My lousy business model

Bryan Spondre keeps calling me out as a Grumpy Blogger  – and it seems I am even up for an award.

It’s true, and what’s worse is that I tend to rail on the businesses that I work with – who would want to be my bank, for example?

However it also seems that some businesses are actually reading this stuff and trying to avoid being the next target. Good for them, and good on people like @hades who are helping them along.

While I may write out of frustration, I write mainly because I want to help companies get better. It’s a great feeling when companies like Kiwibank demonstrate that they are listening, and even greater if a blog post and everyone’s comments catalyze positive change within a business.

Bernard Hickey sees the point:

In Kiwibank’s case, as with some others, I followed up the post with a (free) meeting. I’ve received calls from various senior folks from other companies over the years as well, and had accelerated customer service from a few. Who knows what goes on behind the scenes – many corporates are unable to respond given their internal constraints.

However my strategy of highlighting poor businesses experiences isn’t the best way to attract paying clients. I think nzKoz put it best when he responded to my tweet about BNZ above:

Self touche indeed.

Kiwibank Business – the bank responds well

It also appeared that they just didn’t want my business.

Today I met with Andy Bray, the regional manager for Kiwibank business and Wellington area manager Brian Davies – in response to the previous post on Kiwibank Business. I’d left Brian a message last night, but I’m pretty sure they also got the message though several other channels – including Bernard Hickey’s email missive to bank execs.

We met almost exactly 24 hours after the previous event, and in exactly the same location. Only Andy and Brian where there when I knocked on the door, so I wasn’t able to pass on the offers of employment for Sean.

Andy and Brian get it.

They are very concerned at the experience I and others have had, and they are definitely reacting – though they would not (and this is fair) say exactly how. They won’t get my business as I’m pretty sure that the folks in that office wouldn’t tolerate that, but they did listen and they are endeavoring to improve.

This is a great customer service moment for Kiwibank, and how they reacted is important. By calling back early, using the people on the ground to do so, and by inviting me back into the lions den they are demonstrating that they want to get this right. They could do more –  but they are, for example, constrained by policy from commenting directly on the post.

What happens next will be interesting. I’ve given face to face feedback to BNZ a number of years ago, after I made a lengthy comment by internal bank email about their website. However at the time I got the feeling they were not listening nor able to react, and sure enough very little has changed since.

So we shall see whether Kiwibank Business changes or not. The branch happens to be in a post office which I use now and then, so any physical changes will be evident.  I’d also love to see online sign-ups for business banking – calling an 0800 number is so 1980’s and face to face banking is so 1960’s. Andy promised a coffee sometime in the future – and I will take him up on that.

“Sorry No” – Kiwibank fails business basics

Today I decided to sign up to a new bank for my main business account. I was debating between Kiwibank and ASB – as they both seem to have the best reputation. I decided to give Kiwibank a go.

First I checked their website, and found a large Business Banking tab, followed by a large “contact us” button. Looking good so far:

Clearly they wanted me to click on that contact us button (in the best tradition of Don’t make me think), and so that’s what I did:

Following the same “do the easiest thing” logic I clicked on the “Business Banking Centre text to find my local branch. It was in Marion Street here in Wellington. I didn’t want to send an email – too slow, nor fill out a form – far too complicated, and certainly not make a phone call to an 0800 queue.

So off to Marion street I went.

I confess I cringed a little as it was 4:40pm and the day before I’d also gone to a post office between 4 and 5pm, and left when I saw ridiculous queues. This time I was in luck – not only were there no queues, but there was a sign pointing to a business center. I wandered over, saw two empty client chairs and a closed office door. Not a customer in sight. It all looked pretty professional:

Someone was inside the door, saw me and, after a pause, opened it. That’s when things started to go wrong.

“Hi – I’d like to open a business account”.

The chap that looked behind himself for a second at another guy then turned back and abruptly said “Sorry no”.

I noticed that while the office door and the chairs outside looked professional, the office itself was a seething mess of papers. There were three people inside – the chap that greeted me, someone in the far corner on the phone and another guy who I didn’t really see. Still no customers in sight.

I asked again – but they again said no – too busy.

And that, it seemed, was it.

This all happened very quickly – the door swung shut and I opened it again – asking why they wouldn’t open an account for me. Apparently I was meant to make an appointment, and the chap on the phone was the only guy that could open business accounts.

It also appeared that they just didn’t want my business.

So ASB it is then.

So let’s recap.

1: I was there at 4:40pm – plenty of time before 5pm closing. I have a pay and display parking ticket to prove it.

2: The chap that opened the door was a “Business Manager” – most likely Cliff Lim (judging by the ethnicity of him, the others there and the list on the website of the people in the office)

3: The chap on the phone – identified as ‘Sean’ by Cliff, is a Business Support Specialist. He didn’t do anything wrong – and seemed to be working hard. His job title doesn’t sound as important as a Business Manager. Can’t the manager sign up accounts?

