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RSS FeedSeptember 28th, 2010
“You forgot to get your empanada”, and other lessons in Customer Service
After starving for 12 hours for my annual physical, I decided to treat myself with some gourmet Taco Bell food – 2 burritos, 1 pepsi and 1 Caramel Apple Empanada. After all, with the triglycerides locked in for a year, what is the harm in eating foods that have 23% of your daily requirement of fats. (“If you don’t measure your cholesterol etc., it doesn’t change” — Amrinder).
When I pulled out of the drive through, there was no empanada in it, and if I was smarter and more health conscious I would have left the matters at that, but as I said, it was after 12 hours of fasting and it was a different Amrinder. So, as I pulled into the drive through again, the woman said “Forgot your empanada?”. Did I forget it? No, I ordered one. You took the order, and noted it. You charged me for it. I paid for it. Here, this receipt even shows it. The only thing that happened was that you forgot to put it into the brown bag.
Examples like this of poor/mediocre customer service abound. Still, it must be said that Taco Bell (and McD and BK) has great customer service. A company of this size can’t possibly exist with some very good customer service standards in place. In this particular case, perhaps the customer service representative was just not taught what to do in case she forgot to include something in the order. And the customer service management at Yum brands probably spends a fair bit of time reviewing the processes, the processes for making processes, and such.
When I wrote about decalcification of Jura coffee machine, within a few minutes, I got a blog comment from a customer service rep explaining the decalcification process and where I could get supplies etc. Of course, cynics might say that the company is trying to sell the supplies, but from a customer perspective, the service rocks!
Similarly when I wrote about how unintuitive the user-project assignment piece in BizMerlin was (the way I put it, it was designed to take everyone off of project
s 
), the BizMerlin team responded very quickly and their visual way of showing users to projects assignments is the best in the business. Every month as I go through resources and where they are allocated, it is an indispensable tool to memorialize that.
But back to TacoBell, and I shouldn’t let that inviting picture of empanada go without being accompanied by the nutrition facts.
September 28th, 2010
WordPress and BlogJet
Getting a bit tired of WP stupid editor, just giving BlogJet a shot now: http://blogjet.com
Whoa, that experience lasted about 3 minutes – BlogJet didn’t handle tags correctly, and didn’t handle images correctly. Btw, this exactly is what we mean when we say “software got in the way” – rather than blogging about what I wanted to blog about, I am being forced to blog about my blogging service (WordPress). Anyway, BlogJet has been uninstalled successfully, and I am back to the web editor of WordPress, which as I have said before, sucks.
I guarantee you this – the future generations will refer to this as the dark ages of the “world wide web”, and they will mockingly put little quotation marks around the phrase “world wide web”, much the same way we do when we talk about “universal suffrage” of the eighteenth century.
September 27th, 2010
Son of Darts/Postage Stamps problem
Just came across the Son of Darts problem wherein you are asked to determine values for R dartboard regions to maximize the smallest score unattainable with D darts. It is also known as the Postage Stamp problem, wherein you are asked to determine which R denominations of stamps to issue in order to maximize the smallest postage unattainable with D stamps.
Haven’t had a chance to solve it yet, but did manage to get this far:
Firstly, an observation, one of the regions (stamps) must be 1, otherwise 1 would not be attainable.
Secondly, since we are trying to MAXIMIZE the unattainable score, no point in repeating region values.
So, that gives a degenerate (but not optimal) solution: 1, 2, 3, … R
The objective function value of this degenerate solution is: D*R+1
For example if you have D = 4 darts, and you color your dartboard with scores 1, 2. ..40, then every score from values 1 to 160 is attainable. 161 is not attainable.
Clearly this solution is not optimal, and optimal solution will involve possibly some powers of 2 and definitely some thought.
Now for the notation:
Let f(X,D,{Y_1..Y_R}) =
- 1 if a score of X is attainable using D darts on a dartboard with ranges Y_1…Y_R
- 0 if unattainable
As an example discussed earlier. f(160,4,{1..40}) = 1 and f(161,4,{1..40}) = 0
The objective function value of puzzle can then be denoted as:
g(D, (Y_1..Y_R}) = Min X | f(X,D,{Y_1..Y_R}) = 0
I will fill in some more details later (I am sure you can see the recurrence relation coming up next).
September 25th, 2010
User Interface, Google and Ben Adam
User Interface bugs exist everywhere, even on a minimal page such as Google’s sign in page. They continue to linger simply because they are not blocker errors. Pages work, your queries get processed, your reports get generated, your changes get saved – so no problem. So a “bug” isn’t even an appropriate word for UI issues. Rather, a “user inconvenience”, or a “usability snag” is a more appropriate word.
Consider Google’s sign in page. The page is largely empty. Even if you are a Ben Adam, and you have an intuitive email
address, as you type in the email address, you can’t see it all, since the text field only shows a total of 17 characters. Excluding “@gmail.com”, that leaves a total of 7 letters. My first name itself has 8 letters.
Knowing how quickly Google churns out new releases*, such a minor inconvenience could be fixed if it was a little bit more major.
* [As for Google's releases, are we at Google 3.0 now?. Let us see - Google 1.0 was the original page rank, Google 2.0 was the universal search, Google 3.0 is the instant universal search. Did I miss one?]
September 22nd, 2010
Public Speaking books and resources
Just finished reading 10 Days to More Confident Public Speaking by Lenny Laskowski. Can’t really recommend it, the book is largely just OK. It spends a bit too long in the logistics of the presentation that it appears obsolete just a few years later. As an example, the projectors have changed significantly in the past few years, so chances of you carrying a backup bulb and replacing one during your presentation (and the hazard of burning your hand in the process of doing it) seem rather low.
I am just starting to read The 7 Principles of Public Speaking, by Richard Zeoli. I will let you know how this one goes.