Swivel Chair Racing

Here at UOE we sell swivel chairs, management chairs, visitors chairs, boardroom chairs, stacking chairs, polyprop chairs in fact a chair for pretty much every ocassion..but we've never been asked to provide an office chair you could win a race in...

But, that's not the case elsewhere...in Germany this week the first swivel chair derby took place - and to say the wrong sort of chair can cause back-pain would be an understatement! Check out the photos and video (and dont try this at home!)

What would the risk-assessment chaps say about this one....we cant wait to read the accident book. By the way, any damage caused we think would count as mis-use and probably not be covered by your warranty! Enjoy. We did. :-)

Teaching you to breathe!

We sell IT stuff and so our experiences of less than computer-literate customers is as wide as most but it baffles me to think that any company can seriously feel the need to treat its customers as totally stupid?

I am fascinated with the daftness of the instruction manual from Doro (a well respected DECT phone manufacturer - whose products we sell) for their latest NeoBio 40/45r telephones.

Its instructions for receiving a phone call begin with:

1. Wait for the handset to ring

Well obviously the phone needs to ring for you to want to answer it.... should we start telling customers to breathe in and out to prevent loss of consciousness too? I am all for guiding customers through the confusion of a new piece of technology but come on let's give our customers some credit! Please.

It's this kind of silliness that leads to many customers claiming they just can't get along with instruction manuals!

Disagree? Please post your comments...

Foolproof or a Proof Fool?

These days we're all expected to be experts at stuff we have no training in. The skill of proof-reading is exactly that - a skill and yet it falls often to the least busy staff member, an intern or just gets left till just the very last minute. Proof reading is like cold-calling - everyone can use the telephone but few can make a living from it!

Checking proofs of printed materials is vital to the presentation and professionalism with which companies are judged. The chatty, personal style of a business is one thing, but get the spelling wrong and that trust, reliability and professionalism vanishes faster than you can misspell the word "received"!

UOE's Ten Tips to Proof Reading:
1. It is twice as hard to proof read your own work than someone else's - this is partly because you think you know how to spell things when you don't but also because you will have a tendency to skim the text as your mind knows what you wrote and what comes next! No, really!! So by choice get someone else to proof your work for you too.

2. Cultivate a healthy sense of doubt. If there are types of errors you know you tend to make, double check for those.

3. Read very slowly. If possible, read out loud. Read one word at a time.

4.Read what is actually on the page, not what you think is there. (This is the most difficult sub-skill to acquire, particularly if you wrote what you are reading).

5. Proofread more than once and not straight after you've written the work.

6. Check the photos too - has an image been reversed (classic shots when the text on a shirt is back-to-front)

7. Take an overview look at the whole page - is the layout correct? Are the colours what you expected? Do the fonts match? Do the headlines make sense and are they spelled correctly!

8. Try reading for spelling backwards - this forces you to read each word out of context and stops your mind wandering.

9. Never assume that the studio that did the artwork have a clue how to spell your company name, boss' name, how to format a telephone number or a postcode. Assume everything will be wrong and work on that basis.

10. Keep a copy of the amendments you have made so you can double check them first on the next proof - don't assume the studio will get the amendments correct!

In proof reading, you can take nothing for granted, because unconscious mistakes are so easy to make. It helps to read out loud, because you are using two senses. It is often possible to hear a mistake, such as an omitted or repeated word that you have not seen.

Remember, professional editors proofread as many as ten times. Publishing houses hire teams of readers to work in pairs, out loud. And still errors occur! So you are warned!


Here's a classic example:
Great 48 page brochure, lovely photo, correctly mailed to the right contact but....look at the typo on the cover. "the very lastest in outdoor lighting" - whoops...surely that should read "latest"

There are no traffic jams on the extra mile

We just love the story reported by sky news about the New York Cabbie who took an elderly couple on the longest taxi ride in the city's history...

Douglas Guldeniz drove the pair from Queens, New York, to their retirement home in Arizona. A total of 2,500 miles. The meter ticked up a whopping bill of £1,500. It isn't known if he got a tip!

But what we do know is that he - along with 60 other drivers in the city - were rewarded with New York Taxi and Limousine Commission's 'Going the Extra Mile' award. We love the idea that a customer service focused organisation stopped and rewarded its staff for going above and beyond the call of duty... Good work guys!

