Tag Archives: General

How not to treat a customer

Post Syndicated from esr original http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8730

First, my complaint to Simply NUC about the recent comedy of errors around my attempt to order a replacement fan for Cathy’s NUC. Sorry, I was not able to beat WordPress’s new editor into displaying URLs literally, and I have no idea why the last one turns into a Kindle link.

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Subject: An unfortunate series of events

Simply NUC claims to be a one-stop shop for NUC needs and a customer-centric company. I would very much like to do business with an outfit that lives up to Simply NUC’s claims for itself. This email is how about I observed it to fail on both levels.

A little over a week ago my wife’s NUC – which is her desktop
machine, having replaced a conventional tower system in 2018 –
developed a serious case of bearing whine. Since 1981 I have
built, tinkered with, and deployed more PCs than I can remember,
so I knew this probably meant the NUC’s fan bearings were becoming
worn and could pack up at any moment.

Shipping the machine out for service was unappealing, partly for cost
reasons but mostly because my wife does paying work on it and can’t
afford to have it out of service for an unpredictable amount of time.
So I went shopping for a replacement fan.

The search “NUC fan replacement” took me here:

https://techsterweb.com/2019/05/01/nuc-replacement-fans/

There was a sentence that said “As of right now SimplyNUC offers
replacement fans for all NUC models.” Chasing the embedded link
landed me on the Simply NUC site here:

Nuc Accessories

Now bear in mind that I had not disassembled my wife’s NUC yet,
that I had landed from a link that said “replacement fans for all
NUC models”, and that I didn’t know different NUCs used different
fan sizes.

The first problem I had was that this page did nothing to even hint
that the one fan pictured might not be a universal fit. Dominic has
told me over the phone that “Dawson” is a NUC type, and if I had known
that I might have interpreted the caption as “fit only for Dawsons”.
But I didn’t, and the caption “Dawson BAPA0508R5U fan” looks exactly
as though “Dawson” is the *fan vendor*.

So I placed the order, muttering to myself because there aren’t any
shipping options less expensive than FedEx.

A properly informative page would have labeled the fan with its product code and had text below that said “Compatible with Dawson Canyon NUCs.” That way, customers landing there could get a clue that the BAPA0508R5U is not a universal replacement for all NUC fans.

A page in conformance with Simply NUC’s stated mission to be a
one-stop NUC shop would also carry purchase links to other fans fitted
for different model ranges, like the Delta BSC0805HA I found out later
is required for my wife’s NUC8i3BEH1.

The uninformative website page was strike one.

In the event, when the fan arrived, I disassembled my wife’s
NUC and instantly discovered that (a) it wasn’t even remotely the right
size, and (b) it didn’t even match the fan in the website picture! What I
was
shipped was not a BAPA0508R5U, it’s a BAAA0508RSH.

Not getting the product I ordered was strike two.

I got on the Simply NUC website’s Zendesk chat and talked with a
person named Bobbie who seemed to want to be helpful (I point this out
because, until I spoke with Dominic, this was the one single occasion
on which Simply NUC behaved like it might be run by competent
people). I ended up emailing her a side-by-side photo of the two fans.
It’s attached.

Bobbie handed me off to one Sean McClure, and that is when my
experience turned from bad to terrible. If I were a small-minded
person I would be suggesting that you fire Mr. McClure. But I’m
not; I think the actual fault here is that nobody has ever explained
to this man what his actual job is, nor trained him properly in
how to do it.

And that is his *management’s* fault. Somebody – possibly one
of the addressees of this note – failed him.

Back during the dot-com boom I was on the board of directors of
a Silly Valley startup that sold PCs to run Linux, competing
directly with Sun Microsystems. So I *do* in fact know what Sean
McClure’s job is. It’s to *retain customers*. It’s to not alienate
possible future revenue streams.

When a properly trained support representative reads a story like
mine, the first words he types ought to be something equivalent to
“I’m terribly sorry, we clearly screwed up, let me set up an RMA for
that.” Then we could discuss how Simply NUC can serve my actual
requirements.

That is how you recruit a loyal customer who will do repeat business
and recommend you to his peers. That is how you live up to the
language on the “About” page of your website.

