What’s harder to find then a Nintendo Wii?

How about a Wii controller.

Of course, if you’re willing to shell out a ten more dollars, finding one that includes Wii Play seems to be a little easier, how convenient. It looks like Nintendo held back its stock of controllers for this release. All and all, it seems a little shady to me. Is this Nintendo’s way of getting more money for the controllers? That’s how it appears to me. Not a great way to build customer loyalty.

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Wii Need More Support for Channels

This past weekend I finally managed to find a Nintendo Wii. I have to say that the control scheme is pure genius. Being able to play golf, tennis, bowling, etc. the same way you do in real life is fantastic. The best part about this new system is my wife is totally hooked. Not since bringing home Tivo 6 years ago has she loved one of my tech gadgets so much. And just like when we got Tivo, she may end up being one of the Wii’s biggest advocates.

As I’ve played with the system more, there is one thing I’d love to see Nintendo do. That would be opening up the Wii channels to third-party developers. The Nintendo channels which range from useless, the new voting channel, to fun, the news and weather channels, can be good but it’s unclear if Nintendo will continue to make them better. For example, I’d like to see the weather channel provide more information such hour-by-hour or at least day-afternoon-night forecasts. Does Nintendo plan do make these channel better or do they consider them finished once they are available to all customers? I’d also love to have a media center channel that connected to by NAS (file server). Right now I’m experimenting with using the Wii browser for this but a channel would be more user friendly. The photo channel has potential but is limited by its SD card requirement.

Nintendo has the potential for a huge hit here but I don’t think they can accomplish this on their own. Hopefully they’ll open the system up to third party developers who can make this system really shine.

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Breaking the Corporate Intranet Mold

Four technologies that combined would make a perfect corporate intranet.

Wiki + Blog + Tags + Search = Corporate Intranet of the Future (the same might be true for Corporate Internet as well)

Is there a company that has figure out how to combine these technologies into one killer app?

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The Fall of the Corporate Intranet

Corporate intranets have been rendered useless by top-down management. This of course is by design. The original corporate intranet, circa 1995, broke down walls and had employees collaborating and sharing information without barriers. Those who feared this new monster quickly pointed to broken corporate standards and the risk that someone might post some top secret plans and they would know longer be top secret. So in comes the “experts” to protect all employees from themselves. These “protectors” disguise themselves as the protectors of corporate secrets and style guides. In reality, they are essentially helping employees to find their place in the organization and stopping this open collaboration health risk. Now, thank God, in the year 2007, we have rid ourselves of this madness and have a top-down approach to the corporate intranet that mimics how an organization should be run. A place where documents are logged and archived until eternity, where nothing can be found without attempting to use the search box, and important information is removed and stored locally on each employees computer for safe keeping. Thank you for making what could have been a revolutionary way of communicating within an organization, a place that everyone avoids until they need the latest HR documents once a year.

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The Value of Customer Communities

Shouldn’t a company’s web site be the first place you look for product support? Why isn’t it? At least for me, I’ve been to enough support sites to know that you are going to find much better information elsewhere on the web.

Yesterday, when I wanted to find out if I can run my D-Link NAS (DNS-323), which is a great product by the way, as a web server, I went straight to the web and found this forum. There is a lot of useful information here that you would never find at the D-Link site. Now I don’t want to pick on D-Link as most companies do the same thing. What I want to show is that companies need to embrace these communities and tie them into their own site. These are some of your best product evangelists. Companies should be looking to these communities to build conversations about their products.

Unfortunately, there seems to be too much fear. Companies fear backlash from people who use the knowledge on these sites to brick their system. I’d argue that there is much more to gain by working with and supporting such communities than there is in possible losses due to a few people who run into problems. There is also the potential for a huge savings in support costs just with the customers who have their questions answered by people you’re not even paying. Plus, if you add a D-Link voice to the community, you can foster a relationship with people which will build respect for your brand and continued success for future products.

If you want to find an example of this, check out DBSTalk.com. The DirecTv HR20 forum has an admin (Earl) who receives first hand knowledge from DirecTv on bug fixes, product updates, and service questions. Earl doesn’t work for DirecTv but the knowledge comes from them with a complete understanding of how it will be used. The value of this is amazing. Not only has it helped with all of the complaints about the product, but I’m sure it has saved the company thousands in service calls. DirecTv is also leveraging this community to beta test releases before it rolls out the final software. Although, there continues to be problems, this lone voice is invaluable to DirecTv. It’s just too bad that that they haven’t jumped into the conversation first hand. Or better yet, linked to DBSTalk.com from their support site.

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How Not to Treat Your Loyal Customers.

