To excel in customer service requires a particular mindset: one that puts the customer first come what may. And this mindset has to exist at every level of the business, every employee has to buy into it. Having a flashy website and a call centre with soothing regional accents is not enough. Customer service has to pervade the organisation. And this is where the UK too often has a problem, for there are employees out there who just can’t be bothered, which (if our employment laws weren’t so restrictive) should put them out of  a job, doubtless to be replaced by some charming immigrant worker who is prepared to try his or her utmost to do well for the customer’s benefit.

Now, back to my City Link tale. The basics will be all too familiar: I ordered some shoes for my son from Javari, next day delivery, City Link went to the wrong house (took a photo to prove it) and returned the shoes to their depot. So far so typical, but an error that I’d normally be willing to forgive. The next day was a Saturday. I know that parcel delivery companies won’t deliver on a Saturday, but my son needed those shoes that day (we were off on holiday). So I went online and followed the tracking details to establish where the shoes were: City Link’s Reading depot. But then I noticed that the depot closed at 12 noon, and I noticed this at 11:40. Knowing where the depot was I was aware that I could drive there in 20 minutes with favourable traffic. I should just be able to make it. To be on the safe side though I asked my wife to ring City Link’s customer service hotline and see if they could forewarn the depot that I was on my way, albeit cutting it fine. Amazingly she not only got through on the hotline, but a very helpful lady said that she would ring the depot to let them know I was coming and to confirm the parcel details in advance. Even better, she then rang me in the car to update me. That had all the makings of good customer service and I was impressed.

But here’s the kicker: the manager of City Link’s Reading depot informed his own customer service co-ordinators that he would not stay open a second after 12 noon, even though he knew I was on my way. The nice lady rang me back with the bad news, and by that time I was one set of traffic lights away. Nonetheless, I carried on and arrived at the depot at 12:03. The customer service counter was indeed closed, but the office next door was still open, filled with returning drivers and other staff. It was still busy and there in the middle was the manager.

“Ah yes, I’ve been expecting you,” he said.

“Great, may I have my parcel?”

“No, we’re closed.”

And that was it. No amount of remonstrating; offering to find the package myself; explaining (calmly) that if they’d done their job correctly in the first place I wouldn’t be there; pointing out that by giving me the parcel today would save them a redelivery on Monday; or that my son would be completely stuck today without his new shoes, would change his position. It was past 12 and that was it. What irritated me even more was that this truculent manager was surrounded by perhaps a dozen other City Link staff (drivers and office staff) all of whom turned to listen to my pleas. And not one of them tried to intervene or offered to get the parcel instead.

So this brings me back to my original point: customer service is of no value unless it is practised by every employee in an organisation who encounters a customer. And staff who cannot be bothered, frankly, should lose their jobs to someone who can. I cannot do anything more than complain, and remove my custom from Javari, which is a shame because I was impressed when I first visited their website (although they might want to reconsider their banner above). I won’t be shopping there again though while City Stink are making their deliveries.

Bigger and more noticeable changes are also afoot. First off, we’ve integrated a cool new gadget courtesy of those nice people at Gigya that allows you seamlessly to link your GazetMe account with your other social networking accounts at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest. New users can choose an existing social networking account when registering (just hit the relevant logo at the bottom of the login box). Existing users can upgrade their accounts by clicking Account in the main toolbar and selecting the relevant logo there.

By linking your GazetMe account with your preferred social networking account you can extend your reputation and promote your skillset by allowing achievements logged in GazetMe to be celebrated in your other social networks. So, when you log a new skill in GazetMe you can now automatically Tweet about it to your network. Although 99% of what you log continues to remain private until you add it to a CV, we’ve changed our settings slightly so that the title of your achievement/qualification/skill etc can be included in the body of a tweet or newsfeed item. As always, we welcome your feedback. News on more developments to follow in due course.

