Archives / July 2008

Set the scene: onboard JetBlue flight 644, SFO, awaiting pull-out from the gate to taxi toward the runway.

The captain comes on. "Bad news, folks, there's weather in the New York area today. Practically shut down Kennedy earlier. We're looking at a delay of three or four hours." Groans.

Thankfully, we're allowed to deplane and wait at the gate. But within a couple of hours, irritated passengers start murmuring. "It's not true, you know. Kennedy was shut down for all of ten minutes, but it is accepting flights right now. Just not from JetBlue, because their operations ran late. It's their own fault that we can't fly."

"Delta and Virgin America flights just left for JFK."

"This happens to me every time I fly JetBlue."

"You know what's a great airline? Virgin America."

I check New York weather on my iPhone: sunny and clear.

Passengers stand in clusters, sharing information from cellphones and wireless laptops. Pretty soon the customers are telling each other that the flight will probably be cancelled. Then: the website shows the flight is cancelled. But no word from the JetBlue reps at the gate.

Finally the reps announce what everyone knows already: flight cancelled. Please stand in line to re-book. That's 152 passengers for two gate reps. "Or you can call our 1-800 number." Passengers in line yell back that the phone line isn't accepting calls. People are getting angry and momentarily mob the gate desk before a sullen gate rep restores order. One irate passenger yells down at the desk from a balcony as he heads out.

The last time I saw this low level of order and morale was at a Continental gate in the early 90s, at the bottom of its slide. This is not the reps' fault, nor the pilots' fault - they're all just following orders. But it is the fault of the organization. JetBlue is sick.

It's quite a change from just a few years ago, when I heard people on American Airlines flights talking about how good JetBlue was. Friends and family told me about JetBlue. Our Council members voted JetBlue a Copernican award. I praised JetBlue, too.

But all of that history, all of that "brand-building," means nothing in a world where the customer experience means everything. I mean today's customer experience. If those passengers could have torn up their virtual JetBlue frequent flyer cards to board a Virgin America flight right then to JFK, there would have been a long line at the Virgin America desk. The basics of the customer experience - on-time departure, on-time arrival - are so much more important than any marketing nonsense on a billboard or TV commercial.

I don't know when JetBlue changed. Maybe it was their switch to different equipment a few years back. Maybe it was the departure of the visionary founder David Neeleman last year. Maybe it's when they invested millions in ads this year, focused on the word "jetting."

Funny how no one at the gate said, "Hey, cut JetBlue some slack - at least we're jetting, not flying."

Let this be a reminder to anyone at a customer-focused company: customer experience isn't a one-time thing. It requires constant, constant, constant focus on the basics. A slick ad campaign counts for next to nothing, unless it describes the benefits of the customer experience. And it may even be harmful, if it diverts resources away from the customer experience.

Meeting the basic, key unmet needs of the customers in your niche is everything. Do it today, do it tomorrow, do it every single day of your operations, and then (and only then) you'll have a good chance to succeed as a customer-focused firm.

As for me, at that JetBlue gate: I was lucky to be near the front of the line, so I was able to rebook to fly back after a delay of almost two days. Who knows when the people in the back ever got home.

Back at home, I called JetBlue to inquire about compensation. Extra hotel, food, and cab charges cost several hundred dollars: what was JetBlue prepared to do?

Answer: nothing. Why? Weather. Or as the phone rep nicely put it:

"It wasn't our fault."

- - -

See also:

• About that new ad campaign

• Broken: JetBlue error message

• Evaluating organizations by their customer experience

• Copernican Awards 2005 recap

David Pogue has an enjoyable rant on kiosk interfaces, including the Delta Air Lines check-in kiosk:

You come up, you swipe your credit card. That alone ought to tell the kiosk who you are, and it should therefore know what flight you’re checking in for.

But no, it plays dumb. It asks you to key in your destination. So you type in “SAN” for San Francisco. And it asks you: San Francisco, San Diego, or San Juan? Oh, I don’t know–how about THE ONE YOU HAVE A RESERVATION ON!?

Also includes examples from taxi cabs and the old Palm Pilot. Pogue gets it right on every one of them.

See also: Evaluation organizations by the customer experience

For visitors to NYC, some resources for events and activities...

• Manhattan User's Guide
• Flavorpill New York
• River to River events (summer only)
• The Economist's New York guide

...any other resources I missed, post in comments...

