The telephone box at Westbury-sub-Mendip continues to connect people, but this time to books.  As the last strands of BT wiring were stripped out, the villagers brought the iconic phone-box for £1 and transformed it into a book exchange. You read a book and return it, or better still return it with another you have enjoyed. The shelves were full on the day I visited and I had the whole place to myself. There were some very fine novels, a few books on military campaigns, geography, animal husbandry, cooking, mechanical repairs and one on bee-keeping. The great thing was being able to browse knowing that the phone would never ring.

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Great Ideas

Waterstones, York, twenty minutes before closing time. I’d gone in to find a copy of George Orwell’s political essays. The woman at the counter referred to her computer and said ‘I think you’ll find there’s a copy in the Drama department on the second floor’. I searched the shelves to no avail and asked another member of staff if she knew where I could find a copy. ‘I think it’s in the creative writing section. Wait here and I’ll go down to the basement’. On the way down she asked another member of staff who went over and consulted his computer. Soon three members of staff were searching three floors to find me one £4.99 book. Minutes later it was triumphantly plucked out of a shelf in the political biography section and handed to me with a smile.  Isn’t it great when customer service exceeds your wildest expectations? On my way out I passed a glittering mound of Tony Blair’s ‘A Journey’ at half price.  If I was working for Waterstones’ promotions department, I’d have plonked down a large pile of ‘Why I write’ next to the Blair’s biography……

'Whatever happened to your cardigan, Arnold?'

I met a friend who loves reading and we exchanged notes.  ‘I buy all my books from Amazon these days.  I flick through them all and if there are any I don’t like I just return them and get my card refunded. Easy peasy’. ‘Don’t you ever think about using libraries?’ I replied.  ‘God no, they’re just full of wheezing old men in dufflecoats and the great unwashed checking their emails’ I felt it was a pretty unfair description and shared my enthusiasm for borrowing books rather than always having to buy them. He stared at me vacantly as if  I’d just declared my support for Belisha Beacons, Trilby Hats and Listen with Mother. And then it dawned on me.  He wasn’t just using Amazon as an on-line shop, he was using it as a library.

I think libraries are great, but they must crank up their on-line appeal if they are going to attract the internet generation.  My own portal into their parallel universe of  literature and knowledge is through Libraries West.  It is not, it has to be said, the most attractive website. It seriously undersells its benefits and doesn’t highlight the fact that you can, for the paltry sum of 65p, borrow any book in the country via their Inter Library loan service.   You have free access to the on-line version of Encyclopaedia Britannia too and they will text you when your book is ready to collect.   I wanted to read ‘Walks and Talks of an American farmer in England’ published in 1852.  They tracked down a single copy from the Town Planning library at Sheffield University and it was mine to read for three glorious weeks. And all for the princely sum of 65p!

On the subject of good writing, here is the winning tweet from the Hay Festival as selected by Stephen Fry: “I believe we can build a better world! Of course, it’ll take a whole lot of rock, water & dirt. Also, not sure where to put it.” Brilliant.

Driving home in the sweltering heat of last week I found myself behind a white van.  White van man had his elbow leaning out of the driver’s window in a rather languid pose.  On the back of the van was a small  panel advert – ‘Air-conditioning service from £35′ and a mobile number. Not only had the air conditioning unit in my car packed up, but my garage normally charged £80 for the service. I rang the number and a few seconds later the elbow shot in ”Hello – hang on a minute, I can’t hear you. Let me just  pull over into this lay-by‘.  His van pulled over and I followed him ‘Where are you calling from?’ ‘I’m right behind you’ ‘Oh my god that is spooky – are you the blue car?’ ‘Yes’ I replied ‘And anyway why is it spooky? I simply called the number you advertised on the back of your van’. He roared with laughter – and I was able to book a service on the spot. And an excellent service it was to – the car feels like a fridge now.  If you want to attract an impulse purchase put your mobile phone number on the back of your van and not just your email address.

There was a wonderful hardware store in Glastonbury that was a fountain of esoteric ironmongery knowledge.  You’d wander in with a widget that needed replacing and they would turn it over slowly and say ‘right, you’re going to need a need a 3/8th inch spigot with a 3/8th inch British Standard Whitworth male screw thread on each end‘. And they’d turn round to a shelf packed with small cardboard boxes and find a replacement within seconds.  ‘That’ll be 75p please‘.  Alas, the store has long gone and with it a lifetime of widget knowledge.  In those pre-internet days, I took in what had broken and they rapidly identified it and were, more often than not, able to replace it.