I’ve been a Sprint PCS customer for about 7 years now. I’ve always had great things to say about their customer service. They’ve always treated me well. When I was temporarily living in a hotel for 6 weeks, they comped all my overage minutes, no questions asked for 2 months. But now something has changed that is starting to annoy me. Over the past few months I’ve been receiving advertising text messages. I’ve never signed up to receive them and they come through similar to a voicemail notification which means I’m usually fumbling for my phone only to realize it’s another meaningless ad.

What I want to know is, what has changed? Like I said, I never received this spam for the first 6+ years of my service. Now I have to go figure out how to get off this spam list. Has Sprint ever heard of opt-in? Why should I have to do all the work? If this is going to be how Sprint treats its most loyal customers, then I’ll be finding another phone service. That Apple phone is looking better and better.

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Why I’m done with United.

United Airlines doesn’t stand a chance in the new world. They don’t have a clue how to do the little things.

I recently returned from vacation where I flew United from Boston to Honolulu. With the exception of the last leg of my trip, Chicago to Boston, I couldn’t help but feel like everyone that worked there had given up a long time ago. Perhaps I’ve been flying Southwest and Jet Blue too much. But after this trip I’m avoiding United the same way I avoid Delta and US Air and here’s why.

Reason #1

You can’t switch your seat from Economy to Economy Plus even if there are several open seats. On one of my flights, all of the economy seats were completely full while there were completely empty rows in Economy Plus (Economy seating with a couple more inches of leg room). The guy next to me tried to move to one of these empty rows (before even sitting in his assigned seat) and was kicked out by an flight attendant. Apparently, they keep track of what seats should be empty. Now I can kind of see the logic, since I’m sure United wants people to pay more money to sit in these seats and I’m sure they don’t want to upset the higher paying customers. However, if the row is empty and the plane is about to take off, you should be able to spread out and use the empty rows. Futher, if they want to be fair about pricing, then everyone should pay the same price for a seat in a particular section. It’s entirely possible that the guy trying to move from economy to economy plus paid more money for his seat then some people in the more expensive seating section. Where is the fairness there?

Reason #2

If you’re going to charge people for food, you should tell them when they buy the tickets not after they get on an 8 hour flight. I obviously haven’t flow United for a while or else I would have known this. I got on the plane for an 8 hour flight thinking they would actually serve a meal or get this, maybe two meals. Instead, I was treated with the option to buy 1 of 2 meals or 1 of 4 snack boxes for $5. Well I don’t like roast beef and an airline salad is not a meal. I looked through the snack options and decided one of those would get me through until we landed, barely (had I’d of known, I could have purchased a decent meal at one of many places at the Chicago airport). I don’t have a problem with charging for meals but the limited options need to be stated before you get on a plane for 8 hours. Also, I don’t see why there should be a charge for the snack boxes which Southwest and Jet Blue give away for free and basically add up to a bunch of random bags of goodies that are probably given to United for free in exchange for advertising them to their captivated (captured) audience.

Reason #3

My flight from Chicago to Honolulu was manned by flight attendants that gave up on customer service a long time ago. Drinks were served about an hour after take off and the drink cart was not seen again until 45 minutes before landing. In between, you had to get up and serve yourself. And if you had any trash you had to get up and throw it out on your own. I’ve never seen so many people getting up to serve themselves and clean up the plane. If United paid these flight attendants its ridiculous.

Reason #4

United’s system for updating you when your flight time has changed is pathetic. Now I fly enough to know that flight time changes are part of the industry. I didn’t think anything of it when I printed my tickets the night before and saw that the my flights had changed. It was after I got home from vacation and listened to my messages that I noticed one from United. They decided to call me 2 hours after my flight left to tell me that the flight time had changed from 7:45am to 7:00am. Thanks!!

What can United do?

Look at what Southwest and Jet Blue do to make you feel appreciated and copy it! Better yet, IMPROVE upon it. I like Southwest and Jet Blue but there is plenty of room for improvement in the industry.

Improve employee morale they’ll pass this new found happiness along to the paying customers. Hire people who want to work at United, know how to put the customer first, and treat people with respect.

Communicate with your customers. Tell them when the flight times change. Tell them you are charging for meals on an 8 hour flight. They may already know, but if they don’t, they’ll appreciate the notification.

Find a way to differentiate yourself. Right now, people’s mental model of United is “behemoth airline that lost its way, is losing money, tries to do more with less, and just wants to fill seats”. Why not try to be the “airline that treats people as people and makes a long journey seem like part of the vacation”.

The most important part, have fun!

There is still hope for United but it’s fading fast. I’m hopeful that someday this airline will turn things around but until that happens, I’ll stick with Southwest and Jet Blue whenever possible.

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