10 things to stop worrying about - NYT:

For most of the year, it is the duty of the press to scour the known universe looking for ways to ruin your day. The more fear, guilt or angst a news story induces, the better. But with August upon us, perhaps you’re in the mood for a break, so I’ve rounded up a list of 10 things not to worry about on your vacation.

Go ahead and use plastic bags, turn on the car's AC, and (yes, really) buy fruit from Chile and New Zealand.

I love how this sign aged. (Spotted on a Hertz airport bus a few days ago.)

Over at edge.org they're debating whether War and Peace matters any more, in this age of infinite information. After all, people just don't have time to focus on anything longer than a Twitter message.

It's an interesting question, underlining the need for bit literacy - the skill to thrive amidst an avalanche of data. Ultimately the law of supply and demand will hold true: those few who know how to read - not just scan a feed on Twitter or Facebook, but read - will build a strong intellectual foundation.

In an age of breadth, depth will be rare and valuable - and rewarded.

P.S. Twitter has arrived on Main Street with a front-business-page story in USA Today.

Update: The NYT, on July 27, published Online, R U Really Reading? about how the Internet changes how adolescents are reading (or not).

The good folks at DailyLit have packaged my 60 favorite Good Experience columns and essays into one subscription.

Here's how it works: Sign up for free, and you'll get a column via email every weekday (or MWF, or seven days a week - your choice).

The columns start with some interviews I conducted in 2002 in advance of the first Gel conference - then move into foundational essays on customer experience, technology, transforming the organization, and community.

DailyLit also serializes novels - many of them for free - such as The Three Musketeers, Pride and Prejudice, several books by Cory Doctorow, and many others. I've been a fan of this service since it launched.

Get Good Experience columns on DailyLit.

MIT's Sloan Management Review on the effects of outsourcing:

We analyzed the offshoring and outsourcing activities of 150 North American companies and business units from 1998 to 2006. As a group, those that outsourced customer service saw a drop in their score on the American Consumer Satisfaction Index ... The declines were roughly the same whether companies outsourced customer service domestically or overseas. ACSI scores tend to move in the same direction as companies' share prices.

Companies that outsourced customer service tended to see a share price drop of 1% to 5%.

(Thanks, Phillip)

Slides from my talk on bit literacy this morning:

| View | Upload your own

This was at the inaugural meeting of the Information Overload Research Group.

See also: Bit Literacy

A lawyer's take on bit literacy and Gootodo. (Positive review, likes the mail-the-future option.)

Music video featuring the googlephrases of "biggest regret." I introduced googlephrasing here four years ago in this post.

(For example, "is the best movie i've ever seen in my life" and "is the worst movie i've ever seen in my life" came back with interesting responses. Lots of readers pitched in as well with their own googlephrases.)

I decided to revisit one googlephrase I ran four years ago, to see how the answers have changed.

As answered by Google results, "the thing I hate most in the world is"...

• the lack of peace

• injustice

• hypocrisy

• getting stuck in a rut

• hanging indents I don't format myself (referring to Microsoft Word)

• a girl out looking for a husband

• to be lied to

• painting

• rogers and hammerstein's "oklahoma"

- - -

See also: Introducing... Googlephrasing (March 2004)

Sometimes manipulation can be used for good: the NYT reports that marketers ran a campaign to increase soap usage in Ghana, and it worked. This was different from preachy PSAs ("use soap to decrease disease"), instead relying on marketers' tricks of getting consumers to form habits around buying and using product.

The article includes a case study of Febreze, a furniture spray that almost failed until Procter & Gamble figured out how to manipulate customers into making it part of their daily routine. Great quote from a P&G psychologist:

we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before.

... in other words, they ran out of products that people actually need - so now they think up new "needs," invent products to fulfill them, and manipulate consumers to form habits around the product.

Thus the same process that increased hand-washing in Ghana, saving thousands of lives, vastly increased the sales of a furniture de-smelling spray.

Manipulative marketing is neutral, like any other tool. We have a choice of what we'll use it for. What are the outcomes you'll spend your life to create?

See also:

• Deception considered helpful

• Truth in packaging: Pirate's Booty

Following up on these overviews of the book industry, I thought I'd share some lessons I learned from publishing Bit Literacy. I originally tried to go through mainstream publishers but eventually self-published it, because of what I learned in the process. I wish I had known everything below before I wrote my book.