Here’s what happened instead:

Unfortunately we don’t keep those fans in stock. You can try reaching
out to
Intel directly to see if they have a replacement or if they will need to
RMA
your device. You can submit warranty requests to:
supporttickets.intel.com, a
login will need to be created in order to submit the warranty request.
Fans can
also be sourced online but will require personal research.

This is not an answer, it’s a defensive crouch that says “We don’t
care, and we don’t want your future business”. Let me enumerate the
ways it is wrong, in case you two are so close to the problem that you
don’t see it.

1. 99% odds that a customer with a specific requirement for a
replacement part is calling you because he does *not* want to RMA the
entire device and have it out of service for an unpredictable amount
of time. A support tech that doesn’t understand this has not been
taught to identify with a customer in distress.

2. A support tech that understands his real job – customer retention – will move heaven and earth rather than refer the customer to a competing vendor. Even if the order was only for a $15 fan, because the customer might be experimenting to see if the company is a competent outfit to handle bigger orders. As I was; you were never going to get 1,000 orders for whole NUCs from me but more than one was certainly possible. And I have a lot of friends.

3. “Personal research”? That’s the phrase that really made me
angry. If it’s not Simply NUC’s job to know how to source parts for
NUCs, so that I the customer don’t have to know that, what *is* the
company’s value proposition?

Matters were not improved when I discovered that typing BAPA0508R5U
into a search engine instanntly turned up several sources for the fan
I need, including this Amazon page:

A support tech who understood his actual job would have done that
search the instant he had IDed the fan from the image I sent him, and
replied approximately like this: “We don’t currently stock that fan;
I’ll ask our product guys to fix this and it should show on our Fans
page in <a reasonable period>. In the meantime, I found it on Amazon;
here’s the link.”
>

As it is, “personal research” was strike three.

Oh, and my return query about whether I could get a refund wasn’t even
refused.
It wasn’t even answered.

My first reaction to this sequence of blunders was to leave a scathingly bad review of Simply NUC on TrustPilot. My second reaction was to think that, in fairness, the company deserves a full account of the blunders directed at somebody with the authority to fix what is broken.

Your move.

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Here’s the reply I got:

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Mr. Raymond, while I always welcome customer feedback and analyze it for
opportunities to improve our operations, I will not entertain customers who
verbally berate, belittle, or otherwise use profanity directed at my
employees or our company. That is a more important core value of our
company than the pursuit of revenue of any size.

I’ve instructed Sean to cancel the return shipping label as we’ve used
enough of each other’s time in this transaction. You may retain the blower
if it can be of any use to you or one of your friends in the future, or
dispose of it in an environmentally friendly manner.

I will request a refund to your credit card for the $15 price of the
product ASAP.

I don’t think any of this needs further elaboration on my part, but I note that Simply NUC has since modified its fans page to be a bit more informative.

A user story about user stories

Post Syndicated from esr original http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8720

The way I learned to use the term “user story”, back in the late 1990s at the beginnings of what is now called “agile programming”, was to describe a kind of roleplaying exercise in which you imagine a person and the person’s use case as a way of getting an outside perspective on the design, the documentation, and especially the UI of something you’re writing.

For example:

Meet Joe. He works for Randomcorp, who has a nasty huge old Subversion repository they want him to convert to Git. Joe is a recent grad who got thrown at the problem because he’s new on the job and his manager figures this is a good performance test in a place where the damage will be easily contained if he screws up. Joe himself doesn’t know this, but his teammates have figured it out.

Joe is smart and ambitious but has little experience with large projects yet. He knows there’s an open-source culture out there, but isn’t part of it – he’s thought about running Linux at home because the more senior geeks around him all seem to do that, but hasn’t found a good specific reason to jump yet. In truth most of what he does with his home machine is play games. He likes “Elite: Dangerous” and the Bioshock series.

Joe knows Git pretty well, mainly through the Tortoise GUI under Windows; he learned it in school. He has only used Subversion just enough to know basic commands. He found reposurgeon by doing web searches. Joe is fairly sure reposurgeon can do the job he needs and has told his boss this, but he has no idea where to start.

What does Joe’s discovery process looks like? Read the first two chapters of “Repository Editing with Reposurgeon” using Joe’s eyes. Is he going to hit this wall of text and bounce? If so, what could be done to make it more accessible? Is there some way to write a FAQ that would help him? If so, can we start listing the questions in the FAQ?

