Our Hotpoint dishwasher of 10 years has finally given up the ghost. Fortunately, we’d taken out extended warranty, so a replacement is on its way.
Having ordered the new one, we got a text within hours:
Hotpoint welcomes your Dishwasher order. Your Journey starts here and our teams will be with you until completion, providing updates along your journey.
I don’t know where to start with this. It’s all kinds of wrong and highlights the apparent difficulty that so many large brands have in creating a consistent and credible tone and voice.
To begin with, why is ‘Hotpoint’ doing the welcoming? Shouldn’t it be ‘we’, quite aside of the dodgy use of ‘welcome’.
And then there’s the tiresome, hackneyed use of ‘journey’… I’m only waiting for a dishwasher to be delivered, for God’s sake.
The thing is, I understand the broad intention of Hotpoint. Providing a friendly, customer-centric buying experience is crucial to how you build up advocacy and repeat business. Continue reading “Why tone and voice is so important”
We think of Apple as being the great modern-day innovators, but actually what they do is take an initial idea – more often than not one that a competitor has created – and then improve on it, based on customer needs.
Even in 2016, this is something that so many brands still fail to do.
You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it … And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with ‘What incredible benefits can we give to the customer, where can we take the customer?’ Not starting with ‘Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then [ask] how are we going to market that?’
Image from Flickr: via pibletMonday morning was no different to any other for me and many hundreds of thousands of commuters – a journey punctuated by delays.
As my Southern Rail train arrived at London Victoria more than 30 minutes late, I pleaded (at volume) with the 50-or-so fellow travellers to ensure they claimed back a portion of their train fare, because of the delay.
When I made my plea, there were a few murmurs of agreement, thankfully, but also a whole lot of blank faces. I could see the meaning of my words rattling around: “What do you mean, ‘claim back the train fare’?”
You see, few but the most-hardened of commuters bother to take advantage of any transport company’s poor timekeeping.
Are companies bound to pay us?
The simple answer to this question is YES – providing the delay is severe enough. As Which? explains, all operators have different rules, but the fundamental right to compensation is laid out in the National Rail Conditions of Carriage, namely a minimum 20% of your single ticket, if you are more than 1 hour late.
As Which? says, all companies are different. For example, Southern Railways (with whom I travel) offer a partial refund on delays of 30 minutes or more.
Let’s do the math
As my ticket is an annual season, the complex calculations result in compensation of a mere £3.70 for a 30-minute delay.
However, imagine if every commuter made a claim. A single, 10-car Gatwick Express train has 692 seats. On a crowded journey, add on an extra 100 for those standing and – rounding up – you reach 800.
The chances of every passenger having an annual ticket is non-existent, but for argument’s sake, let’s say they do and they all come from Brighton. That’s a total train compensation of £2960.
Yesterday, pretty much every train for a 2-hour period was delayed (I have Twitter buddies who travel and feed me info). At the very least, that’s another 10 trains.
If we do the same calculations and then multiply by 10, you get a compensation figure from 1 morning and 1 route alone of £29,600.
I don’t keep a definitive log of train delays, but I think it’s fair to say that there’s at least one a month that can be claimed for, so multiplying our one-off figure by 12, you get £355,200.
That figure is based on every passenger claiming for just one 30-minute delay of 10 trains on a single route, once a month for a calendar year: £355k.
That sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Well, not if you read a bit more carefully.
John Nicholson, co-founder of Alliance of Kent Commuters, points out: “Not that many people are actually claiming; the forms are fiddly and the amount you get back isn’t always worth it.”
Even he doesn’t bother to claim every time: “I’ve only claimed once when I could have claimed half a dozen times or more. There are others I know who don’t claim either”.
Why don’t people claim?
The two overriding factors are simple: ignorance and difficulty.
In spite of their protestations (I’m sure), most rail companies clearly don’t make a huge effort to advertise their ‘Delay Repay’ schemes. Sure, there’s a shiny page on the website, but it’s not front and centre when they’re apologising the next day after major delays.
Most people also think it’s difficult to claim, too. Admittedly, the hassle of going to the ticket office and getting a form, filling it out, etc, might be a bit painful, but 5 minutes effort for ‘free’ money?
What’s more, with the proliferation of smartphones it’s easy to do it on the go. You can upload a photo of your ticket direct from your phone and, if you’ve registered with the website, they pre-fill your details.
Also, you can now cash in most vouchers for money now, rather than having to use them against your next ticket purchase. A small mercy 🙂
Prices still keep going up – get your own back
Let’s face it, we know that every January – in spite of howls of protest – all the operators will put prices up by more than inflation…
My journey will cost me 4.1% more next year, than it does this year – an increase of approx £13 a month.
I don’t claim to understand the justification for the increases. Southern, to take my operator as an example, increased passenger journeys in 2011-12 by 7.4%, but – and here’s the kicker for the likes of you and me – overall operating profits dropped by 4.9%.
The important thing to note here is not that there was a loss, just a drop in profits. Go-Ahead Group (Southern’s owners) still made an awful lot of money – just not quite as much as before.
Tube users can do it too
If you’re reading this in London and you think this doesn’t apply to you, then you’re wrong.