Here's what you should know about how most - not all - publishers work:

• They're not doing it for the love of books. Publishers want something that sells. Similarly, bookstores want something that sells. Publishers and bookstores want a book that sells early, sells often, and sells for a long, long time. If they don't think your book will sell, they won't pay much attention.

• Conversely, if your book will sell, it doesn't matter what you're writing about. You could write something boring, or irrelevant, or nothing at all - just a blank set of pages with a coffee stain on them will work fine, if the book sells. Do you get the picture? It's not about any high-minded ideals of literature, or craft, or changing the world - publishers and bookstores want something that sells. Drop any illusions about spending time with book lovers; this is business.

• When you approach publishers with an idea, your main job - practically your only job - is to explain very clearly why the book is going to sell. (Here it really helps if your last name is Clinton.) If you're not a known author or celebrity who can guarantee some sales, then it's best to come in with a clearly defined, market-tested book idea... not to say a knockoff of a bestselling concept or a me-too book on a hot trend, heavens no, we'd never do that, just maybe something "inspired by" a successful book.

• What did you say... you want to do something original? Wait wait wait. Did you not read anything I've written already? "Original" means "risky," which to publishers and bookstores means "it might not sell." IT MIGHT NOT SELL? Oh boy... maybe you could consider doing a cookbook? Or could you become famous and then send out your idea?

• If you do get a publisher interested in your idea, you should know now what the deal will be. You write the book, you promote the book - in other words, you create the product and sell it - and in return, the publisher will allow their name to appear on the book jacket. Oh, and the publisher keeps most of the money - since, they'll remind you, they assumed all the risk in the project.

• Don't write a book for the money. As the author, you can expect to make about a dollar on every copy that sells. The publisher makes several times that, so they make a nice profit with as few as, say, five thousand copies sold. Books that sell ten or fifteen thousand are rare, and considered strong sellers. So let's say you strike gold. After working on your book for a year or more, are you going to be happy with a payday of ten to fifteen grand?

• Incidentally, don't expect your royalty check right away. The publisher gets paid first, by the bookstores, and the publisher may then hold on to your money for several months before they part with any of it. Yes, this is legal: it's in the publisher's contract. Not getting paid may be a bummer for you, but it's a great deal for the publisher, since they make interest on the float (all the money they owe to their authors) - which is another profit stream. They'll claim one reason for the delay is the sheer administrative challenge of cutting a check within three months (so many authors to keep track of! so many payments!)... a less ridiculous reason is that they have to wait to see whether bookstores are going to return unsold copies of your book for a full refund (an arrangement that I describe more below).

• As for how you get those sales... that's your job, as I said above. Wait: you thought the publisher was going to sell and distribute your book? No no no. Their job is to put their name on the book jacket, fulfill orders and accept payment from bookstore orders (which come from your sales efforts), keep most of the money, and then, several months later, cut your small royalty check.

• By now you should be convinced that you have to sell your own books. If you're not a Clinton or other celebrity, the best way is if you have a following online - via a blog or newsletter - that you can sell the book to, by linking to the book's Amazon page. That way the publisher can just sit back and watch the money roll in, as you write and sell the book yourself. Don't rely on the publisher to sell your book. They probably won't sign you as an author, anyway, unless they know that you have a way of selling the book yourself.

• Another way to sell your book is to get it into physical bookstores. This isn't the best sales route, but it's worth describing. Two ways into a bookstore: (1) pay the bookstore for placement - you didn't think those books were displayed prominently because the store employees like the book, did you? ... or (2) convince the buyer for the bookstore chain that your book will sell, sell, sell, and so she should place a big order for your book.

• The buyer is the one single person who determines what's on the shelves in all of the stores in a chain, for a given book type. The business section in every Barnes & Noble store in the country takes orders from a single buyer. For a given category, Borders has a buyer. Wal-Mart has a buyer. Even so-called "indie" bookstores have a (single) buyer for that category. I'd guess that over 90% of the business books on the shelves in all the bookstores in the US are chosen by a half-dozen people.

• If you can convince the buyer to carry your book in their chain, you'll have some distribution. (Not sales, to be clear, but a step closer.) But how do you contact one of those half-dozen supremely important people? You need entry. The buyer doesn't have time to talk to every individual author in the US about their half-baked book idea... there needs to be a gatekeeper to filter for surefire sellers.