The other day I needed to buy an electronic component.  I couldn’t find the right website via Google, as my search enquiry sent me to endless directory websites. And then I thought why not just search for the image instead? The web equivalent of handing my widget over the counter to a man in brown overalls. I found it on the first page of Google images.  I was so grateful to have found the lead, that I purchased it on the spot.  I didn’t cross reference it in price comparison websites to find the cheapest price. Because the shop had added alt tags to their images, I was able to find it visually rather than on a traditional text based search – and the ease of that search turned me into an impulse buyer. Moral of story – make it easy for your customers to find your products and add .alt tags to your pictures!

...it cheap

When Jack Cohen set up his barrow stall to sell surplus groceries in the East End of London in 1919, he might not have believed that a new unit of measurement would be coined ninety years later.  The ‘Tesco’ is equivalent to £40billion.  Or to put it another way, Tescos is now worth  1/24th of the UK’s GDP.  Jack Cohen’s business motto was “pile it high and sell it cheap”, although this was quickly replaced with the saying “You Can’t Do Business Sitting On Your Arse”. He distributed items bearing the acronym “YCDBSOYA” to his sales force.  Add the square footage of their UK stores together and Tescos is larger than the State of Monaco.

An interesting report from the BBC on the sheer scale of Tescos.  Some good local news.  Despite receiving planning permission they decided not to proceed with a store (on stilts) in Glastonbury, where many small local retailers thrive. We have an excellent butcher, baker, delicatessen, a lively weekly market and a whole-food store that has taken over the old Woolworths store.  Exactly the sort of retail environment that Jack Cohen would have been familiar with in 1919. Long may it continue.

choo choo

The other day I brought a return ticket from St.Pancras to Canterbury from the First Great Western website. When I arrived at St. Pancras to collect my ticket, the machine refused to print it out. I missed my connection, had to reschedule my meeting at the University, purchase a replacement ticket and wait an hour and a half for the next train. Feeling rather aggrieved at having spent £60 instead of £30 I rang First Great Western Customer Services only to be told that they would refund my original ticket price less a £10 administration fee. “But it wasn’t my fault!” I explained. “Sorry” they said, “you purchased your ticket from a machine owned by another Train Operating Company (how was I to know?) and you will have to direct your complaint to them”.

I then received a tediously jobsworthy email explaining, in the most granular detail, what a complex operation it was to process my humble refund. I was told how many accounts payable ledger clerks were involved, the number of inkwells and quills used, what security verification and external audit systems had to be deployed and finally I was given a postal address in Plymouth to reclaim the £10 administration fee. At the end of the email there was a P.S. *** Your feedback is really important to First Great Western so we would be very grateful for a couple of moments of your time to complete our customer satisfaction survey. *** I resisted the temptation. You see, at the end of the day it wasn’t about £10. It was about a missed opportunity to make one of their passengers feel happy. And happy customers are the best free marketing resource any business can have.

Engraved on the doors of the Amazon warehouse entrance is Jeff Bezos’s motivational phrase to all his employees ‘Work hard, have fun, make history‘.  Just below this notice (and written in invisible ink), is the following addendum  ‘and thanks for making me a multi-billionaire in the process‘. The growth of Amazon has been truly phenomenal.  From a two-bedroom house in Seattle in 1994, with extension leads running into the garage to power the servers, to a global business now serving 45 million customers.

When I’ve run e-commerce seminars, one of the questions I regularly ask delegates is ‘What do you think is the secret of Amazon’s success?’  Almost everyone says – ‘ the low prices’ or ‘the range of stock they carry’.  I then bring up the quote from Jeff Bezos himself, which underpins the Amazon philosophy – ‘Amazon.com is obsessively focussed on great customer service‘. It is a sentence that should be enshrined in the heart of every e-commerce entrepreneur.

It is hard to believe that when Amazon started receiving its first online orders, the programmers coded a small electronic beep to sound in the office every time an order arrived.  Every beep was greeted with a loud cheer in the Amazon office. It wasn’t long before they had to switch it off. Permanently.