Is Diners Club listening to the Groundswell?

A different type of diner’s club ;-). Photo credit to MamaT
A rant about not being able to get my money from Diners Club – the charge card people.
Set of bullet points to summarise the situation (from my perspective, of course):

• I have over-conscientiously credited £550 to my Diners Club account – i.e. to pay off what I thought was an outstanding balance
• I would like the money back – i.e. I don’t want to spend it
  
  • Anyway, not many places actually take Diners
  • I’m not staying in hotels, so haven’t got any big ticket things to spend the balance on…
• I first start asking for my money to be wired to my current account, probably back in October
  
  • however, there’s some technical issue or other
• I also wanted to pay off my credit card – but they couldn’t do that either
  
  • I thought the credit card was owned by the same company, but I now find that Diners Club has been sold by Citigroup [find out who has bought them]
• Because it hasn’t happened, I’m wondering whether Diners Club is deliberately retaining my credit balance because they are affected by the Credit Crunch
  
  • I’m rather worried I’m not going to see the money again
• Supervisor
  
  • There never seems to be a supervisor to talk with
  • I have been promised a supervisor call-back on two occasions – it hasn’t happened
  • Either they haven’t called, or they haven’t called my mobile
  • Presently I have no messages on the landline number they have for me, and I don’t recall their supervisor calling on my mobile
• That said, Diners have a great first line
  
  • Plaudits especially to Juliet – extremely helpful, patient and courteous
  • Also, Shirley
  • There’s no point having a pop at the call centre people – they are told to speak to a script, and have little discretion.

Anyway, I have no confidence in Diners Club as an organisation, and I’m writing this because I want my money back!
The title of this blog relates to whether I will get satisfaction from Diners Club in the UK because they are listening to people like me to blog and tweet about corporations – although I think not.
If that’s the case, then I will use this post in future to agitate for better Customer service through social media tools like Twitter etc..
I have posted to my personal blog, as it’s a personal matter, but it could be an interesting case study!
I’m going to get in contact with their UK head office – Google led me to this post with contacts details for the Chief Executive’s complaint wrangler.
Update: I've hopefully removed all the apostrophe's from Diners, apart from the photo credit...

Technorati Tags: incompetence,charge card,finance,useless,customer service,diners club,muppets

My skills as a Business Consultant

A quick bulleted list to give readers an idea of what I have to offer:

Consultancy skills

• Business Change: deep understanding of how to combine people, process, and technology to achieve business outcomes—with the emphasis on people
• Business consultancy: Strategic and technical IT consultancy from a programme viewpoint; business / process analysis and design; report writing and presentation delivery
• Benefits management: Experience of Fujitsu’s Benefits Realisation methodology, which focuses on business outcomes, and creates network of activities to assure delivery of business benefits
• Business networking: active business school Alumnus and business networker (online and face-to-face).
• Project delivery: architecture and design; technology selection; team-worker and leader
• Project management: project planning and basic financials; awareness of PRINCE 2 methodology

Business Understanding

• IT Strategy and Governance; Peer collaboration, Financial Services regulation; Corporate Performance Management.; Virtualisation; Enterprise Application Integration & Web Services, Business Process Management, Virtual Worlds; IT Architecture; J2EE and Application Servers

Technical

• Internet protocols and infrastructure; Collaboration platforms and online communities; Windows Operating Systems (MCSE 1999); Database Systems; Gadgets of all kinds

Grasp of Business and Technology Marketspace

• Through reading The Economist; McKinsey Quarterly, Harvard Business Review; subscription to various Industry Sector and Technology newsletters and blogs

Props to Hugh Macleod

Technorati Tags: business,technology,consulting,skills,benefits,return on investment

Google Advert trial

This post summarises learnings from a free trial for Google Adwords. I'm experimenting with it to generate traffic for this blog. It's been an interesting learning experience.

I subscribe to Information Age, an computer-related technology magazine. In a recent mailing, I also received a marketing flyer from Google, featuring a company called Wriggly wrigglers - you may also have seen it if you're in the UK.

The freebie part was a £30 voucher, so I thought I'd have a go. The time limit is the end of June '08, so thought I should get cracking.

I've gone some fairly idiosyncratic posts on here, e.g.: Locked In syndrome, Mobile Cranes, choosing adverts, Psychology experiments. I thought they be a good way of reaching a specific audience. Besides, these are things I'm interested in.

So lessons learned so far:

• I've done a general ad and two specific ones (Zimbardo & Milgram, Locked In syndrome)
• When you sign up, you start with Starter edition
• This is probably only good for setting up your account
• Otherwise, Starter edition, you want Standard - no price difference apparently - this is the comparison
• With the Starter edition, you can run variations of the same ad, but I wanted to run ads on different keywords, so you *have* to upgrade to get this functionality.
• You can choose "bundles" of Countries
• Basically, I've chosen English-speaking countries from around the World, with some Scandinavian ones (and Spain, I like Spain)
• I've got it running for a month, although need to check regularly - you have to give them a way of payment (they want to wean you and hope you forget you're paying)
• The "cost per click" is supposedly optimised by Google - but quite a lot of my keywords seemed not to be active because of 1p minimum Google has chosen
• It's one Campaign - multiple ad groups (i.e. ads for different posts
• The usability is actually pretty good, decent tools
• A fat pipe would be nice, saves lag between pages when you're setting everything up (although you can download software to do things offline)
• Demographics
• You can target 10 year cohorts (e.g. 0-17 years)
• Site and Category Exclusion
• You can choose to be excluded from various sites / pages, e.g. "Death & Tragedy"
• Also certain page types - e.g. Parked domains
• There was a £5 "Activation fee", so I've only got £25 to spend
• There seems to be a daily cap on spending
• "I already have a Google Analytics account. Please link it to this AdWords account"
• Nice, already have the Analytics code on my blog, I can link automatically to it, and Google joins it all up. :-D

One other thing - I've linked to my original "Diving Bell & the Butterfly" post, so I've updated that to give links to posts 2 & 3...

I'll report back about how I get on!

BT customer's YouTube complaint

My friend Matthew Rippon recently introduced me to Nina Belk at Zest Innovation.

Nina and co-founder Laura Williams help organisations understand how Customers perceive the service they receive (or don't). At Fujitsu, I have a colleague who leads a Practice doing the same sort of thing.

I reckon that most organisations find it difficult to understand things from the outside in, which is why they need help -- and why the article linked to in the title made me smile (wryly).

The reason for the smile is that Caroline (my Partner - and she of the Prince and the Queen link to the right), has been trying to cancel her BT broadband connection for the last 10 months.

The connection doesn't work (and only ever has done very intermittently) but she can't get through to the blighters to pack it in!

So they carry on direct debiting her account, and she's unlikely to see the money again as the BT Customer Service experience is so dire. She's complained repeatedly and got nowhere. Bah! :-(