It sure beats the 12 mile rule for London cabbies that Transport for London require!

Terminal Illness

We've all had that feeling - you know the harder you try the worse it gets! Well that seems to be afflicting BA and the launch of its new facility at Heathrow. Try as they might the world seems to be conspiring against them to actually get the benefits of the "super-advanced" Terminal 5.

You would have thought seeing as they could chose the time and date of the launch they'd have tested to destruction the baggage management software and hardware BEFORE inflicting it upon their paying customers! For sure, it will go down in history not only as one of the all time PR disasters but also a text-book case of how not to communicate and treat your clients in the face of critical systems failures.

As an regular BA traveller I'm not looking to burn my executive club card and membership, but having just booked some flights for late May 2008 I am beginning to wonder whether they'll have sorted it out by then!!

To top it all, it would seem the new super-flash car-park management system at Terminal 5 also has a bit of a serious flaw - as broadcast on BBC1's Watchdog programme this week - it tells you you've parked your car in a different space to the one you actually did(!)

Granted this only happens if you fail to follow the signs the computer puts on the ceiling indicators as your car moves through the car-park...but I'm sure I'm not the only one who ignores these type of car-park signs...after all someone else might get that really good space before me!! They really should have tested it with REAL people, not programmers!

How can it be that as the flagship of BA and BAA respectively the launch of Terminal 5 could be allowed to suffer such silly and fundamental process failures? Were they not properly checked? Sadly it is quite the norm to see the launch of a technologically complex project which despite being "tested" is woefully inadequate for the purpose at launch.

As a business, UOE has spent 18 months developing its latest Dragonfly online order system. The new site is fantastic, delivers a heap of extra benefits to clients and is super-fast but if we had launched it back in November 2007 as we originally planned, well it would have been a terminal 5 fiasco. We bit the bullet, swallowed our pride and worked even harder to make sure when we did roll it out, clients got what they wanted - a good first time experience that (hopefully) makes then feel more inclined to use us rather than avoid us! Making the delay was a tough decision, but we knew we'd be letting ourselves down if we didn't.

Now UOE is rolling out the Dragonfly technology over the next 90 days to all of its clients. The feedback so far has been excellent...so fingers crossed we not made any of the silly mistakes of our airline colleagues!!

Call Centres

There is nothing worse than a so-called customer service centre that puts you through those really annoying button pressing systems, then repeats the same "calls may be recorded" nonsense about 3 times, then tells you to hold (for what seems like forever) then when you get through some muppet at the end of the line tells you his/her computer system is down and can YOU call back! This delightful experience - which sadly seems commonplace these days - was today courtesy of our 'friends' at Transport for London.

This fabulous service was topped off by me calling back and having the phone hung up by some incoherent telephonist who just said "sorry really busy at the moment can you call back" - what, AGAIN?!

Why do so many call centres think that we want to press loads of buttons - hands up if you do?
Why do so many companies think we want to call THEM back - they're busy? Why not offer to call ME back?
Why do companies think giving me a issue reference number is sufficient to get me off the phone! I want REAL, good old fashioned help. With people who care, understand and are empowered to make a difference...not some buck-passing call-centre chicken who doesn't get the idea of customer service!

To Insure Prompt Service

So this is our first blog and to give you the flavour of what we'll be discussing it will be the good the bad and the downright awful service that we encounter in our daily life and the interactions with companies and people we suffer and delight in.

I think great service should be standard in this 21st Century, high-speed, low-tolerance world but it would seem not everyone is on the same page! Bad customer service just isn't right, shouldn't be accepted and deserves to be discussed, debated and ditched.

So lets begin...Why do so my restaurants automatically add a 15% tip these days to your bill? They say it is to prevent the Inland Revenue chasing the restaurant owner for the taxes on the tips the staff pocket...but is it really just to promise the staff some extra money from us rather than pay them a decent hourly wage? Regardless of the service they give? I'm all for tipping - after all TIPS are supposed "To Insure Prompt Service - TIPS" not just to line pockets of the slowest waiter the world has EVER seen!! So join me in doubling your tip when the service is great and not being shy to ask it to be removed by the surly, unfriendly and downright rude guy or girl who just ruined your night out.