Zoopla for planning how to spend that lottery win

The classic long journey conversation of how to spend your lottery winnings always includes a chunk of time dedicated to your dream home and all the details down to where the pool will be located. This fantasy planning can be greatly aided by zoopla (www.zoopla.co.uk) that can help you find homes and prices for dream properties to let you know just how big a lottery win you need to make.  Go running down a picturesque lane where the houses are all hidden from view in idyllic settings. Whack the address into zoopla and find out how far out of reach that home is the. Head straight to the newsagent and purchase your trusty lottery ticket ready to wallow in misery on Saturday when no surprises you don't win. But the service of zoopla in understanding this dream is hard to knock and something that would have taken days of research in the past. The data and availability of this through the likes of zoopla is epic and we should not fail to recognise this. 

Amazon local - does anyone know what this is?

I have been an amazon (www.amazon.co.uk) customer for a number of years not put off by documentaries showing the pressures of the workforce but sold on the range of products and price. The store and corresponding services have grown beyond recognition from the original offering swallowing up businesses along the way. Since the start of this year I have seen a new product splattered all over my inbox from amazon for Amazon local. Why I have started receiving these emails I am not sure and the value proposition is not clear I assume it is more of the groupon type discounts that I steer well clear of. As a frequent amazon customer I would have expected them to value the position of the brand and not want to risk this with an existing customer base but they seem to have decided to start pushing this new service uninvited. As it is clearly still amazon I will associate it with the main company but at the moment as I have no idea why I am getting this or how it meets any consumer need I have the only impact it is having is annoying me and threatening the value I put on the main amazon brand. Epic fail. 

How a poor customer relationship management capability can reflect badly on a company

In an ever increasing digital age all companies are desperate to get greater stickiness with their customers seeking all manner of personal contact info and asking you to like their Facebook page and retweet their least catalogue but all this insight requires sophistication. Recently I blogged about a company where I was thrilled with their customer experience and could see an opportunity for them to market this capability harder to differentiate. I tagged a twitter link with the companies twitter ID so they would have the opportunity to hear my feedback and use as they wish. A few days later they send out a generic feedback request with links scattered all over it to social media sites but it is clear they are not listening. Eagerly scrabbling about for customer insight and failing to maintain the channels. Social media is a tough nut to crack corporately but if your going to join in the game then you really need to think through what that means to your other customer touchpoints and manage the customer journey. What was epic unfortunately becomes somewhat tainted. 

Bupa delivering when it matters

Private medical is something many of us have but are never really sure if its worth it renewing each year not quite brave enough to cancel. One provider of stealth medical to rival the UK nhs is Bupa (www.bupa.co.uk). They deliver private medical cover for an annual premium seeking to deliver where the nhs can't. Having never previously used the service I have been doubting if it were worthwhile having in the same period on occasion been genuinely pleased with the nhs on dealing with things. This week the customer experience of Bupa I can 100% confirm is worth it and absolutely epic. A member of family who had been ill for some time had the opportunity for surgery that could be exactly the remedy required but due to waiting times would have to wait until next year. The consultant pointed out that with private healthcare that time frame could be a few weeks wait instead. So phoning Bupa not sure what to expect got straight through to an agent who could verify who I was and confirm I was covered under my policy. Moreover they could authorise the surgery with a confirmation code for the surgeon and get the procedure booked in there and then. Amazing. Bupa literally to the rescue. No forms to fill in. No quibble over cover. No changes needed in terms of medical care. Just quick clear support. I may have been a doubter but will not question my renewal now. Epic. 

Top 10 epic fails

My top 10 epic fails in customer experience where the customer journey becomes shockingly bad. 

1) impossible contact options. Hidden in the depths is a contact number for a telephone locked away in a cupboard nobody will ever hear ring. Fail. 

2) over promised offers that fail to deliver. The hard sell enticement that lures you in only to mystically disappear upon entry. Fail. 

3) complexity to baffle even the most nerdy customer. Where am I in the digital journey and what am I supposed to do next?  Fail. 

4) love you then leave you. Huge attention right up to the point of purchase closely followed by absolutely nothing. Fail. 

5) spamming you for feedback after every touch point. Having made some effort to use their service you are then battered for feedback on how much you loved it even if you haven't done anything yet. Fail. 

6) Monday to Friday 9-5 with an hour for lunch and finish early every other Friday. When the opportunity to get some customer service is so restricted that you can never be around to use it. Fail. 

7) personalised journeys that completely miss the point. Offer me a discount on a new car when I am looking at bicycles. Fail. 

8) pricing that has a life of its own changing seemingly at random with little or no explanation and certainly nothing that could be understood by any normal individual. Fail. 

9) style over substance. Websites that swoosh and dazzle your eyes only to offer utter rubbish and tell you nothing meaningful about what your looking for. Fail. 

10) like me buttons on everything. Ooh you used our next page option. Like me! You looked at our page on opening times. Like me!  Fail. 

Heart rate based fitness

Conventional fitness training sees us pounding out the miles in order to achieve fitness anchored in achieving a distance at a target speed where we feel little motivation and even less when we are slower. An alternative is to use heart rate monitors to control your training and discipline yourself with this and a timeframe rather than distance. So for example on heading out for a run you will do an hours running at an aerobic rate (110 - 150 beats per minute) and build on this. It takes your training to a different level and you stop thinking so much about miles and speed and more about maintaining a controlled heart rate over a set timeframe. This ensures you are delivering the right aerobic or anaerobic training rather than pounding out the miles and probably sitting somewhere in between these and not really delivering much benefit. So how to monitor your heart rate?  I would recommend polar watches with a heart rate strap for accuracy (www.polar.com). They give you continuous heart rate reading that is wirelessly synchronised to your watch from the heart rate strap. Interesting samsung are keen on such thinking and announced the S5 with heart rate monitoring capabilities. Shift your fitness training to epic. 

Bathstore in house design service quietly delivers

Fitting out a bathroom is a vast array of complicated choices and design decisions that can leave you dithering between free standing baths and integrated shower heads until you ultimately give up. The bathstore (www.bathstore.com) has an in house design team who can take your room dimensions and help you model the bathroom there and then. Walk in with a vague idea of what you want and you could be walking out with bathroom picked and ready for install. The service goes beyond merely 2D overhead views of your room to a 3D walk in flavour of your bathroom complete with flooring choices, tiles, mirrors and walls painted to your preferred colours. This helps convert a maybe into a sale as you have confidence in what you are getting which is even more relevant where you are comparing different layout choices. This brilliant service is not hugely advertised and is free so no obligation to buy. It is an epic aid in the purchase process and something they could really market harder as it makes a huge difference for those this side of employing an interior design to make their feng shui informed room designs.