However the series wasn’t just about the vision thing.  It also revealed to me a lot of unseen truths about how the web now works commercially, things that perhaps I’d suspected but like most people failed to analyse fully. As one contributor put it: the commodity that is being traded online is not the information that enterprises like Google give you, it is the information that you give them. Now I’m a big fan of Google and I like the incredible range of services that it gives me ‘free’; but I can now see that I am giving huge amounts of data in return. I don’t mind this, it seems a fair deal. However it is definitely better to see the commercial web in those terms and to understand the deal, rather than simply to play with the toys unknowingly.

If you missed the series, find it on iPlayer - it will wake you up to what going online really means.

However one section that jumped out at me was the interview with ‘virtual lawyer’ Denise Nurse - who as well as running an innovative legal practice manages to hold down a bagful of other jobs:

She also has another career: presenting the weather on Sky News and BBC Two’s Escape to the Country. This began when she was working as an in-house lawyer at BSkyB and won a competition to find new presenters. “I am first and foremost a virtual lawyer,” she says. “In the future, though, increasing numbers of people will have a portfolio of careers, but no office.”

To my mind that is the perfect example of a portfolio career: lawyer, weather-girl, TV presenter. Clearly Ms Nurse has many talents and isn’t afraid to put them all to good use.

First up then we celebrate the achievements of Clare Robertson. Now fans of Woolworths and residents of Dorchester may already be familiar with her story, but for anyone who isn’t, Clare is the former Woolworths manager who decided not to give up when the company collapsed last year. Wasting no time, she made arrangements to take over the lease of her store in Dorchester, Dorset, rehired staff, engaged with suppliers, and reopened the store under the name ‘Wellworths’ to local acclaim. A year on, Robertson’s store is doing well and looking forward to good Christmas trading. All in, a great achievement. You can read the full story here. Clare: we salute you.

There are advantages and disadvantages of having a portfolio career, as the Economist article outlines:

“Portfolio workers lack a lot of the things that full-time employees take for granted, ranging from secretarial assistance to office parties. They need to acquire a far wider range of competencies, such as computer skills, marketing, accounting and filling in tax returns. Moreover, unlike full-time employees, portfolio workers should not hope to find confirmation of a job well done (a crucial part of any worker’s motivation) from within their own organisation. They have to find it outside, primarily from their clients. This, it can be argued, makes them intensely customer-centric, something that might be expected to serve them well in the 21st century.”

Now I would say this, but I think that GazetMe is perfectly suited to portfolio working since it enables users to keep track of projects on which they’ve worked and, more importantly, gather feedback from contacts along the way. For anyone looking for a new job, it’s worth considering, even as an interim measure. Who knows, you may find it becomes your career.  You can read the full article here.

“The Israeli government’s venture-capital fund, which was founded in 1992 with $100m of public money, was designed to attract foreign venture capital and, just as importantly, expertise. The government let foreigners decide what to invest in, and then stumped up a hefty share of the money required. Foreign venture capital poured into the country, high-tech companies boomed, domestic venture capitalists learned from their foreign counterparts and the government felt able to sell off the fund after just five years.

Last year Israel, a country of just over 7m people, attracted as much venture capital as France and Germany combined. Israel has more start-ups per head than any other country (a total of 3,850, or one for every 1,844 Israelis), and more companies listed on the NASDAQ exchange, a hub for fledgling technology firms, than China and India combined.”

The question we should be asking is: what can be done to replicate that success here? We have no shortage of talent, and plenty of would-be entrepreneurs, it’s just a question of harnessing those ideas and providing easy access to VC funding. More initiatives like the Enterprise Finance Guarantee (formerly the Small Firms’ Loan Guarantee Scheme) would help, but with an emphasis on providing access to equity as opposed to debt funding. As I’ve discovered myself, the SFLGS sounds great until the sponsoring bank requires security for the part of the loan that is not guaranteed by the Government.

I’ve been thinking alot about functionality, information overload, and the notion of ‘rusting’ about which I blogged recently. To my mind, the classic Google home page is one of the finest GUI designs ever. One box! How amazing is that given the output that that one box then delivered. Compare this with Microsoft Office 2007 to which I’ve just upgraded on my laptop: what a dog’s dinner.