4: The other person in the office, and all of these names are true only in the Kiwibank website is up to date, was Brett Garner. He observed only.

5: The Senior Business Manager is Brian Davies – I called him subsequently and it turns out he was out of the office today. His message suggested calling Sean.

6: Nobody tried to qualify me – how much money was walking into, and then out of their bank? Nor did they apologise and ask to make an appointment for the next day. They just didn’t want my business.

7: I believe this was unacceptable from Kiwibank, and along with this post I have left a message with Brian Davis. We shall see what happens.

It’s the internet – so link to each other

Well done to Russell Brown over at Public Address (I said they write well) for breaking the story on the Kids Can Stand Tall debacle. It’s a good scoop after some digging into the history of the Telethon beneficiary. I won’t repeat it here – but I will get grumpy instead.

I found Russell’s post after reading an article on Fairfacts*, which linked me to an article on Stuff. Neither the Fairfacts nor the Stuff article linked to Russell’s original article.

Both should know better.

Shame on you Fairfacts:

(and I also couldn’t leave a comment using either Google or WordPress logins)

Shame on you Stuff:

and well done Russell.

How not to launch an upgrade – BNZ

BNZ announces that their banking site is being refreshed. This brick wall advertisement appeared after logging in with my online banking number, password and that stupid netguard card:

Problem is that after a little pause I got this:

Which meant restarting Safari, re-entering my login and password and re-entering in some numbers from the stupid netguard card.

I got those numbers wrong:

So my simple login faced a brick wall advertsiement of dubious merit, crashing of my browser, typing my login and password two times and looking up and typing 3 numbers from the stupid netguard card grid three separate times.

It shouldn’t be that hard. The brick wall advertisement is not helping – rather than telling us about the refresh – just do it already. Meanwhile I really hope that the refresh is more than a few colour changes and some rounded corners.

How consumers shop – some lessons

After a laughably dumb registration process (use fake data) you’ll find the  ChannelAdvisor report on How Consumers Shop Online.

Let’s start with a caveat – the sample size is 824 people from 29 states in the USA, but there is no information on how this sample was selected. We should probably therefore assume that the sample has bias, but see what we can learn anyway. (It’s actually really hard to remove bias from surveys, and if they had done this properly then they would probably say so)

The report is pretty, but pretty short, and has 6 findings:

· Consumers are researching more and are spending less.
· Shoppers don’t necessarily realize where they buy.
· Amazon and eBay contribute to 70 percent of purchases.
· On-site purchases are driven by value enhancers, security features.
· Search is integral to the purchase decision.
· Comparison shopping engines can’t be ignored

The most interesting one to me is “Shoppers don’t necessarily realize where they buy.” This was a big outcome, but it was inferred from, well not much:


When asked where in the past six months they had purchased a product online, 17 percent believed they had actually purchased a product from a major search engine.
And when it came to comparison shopping engines, seven percent believed they had purchased a product from Shopping.com, Shopzilla, NexTag or PriceGrabber.

They drew big conclusions – perhaps a bit too big but definitely worth thinking about.

We believe this highlights a persistent trend in multi-channel retailing – shoppers don’t necessarily realize where they buy their products, but they will definitely use all the tools at their disposal to locate the deals they want.

Furthermore, just because consumers are able to use tools like comparison shopping engines to find deals, it doesn’t necessarily mean these individuals are aware of the sites they’re using.

With consumers laser-focused on the lowest possible prices and best deals available when they are ready to make a purchase, it continues to be imperative for online retailers to have a strong presence on as many channels as possible (search engines, comparison shopping engines, marketplaces, online storefront, affiliates, email).

There were three interesting charts in the report: Americans spend a lot of money online each month:

It’s clear that stores should offer free shipping – it is cheaper, much simpler for buyers to understand – and it works:

Amazon rules the roost in the USA – and eBay’s woes continue.

Car texts

3 reasons not to follow up on this advertisement in today’s NZHerald.

1: there is no specific URL which I can see delivers me to the txt car alerts page. Nor us there any way I can do anything with my non Internet surfing mobile.

2: there is no price information, and we are all a bit bitter about the insane prices of txt alerts in general. (You can blame the telcos for much of this)

3: NZHerald and other dailies lost the autos market years ago – first to the free ads papers and latterly to Trade Me.

Get yourself free email alerts from Trade Me instead.

But then if you are reading this then you know that already.

So just who is that ad targetted at?

Tuesday Three: 3 ways to improve your business

Ask and ye shall receive

  1. Ask staff to present to the CEO their delivered improvements each quarter. In front of their peers. (this really works)
  2. Fire your unprofitable customers – that means you need to make sure you know how much each of your customers costs to service and earns you in margin
  3. Fire your expensive consultants if they are not adding revenue or reducing costs by an amount well in excess of their fees. If you don’t know then fire them anyway. Re-assess every week. or day.

Phishing on Twitter

I received this DM from Wellington’s @andrewfantastic this morning:

Given the state of affairs with the NBR and so forth, I clicked on the link – hoping to see a lovely rant.