Joe has used gdb a little as part of a class assignment but has not otherwise seen programs with a CLI resembling reposurgeon’s. When he runs it, what is he likely to try to do first to get oriented? Is that going to help him feel like he knows what’s going on, or confuse him?

“Repository Editing…” says he ought to use repotool to set up a Makefile and stub scripts for the standard conversion workflow. What will Joe’s eyes tell him when he looks at the generated Makefile? What parts are likeliest to confuse him? What could be done to fix that?

Joe, my fictional character, is about as little like me as as is plausible at a programming shop in 2020, and that’s the point. If I ask abstractly “What can I do to improve reposurgeon’s UI?”, it is likely I will just end up spinning my wheels; if, instead, I ask “What does Joe see when he looks at this?” I am more likely to get a useful answer.

It works even better if, even having learned what you can from your imaginary Joe, you make up other characters that are different from you and as different from each other as possible. For example, meet Jane the system administrator, who got stuck with the conversion job because her boss thinks of version-control systems as an administrative detail and doesn’t want to spend programmer time on it. What do her eyes see?

In fact, the technique is so powerful that I got an idea while writing this example. Maybe in reposurgeon’s interactive mode it should issue a first like that says “Interactive help is available; type ‘help’ for a topic menu.”

However. If you search the web for “design by user story”, what you are likely to find doesn’t resemble my previous description at all. Mostly, now twenty years after the beginnings of “agile programming”, you’ll see formulaic stuff equating “user story” with a one-sentence soundbite of the form “As an X, I want to do Y”. This will be surrounded by a lot of talk about processes and scrum masters and scribbling things on index cards.

There is so much gone wrong with this it is hard to even know where to begin. Let’s start with the fact that one of the original agile slogans was “Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools”. That slogan could be read in a number of different ways, but under none of them at all does it make sense to abandon a method for extended insight into the reactions of your likely users for a one-sentence parody of the method that is surrounded and hemmed in by bureaucratic process-gabble.

This is embedded in a larger story about how “agile” went wrong. The composers of the Agile Manifesto intended it to be a liberating force, a more humane and effective way to organize software development work that would connect developers to their users to the benefit of both. A few of the ideas that came out of it were positive and important – besides design by user story, test-centric development and refactoring leap to mind,

Sad to say, though, the way “user stories” became trivialized in most versions of agile is all too representative of what it has often become under the influence of two corrupting forces. One is fad-chasers looking to make a buck on it, selling it like snake oil to managers forever perplexed by low productivity, high defect rates, and inability to make deadlines. Another is the managers’ own willingness to sacrifice productivity gains for the illusion of process control.

It may be too late to save “agile” in general from becoming a deadening parody of what it was originally intended to be, but it’s not too late to save design by user story. To do this, we need to bear down on some points that its inventors and popularizers were never publicly clear about, possibly because they themselves didn’t entirely understand what they had found.

Point one is how and why it works. Design by user story is a trick you play on your social-monkey brain that uses its fondness for narrative and characters to get you to step out of your own shoes.

Yes, sure, there’s a philosophical argument that stepping out of your shoes in this sense is impossible; Joe, being your fiction, is limited by what you can imagine. Nevertheless, this brain hack actually works. Eppure, si muove; you can generate insights with it that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Point two is that design by user story works regardless of the rest of your methodology. You don’t have to buy any of the assumptions or jargon or processes that usually fly in formation with it to get use out of it.

Point three is that design by user story is not a technique for generating code, it’ s a technique for changing your mind. If you approach it in an overly narrow and instrumental way, you won’t imagine apparently irrelevant details like what kinds of video games Joe likes. But you should do that sort of thing; the brain hack works in exact proportion to how much imaginative life you give your characters.

(Which in particular, is why stopping at a one-sentence “As an X, I want to do Y” is such a sadly reductive parody. This formula is designed to stereotype the process, but stereotyping is the enemy of novelty, and novelty is exactly what you want to generate.)

A few of my readers might have the right kind of experience for this to sound familiar. The mental process is similar to what in theater and cinema is called “method acting.” The goal is also similar – to generate situational responses that are outside your normal habits.

Once again: you have to get past tools and practices to discover that the important part of software design – the most difficult and worthwhile part – is mindset. In this case, and temporarily, someone else’s.