Why is everybody so shocked by Orange’s customer service quality level?

So an Orange customer received his monthly bill for internet access for a total of... 45 923€. Mistakes happen, it's not the issue. What is typical of (way) too many French businesses is the level of customer service he was confronted to when he contacted Orange:
- first call: the agent hung up on him
- second call: another agent tells him that everybody has problems, deal with it
- third call (and final decision from Orange at this point): he was generously offered a 40 years plan to pay off his bill!
Morale of the story: Orange makes the headlines with all of France ridiculing them and customers checking their contracts to see how to terminate their contracts, when they had the opportunity to handle this case appropriately and improve their image already compromised by the wave of suicides in their employees ranks (yes, too much stressed by the quality of work expected from them).

It is sadly very representative of the attitude customers can expect from businesses in this country. Who has never had the feeling to annoy the sales people when asking a question, or has never been snobbed by waiters, etc. ?

Three lessons: 1- From a business perspective, someone needs to tell them that it costs 5 times more to gain a new customer than to win a new one. 2- In a world of hyper communication, every customer interaction is an opportunity (or a risk) to make headlines 3- Treating poorly customers is just plain and pure bad karma.

It reminds me of the attitude of an IT PM in my last job who put a very low priority on improving the online user experience by arguing that "if someone doesn't understand how the site works, he's just an idiot and there is nothing we can do about it". The most ironic part is that management agreed with him and fired me for being disruptive when trying to be the customer advocate. I guess nobody had told them about the two golden rules of business: 1- the customer is always right 2- Refer to rule number 1. With this kind of attitude, no wonder their business is going down. Which might also be Orange fate if they don't make a radical change in their policies and don't start putting the customer first.


Image source: http://www.pcinpact.com

It’s Harder to Get a Job At the Apple Store Than It Is to Get Into Harvard

It's apparently significantly easier to get admitted to Harvard University than it is to get a job at the Apple Store. At least for Apple's newest store in New York.

At a press event today, Apple said that 10,000 people submitted applications to work at the new store on Manhattan's Upper West Side, according to Gizmodo's Matt Buchanan.

Of those, just over 200 got jobs, for a 2% acceptance rate.

Meanwhile, Harvard's acceptance rate was 7% this past year, according to a March report in the Boston Globe. That's 29,000 applications for about 2,000 admissions.

Obviously, the requirements and admission processes for college and a retail job are much different -- these aren't direct comparisons. But it's amazing how selective Apple can be with its retail employees. And it's amusing that, at least statistically, the odds of getting into Harvard are better than getting a job selling iPods.

This may put new meaning into the term "Genius Bar."

Source: Business Insider

Google on what the Web will look like in 5 years

Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said at last week's Gartner symposium in Orlando.

Highlighted comments include:

- Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.

- Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.

- Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.

- Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

- “We’re starting to make significant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.

- “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”

- There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.

- “We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?”

- It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

Watch the interview on YouTube

Source: www.hotelmarketing.com

Apple Store Opening in Paris!

The opening of a retail store near the Louvre draws huge crowds in Paris

Who says Parisians are blasé? Tout Paris, it seems, turned out Saturday morning for the opening of Apple's (AAPL) first retail outlet in France. The video posted below shows lines of shoppers that stretched for blocks.

Planning for the store, located in the Carrousel du Louvre, an upscale shopping mall beneath the Tuileries garden and adjacent to the museum, began more than two years ago. A second store in Montpelier was actually ready before this one, but its opening was postponed, according to ifoAppleStore, in deference to the City of Lights.

Source: http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com by Philip Elmer-DeWitt



Video Source: piratec.net

Happy Birthday Internet!

At the occasion of the 40th birthday of the first network connection, the Guardian has put together a great timeline retracing this adventure. Who would dare saying that internet is not the biggest invention since the print?

Source: The Gurdian.co.uk

Finaly, Apple Store arrives in Paris!

Apple has issued the city of Paris (France) a formal announcement of its future Carrousel du Louvre retail store, with a storefront construction barricade banner that features a graphic design based on iPod colors and its circular control wheel. The banner graphic also has elements of the huge glass pyramid that sits above the underground visitor entrance to the Louvre art museum, which is adjacent to the future store.

Tipsters first identified the location in mid-2007, and Apple executives confirmed the store earlier this year. But this new banner is the first on-site acknowledgement of the store. As reported by the MacPlus Web site, the banner graphic that just appeared bears a single-word greeting to Parisians: “Soon.” According to previous statements by Apple executives, the store will open before year’s end.


Sources: www.ifoapplestore.com and the Apple Blog

If Facebook was a country….

Great physical representation of FB as a country map by Permito agency. They used rivers length to show the size of the main population groups etc. Very nice job at using a physical metaphor to map a virtual kingdom.