T’was not to be – instead Safari gave me this:

The URL is and if you click through the warnings then you will see a twitter login screen – albeit with the wrong url.

Checking out Andrew’s Tweet stream we can see that the last few tweets in particular are dodgy as anything – though I always view with suspicion anyone that twitters coherently at 4:34 in the morning:

The lesson is simple – don’t ever type your twitter long/password into another site.

NBR increases sales

It appears as though I made it to the front page of the NBR today.

It was in an article written to defend the seemingly arbitrary and certainly poorly implemented decision last week to charge outrageous fees for access to a part of NBR’s online content:

NBR publisher Barry Colman said the service was introduced last week to a barrage of criticism from most of New Zealand’s “amateur hour, self righteous and all knowing bloggers”

Now that phrase could be referring to anybody, and certainly the NBR’s behaviour caused many people to comment. But just to make sure I was including in the amateur self righteous and all knowing group Barry later said:

“The bloggers had a bad week. New subscribers are coming on every day and the gleeful announcement of one of them [that would be me] that our site’s hit rate had slumped was ruined with a quick check of the facts. Our visitor numbers were unaffected.”

It’s easy to argue with such prose – indeed I suggest that the article was written with this very much in mind. Why not wind the bloggers up, provoke a response, generate even more publicity for our expensive products, sell more newspapers and gain online subscribers? <as a commenter points out – we call this trolling>

Well – I have to confess in this instance Barry was right. The tactics worked and sales have risen.

That’s right – after being tipped off about the article I actually went and purchased an NBR this afternoon.

That makes two this year – so keep mentioning me and other online writers in your newspaper Barry and we will keep buying your paper.

You can still forget about the online subscription though.

Analysis or Opinion, Faith or Facts?

I had a good email exchange yesterday with a friend. It started after the Tuesday post on improvement – and my comment about switching from MYOB to Xero. My friend is a big MYOB fan, and challenged the assertion that Xero is better.

Now I happen to believe Xero is better as a result of meeting too many people that rave about it, knowing how good the people that work there now, worked there before and invested in the company are, and by seeing it in use by others. But that’s beside the point – as he said:

I thought consulting taught you to work on facts and not anecdotes!!!!

later on he also said:

As consultants we cannot constrain advice to what we have experience with….but if we give advice we should do analysis.

and then:

The issue I have with blogs is the kind of “no discipline” approach to writing. Its easy to have ideas but when you put facts behind them a lot of good ideas become bad ideas. How many time have you done consulting…had ideas…but when you use discipline and write them down…using facts…you end up discarding them.

Also the fact that I believe the problem of the world is not lack of information, but lack of proper analysis of information.

All good points. My take is that bloggers are not alike – and that some blogs find news, some add analysis to the news, and some add informed or uninformed opinion. Indeed some blogs are ‘faith based’ rather than fact based.

The more faith-based opinion blogs (which are often political) can be good fun to have a decent argument in, and the great ones generally get a lot of traffic from their fans and detractors alike.

The analysis blogs need to walk the line between writing insightful content and writing articles that will actually get read. It’s hard, takes a lot more work and boring prose is ever-threatening.

In reality we bloggers all do a bit of everything – using faith and fact as the basis of our analysis or opinion. I see it as a continuum.

And here I should present a chart showing popular Kiwi blogs on a continuum from fact based to faith based, and from rigorous analysis to canned opinion:


As you can see – it is empty.

I tried – I really did – but it is too hard and only going to get me pelted from all sides. Who wants to be ‘faith-based’?. What I should really do is make up a scoring system to measure each of the two axes, and systematically measure the top blogs in NZ and the USA.

That’s a great idea – but it would take time that I’d rather put into other things – but I will continue to mull the idea for a while.

Meanwhile aside from the occasional Valuecruncher, which stays consistently fact based and analytical, most bloggers vary from post to post. I would posit they we have to do this to stay interesting and insightful while being with fun to read and more importantly, fun to write.

So over on interest.co.nz/blog you will get boring fact based analysis on exchange rates (though I’d say that any analysis on short term exchange rates is faith based) along with highly charged opinion pieces, albeit with supporting facts, from Bernard.

WhaleOil meanwhile mixes facts and analysis into the polemic faith-based opinions, making for both entertainment and interesting reading.

No Right Turn and Kiwiblog (commenters aside) each operate from a particular faith-based angle, but they strongly support their opinions and analysis with facts and vary their posts across the spectrum. Both blogs make for entertaining, informational and insightful reading.

Personal blogs like this, Rowan Simpson‘s and Natalie at Simpleandloveable and many many others (I’ll stop there for risk of offending anyone I miss out – one reason I don’t do a blogroll) vary between the occasional rant, the odd bit of analysis, some genuine insights and the odd bit of personal news. They also operate across the spectrum.

What do you think – is this a chart and measurement system that could work? Do we care? What do we really want?