My issue is not that everything should be needlessly simple in functional terms (I like plenty of functionality), it is that everything should be as simple as it possibly can be in the way that it is presented to me as a user. Looking at the default setting on MS Word I am presented with no less than 78 different functions, and that’s before I’ve started running through the menu lists and toolbar options. It’s too much; I just don’t need all this stuff. There are probably only about 6 that I use regularly: print, save, new, copy, paste, and scroll. All the rest just get in the way of my user experience. OK I know that if I want to I can go an change all my options, hide the stuff I don’t need etc. But this is software. Why should I have to do that? Why can’t MS Word do it for me.

So here’s my suggestion for developers: by all means keep that functionality - after all, there may be a day sometime in the future when my life will grind to a halt unless I can make my text run vertically instead of horizontally. But in the meantime, how about hiding most (if not all) of it. Indeed, if you’re as smart as I think you are, why not get your software to track the way that I use its functions and set about hiding all those that I never use (or prioritising those that I use regularly). Why not add some rust to functionality? This to me is the best of both worlds: all the functionality is there if I need it, but I only see the stuff that I use most often. Everything else just fades into the background the less I use it. It doesn’t have to be hard to find the ‘make text vertical’ button (could even use some search functionality for that), but for when I’m not using it (which is most of the time) it would be shut away like my old hand drill which sits on the bottom shelf at the back of the garage: there when I need it but not cluttering up my desktop.

In the spirit of practising what I preach, I’d like to look at GazetMe functionality with this in mind. User feedback though most welcome: which GazetMe functions do you use most often?

The Professor’s suggestions for dealing with this include (if I understood correctly) creating something equivalent to tags that allow users to set a date after which their data will self-destruct; managing sub-compartments for our online lives; and something called ‘rusting’, which sounds suspect but makes quite a lot of sense.

It may be that one day, technology will allow us to append a use-by-date to our data, after which it will self destruct. But I suspect this will be a solution offered by individual data processors, at least to begin with. I can foresee a scenario where Twitter, for example, might offer users the option to have tweets self-destruct after a set time. The question is though: would that be that? Once the data has propagated itself around the net, can the original service provider ensure its effective destruction? I suspect not.

More realistic to my mind is the idea that we should take personal responsibility by taking more care as regards the people to whom we publish our data. This, with the support of service providers, shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve. At GazetMe we’ve always made our starting point that data recorded by our users should be private until such time as a user decides to make it public. What’s more, we allow our users to publish different information to different groups of contacts: you may want to present a detailed resume only to limited people, but a more general summary of your achievements to your wider network, for example.

And so then to ‘rusting’. This, the Professor explained, was like the way we store our personal papers in a succession of ever more inaccessible shoe-boxes: first the box is by our desk, then in a cupboard, then in the attic. At each stage it gets harder and harder to retrieve the information. In the online world, our data would simply acquire rust: retrieving it would become harder (slower) the longer it had been out there. Eventually, most of us would give up unless we really needed the data - that’s the point where we get out the step-ladder and head up into the loft.

Some interesting issues then, and doubtless technology will be part of the answer. The starting point though has to be that we take care of the information we put out there.

In particular, Dr Rob devotes five chapters, nearly half the book, to the types of questions that you are likely to get asked. Now you might think that it’s impossible to identify all types of questions that will come up, but believe me, Dr Rob does. What’s more, he distinguishes between questions that you are likely to be asked by a skilled interviewer (e.g. those that elicit more information than might at first seem obvious) and the dead-end questions that an unskilled interviewer will ask.

How do I know that these questions come up? When I first read the book I’d had some interviews where I knew I could and should have done much better. So I set about creating a document listing every question or question-type that Dr Rob identified and drafting my own answer to each. It was quite an exercise and at the time I questioned my sanity for going through the process. However there is no doubt in my mind that it paid off: I used the document with my answers as a crib before interviews and sure enough the questions came up. The value to me was that I was able to answer those questions with prepared answers that were crafted to show my skillset and potential value to the employer organisation. Had I been answering on the hoof, I doubt that my responses would have been anyway near as good.

So, before your next interview, get a copy of this book; study the questions; craft your answers; and memorise them. You’ll thank Dr Rob at the end of it.