What do customers really want and train tickets.

If you are ever wondering why your customers are becoming harder and harder to deal with, before you start to blame them, maybe the reason is because you are not delivering to them what they really want.

This came up in a workshop I was in last week. I used the humorous comparison between buying paint with buying airlines tickets to show how complicated we can make things. As well I explained another classic example which happened to me just that same morning...

This workshop was in a city I travel to on a regular basis and I always use the train from the airport to the city center. The day return train ticket for the city costs $17.80. I have the choice of queuing up at the ticket booth which usually takes 10 to 15 minutes or using the ticket machines. As the ticket machines are quicker I try to have a $20 note on me so I can be on my way and catch the train which the monitor shows me is only 3 minutes away.

The problem is that sometimes the ticket machines run out of change and displays the words "Exact Change Only". When this happens a large queue forms behind the remaining machines until they also run out of change. There I am with my $20 in my hand, a train coming in 3 minutes and the ticket machine won't give me a ticket because it can't give me my $2.20 change.

What do I really want? To catch the train coming in 3 minutes.

How can we fix this? Many would think of more regular services on the ticket machines, but almost certainly the rail company has outsourced this task and the service levels are now based on cost savings and not customer service - see "outsourced luggage handling". Some might look to the technology answer and hook the machines up to credit card services. My thought was to add the option which said "Exact Change Only or Give us a Tip". This way I had a choice to forgo my change in order to make the train arriving in 3 minutes and the rail company makes a 10% premium. If anyone was worried about their change they could always queue up at the window and catch the next train or the one after that depending on the queue.

Well that morning they had come up with a different answer. I am not sure whether it was an intentional fix to the problem of ticket machines running out of change or just a happy coincidence.

That morning I didn't have to worry about my change as they had put the ticket price up to $20!

And yes I caught the train that was arriving in 3 minutes.

Wisdom of Crowds exercise with our Fund Raiser

Ok, ok, before you read this and say this guy needs to get a life, I already know.

We had a fund rasier at work were people had to guess the number of candies in a jar. After it was over, just like in James Surowiecki's book the "Wisdom of Crowds", I took all the guesses and did some analysis. The results;

• total number of estimations 104 (so it wasn't a big fund raiser)
• the correct number 567
• the average of all estimations (the crowds estimate) 515
• number of people better than the crowd 12
• number of people worse than the crowd 92

The crowd was better than 88% of all the estimates.

Travel Post 2 - Are you a terrorist?

It is was interesting to observe the different amounts of paperwork required when going through immigration at the various countries we travelled through.


Arriving in Paris I dutifully filled out a short list of questions that were pretty straight forward and seemed fairly reasonable. How long are you staying in France? Where are you staying? etc. Going through immigration the only thing we were asked for was our passports. I still have the filled out forms. Our passports were processed without any questions and off we went to collect our luggage. Having collected our luggage we walked straight out of the airport not seeing any hint of customs personnel.


The next test was America. One immigration form for each family member and one customs form for the whole family. A question on the form was, "Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide; or between 1933 and 1945 were involved, in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?" I wonder how many yes answers they get to this question?


Another question starts 'Have you ever been arrested or convicted for an offence or crime involving moral turpitude..." (this question is referred to in Wikipedia's explanation of moral turpitude)

Upon arrival we were all photographed and fingerprinted. The camera looked like a web cam bought at circuit city, blu-tacked to the glass divider. To help take our fingerprints we had to first place them on a wet towel which was sitting on the bench. All in all it looked like a pretty make shift job. The immigration officer was much friendlier than we remembered and processed us without fuss. The feeling I got was that they were a bit more relaxed because they were relying on the technology to do their job. I wasn't sure that was such a good idea. As a security friend once told me that if you are relying on technology as a gate keeper, like a logon password, and it is broken, the intruder suddenly gains a higher level of trust because they are assumed to know the password and therefore are trustworthy.

Japan also photographed and fingerprinted us but this time the technology looked purposed built. A combined camera and fingerprint device with a screen so that you could see what the camera saw.

Having filled in all these forms I couldn't help but think about the waste of the whole exercise. I wondered what happened to the filled in forms. What poor keyboard operator was sitting there typing them in. Or do they sit in a giant warehouse waiting for someone to break the law, you know like committing genocide, and their answers can be and will be used in a court of law against them. "Ah ha, you wrote that you have never committed genocide therefore you are even more guilty...."