• You can guess who that gatekeeper is: the publisher. If you sign with a big enough publisher, you have the chance - not the guarantee - of getting some - not necessarily much - distribution in some - not necessarily more than one - national chain, where customers will have the chance, on a shelf somewhere in the store, to come across your book and maybe buy a copy. As I said, it's not the best sales route. (And it's not a compelling reason, on its own, to sign with a publisher.)

• What's more, publishers have limited resources for the (usually) enormous list of authors they sign, so publishers focus only on a very few A-list authors. The majority of their list gets very little support. And if you have to wonder whether you're one of the chosen few, you just got your answer. (Why, then, do publishers sign so many authors, if they can't support more than a few? Same reason gamblers play the numbers in roulette - you never know which long-odds bet might win big. Besides which, authors are signing on to write and sell their own work, so it's a pretty good deal for the publisher anyway.)

• Incidentally, if the book sits too long, unsold, on the bookstore's shelf, the bookstore will return it to the publisher for a full refund. Once again, distribution is not the same as sales, although it can be a step in the right direction.

• If you do find an interested publisher, they'll hand you a contract. Read every word of the publisher's contract, and get your lawyer to do the same. Many things in the contract are negotiable, though the publisher won't tell you that upfront. But you'd be a sucker to sign the first draft of the contract.

• Up to this point you will have been talking to an editor at the publisher, and if you're at the contract stage you probably have a good rapport with him or her. Such a nice person, the editor wouldn't try to shaft you, would they? Well... they don't write the contract; that's the job of the contracts manager. This is someone who's never met you, who doesn't particularly care whether your book gets published or not, and whose responsibility it is to secure the very best terms for the publisher. Furthermore, their job is to write contract after contract, day after day, ad infinitum, and so anything you ask out of the ordinary, any change from their best-terms-for-publisher template, will be a major pain for them.

• Years ago, before I was fully educated about publishers, I let two different books die at this stage - because the contracts manager couldn't (or wouldn't) fix some truly boneheaded wording in the template. I'm glad I made that decision. If the contract process doesn't go well, walk away. This is the most attention your publisher will ever give to you - remember, after this, it's up to you to write and sell the book - so if they can't be reasonable in the contract, it's really not going to go well later, when it's time to publish the book.

• You can also hire an agent to seek out and negotiate with a publisher for your book idea. This can shield you from some of the hassle of contract negotiations, but the basic arrangement is still in place. You write it, you sell it, and the publisher keeps most of the money. (The agent, for their efforts, gets a percentage of your royalties.)

• You may see now the author's dilemma. Publishers and bookstores are in it for the money. But you, the author, can't be in it for the money - it doesn't pay enough. You should write a book because you believe in it. And that's the trouble: what you love isn't necessarily what publishers believe will sell. If you can find a topic that you love and that will sell in the market, well then, go forth and type. You're one of the lucky ones.

• You may not want a publisher to handle your book. After all, you have write the book, you have to sell the book, while the publisher may get you some distribution that may lead to a little bit of sales. Meanwhile, the publisher gets most of the money - and can pay you months later, according to the contract, which they wrote. It's just not a great deal for you, unless you're a celebrity or known author and can negotiate more equitable terms.

• The good news is that there are other options than finding a publisher. You can self-publish, as I did with my book Bit Literacy - or you can publish your content online for free (via a blog, for example). It depends on your goals. If I have time for a followup post in the future, I might write about the pros and cons (mostly pros) of self-publishing.

I just hope this helps some aspiring authors out there. As I said, I wish I had known this before I wrote my book.

See also: Seth Godin's advice for authors

Using rice as pixels makes for cool art. The refresh rate isn't very fast, though. (via)

If you're reading Good Experience on our RSS feed, you might have missed these recent job posts on our Jobs Board:

• The Motley Fool is looking for a Front End Web Developer. (VA)

• Myspace seeks a director of business development. (CA)

• Sirius Satellite Radio is looking for a Web producer. (NY)

There are several other recent job posts, too - here's the website and the RSS feed for Good Experience Jobs.

Also don't miss the latest from Good Experience Games (website, RSS):

• Totem Destroyer

• Hedgehog Launch

...and several others.