfway there. Keeping things short and sweet is the way to go. Normally, I would try to avoid bring more than one key issue across in one message if possible. Also, the use of some structure like bulletpoints and lists help tremendously.

And yes, I do still get people who send me e-mails TyPeD iN aLtErNaTe CaPs, most possibly to irritate me. Normally I can't get pass the 2nd line without get a headache so off into the trash it goes.

2) Wrong Priority

This should be pretty obvious. Get the most important message across and cut out the rest of the distracting, non-important fluff. When in doubt if something is relevant to the e-mail, one can always just leave it out. Besides, shorter e-mails can be read much faster.

3) Ambiguity

Normally, you communication to ask for some action on from the receiver but how often do you wait in frustration when no reply comes? Chances may be that the receiver didn't get the message that something needs to be done. Did you just give a boatload of information without saying what it's for in the first place? Or worse, give conflicting ideas in the message and not say exactly what you want. Last time I checked, 99% of us weren't exactly psychics. So, the best thing is to have the last sentence of your e-mail in a seperate line that dictates what followup you are expecting exactly.

So avoid these mistakes like the plague to save everyones' time and to keep all those e-mail frustrations at bay!

[pics from : www.thisisbroken.com ]

Organizational Friendly Fire

In war, the last thing any army wants to see happening is friendly fire taking casualties on its forces. The reason is simple -- if your own folks are shooting at themselves, you lose a bullet, a soldier and make the opposition laugh.

Why then, do organizations continue to live with internal "friendly fire", playing the blame game and politics within firms, forming alliances and trying to outdo each other internally?

Sometimes, these may be due to the numerous, lengthy processes and amount of stakeholders involved in different projects. Human error is inevitable when they do occur now and then, they serve as catalysts for inter-personal conflicts which may escalate into "in-fighting". Other times, poor leadership / management that fails to see the larger goal of the organization contribute to such situations.

Needless to say, all this is extremely non-productive and damaging to any organization.

What I feel is needed is basically good communications on the ground as well as leaders who are able to look on situations from a bigger perspective and to direct the crosshairs of his/her followers to point externally.

If soldiers try to do that consciously to stay alive, shouldn't all individuals in any organization be doing the same?

Guy Kawasaki - The Art of the Start Video

As a book, "Art of the Start" is definitely one of the best in its class on the topic of entrepreneurship from one of the best evangelist / venture capitalist / writer / blogger -- Guy Kawasaki.

Guy was invited as keynote speaker for for TiECon on May 13, 2006, which was the annual meeting of The Indus Entrepreneur organization. And it's great that a video of it has been made available on Google Video. In the video, Guy takes out the essence of what he covers in his book and packs it into a neat 40min keynote.

Enjoy:





[ link : http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/06/the_art_of_the_.html ]

Quote on taking action

I can't remember where I heard this one from but its pretty much something to mull about when you get indecisive over whether to stand up and go for something or not :

"Why aren't you going step up to do something about it? Don't you feel that there are enough live people passing off as dead people already!?"

Gimme a bump if you know who said this (or something close ) so I can attribute it properly.