To serve or not to serve ... that is the question

 

Number 1: how to retain a customer

Back last September, the heating system was having a few hiccups so I went to the local Screwfix Limited store (they had late opening) and purchased a fan heater over the counter.   It was fairly late, fairly cold and I still had work to do.

This December the heater broke down.  Being me, I took it apart to find out why.  A connector had not been properly insulated and had burnt through.  Naturally, of course, I couldn’t find the invoice (in my haste to use the heater I think I must have thrown in away in the packaging).  I resigned myself to writing off the cost.  In any event, according to the warranty I had voided that by
opening the casing.

I was concerned however about the manufacturing fault and so emailed Screwfix with photographs of the damaged component.  They replied asking for the purchase order number.  “Hello”, I thought, “this is going to be a bad experience” but I emailed back saying I didn’t have any purchase documentation. I told them them where and when I purchased the heater and I wasn’t trying to claim on the warranty, but I wanted the manufacturer to know that there could be a manufacturing fault.

The next day I got a reply.  Screwfix had traced my purchase, had credited back the purchase cost to my bank account and given me a voucher for a future purchase on top of that.  They had also checked their records of complaints and were satisfied it was one off fault.

Needless to say, I was impressed.  I’ve told others therefore about this and I am writing this blog to expand that reach.  They deserve it.  And I will be back to them again.

Number 2:  How not.

I have a set of headphones I use for video conferencing.  I’ve had them for years.  Not surprisingly their usage has gone up rather a lot recently.  In December, the foam ear-pieces started to fall apart.  The particular headphones were no longer made and it wasn’t clear from the manufacturer’s website which of their current ear-pieces would fit.  They don’t show dimensions on the web-site, of course, that would be too helpful: they only show part-numbers.  Pre COVID I would have called into a shop and asked.  But at present, there was nothing for it but to email the manufacturers.  

“Can you give the model number?” they responded. 
“Yes,”  I replied, “I already did in my original email along with the dimensions of the ear-pieces I need.”

“We don’t make that model any longer” they said.  “I know!” I replied, “I’m asking whether any of the ear-pieces you make for existing models would fit.”
“We’ll get back to you”….

Three days later I got an email:  “Which of the new models would you like ear-pieces for?”
“I DON’T KNOW.  I’m asking you.  Please – ears have not changed that much in shape in ten years, something must fit.”

I’ve still not had a reply.  How difficult is it to look at the dimensions I gave and compare them with those of the models they currently make?  Apparently extremely difficult.

In any case, we’ve made some replacements ourselves which work.  I’m not throwing away a perfectly good set of earphones because of incompetent sales people.  They’ve lost a small sale but, more importantly, I won’t be buying anything else from them for a long while.

Motto:  treat your customers with respect.

A less scrappy business

 

We have a Vauxhall Zafira which is now a few years old.  It ran perfectly until it failed its MOT as a small valve switch on the engine management system was acting up.  It didn’t actually stop the car from running but it meant that emissions could potentially breach ULEZ limits. 

The car is used for transporting lots of “junky” stuff for various projects and we would like to still have use of it.  Partly because of the expense of replacement, partly because we are quite fond the vehicle which has give us years of service, but mainly because the idea of replacing a whole car for the sake of a £50 component is simply horrible. 

But Vauxhall have stopped making the part.  All the spares companies have done likewise and we can’t find a breakers yard who will get one from a scrapped vehicle.  So it looks as if we will be forced into buying a new vehicle and scrapping the old.

This is, of course, what car manufacturers like us to do.

And it’s not only car manufacturers.  A component of our curtain rail (in a large bay window) broke.  It was a small plastic piece no more than a couple of centimetres long. You know where I am going with this: it’s no longer made and the equivalent component in the replacement system is incompatible (“improved” in sales-speak).  We could of course buy a whole new curtain rail, have it moulded to shape and installed at a cost running into hundreds of pounds. 

This does have a happy ending (I wish the first example could).  Our son had access to a 3D printer and we scanned the parts of the broken component in, tidied it up in FreeCAD, and printed a new one.  Works perfectly.  Cost: 3 hours of spare time (mainly learning how to use FreeCAD) and about £1 worth of plastic or less; installation time 10 minutes.  So if we can make replacements to order, why can’t the company?  At the very least, it could publish the template for such components so consumers could print them directly.  It won’t, of course, it wants the profits from forcing us to buy new.

I loathe, as you may gather, the throw-away society.  So it comes with some relief to read that IKEA has seen the light and plans to sell replacement parts such as chair legs and arm rests for its furniture, although those plans are at an early stage.  The company already buys back certain used items, such as its Billy bookcases, for resale or recycling if they cannot be sold, but this is a welcome extension of sustainability from the world’s largest furniture business.

As consumers we need to encourage all other businesses to ensure that their products are repairable and reusable for longer.  We need to look at retaining and repairing products rather than disposing of them.  Landfill sites are still full of mobile phones, upgraded every year by throwing away the old and buying the new.  The seas are full of micro-plastics much of which comes from plastic
clothing, worn for a season or two and discarded.  I could go on.  I confess that I have my own limits on ecology:  the car is too useful to give up, but manufacturer could do a lot more to help us (and the planet) and it is up to us to insist they do.  So, well done, IKEA. 

How has Excel faired - a five year review

 

 One of the few blogs I have retained from my old collection was my wishlist for changes to Excel that I raised at a meeting with Microsoft back in 2015.  Which of my wishes has come true?

     First, let me say, Excel has added a whole lot of stuff which makes it a far better product than it was then and I wouldn't now be without.  Of the many changes, I rate the following as the star points:

• Power Pivot and M-language which allows a much greater ability to import all sorts of data and manipulate it without resorting to VBA
• Dynamic arrays
•  XLOOKUP() – well overdue although limited use in production spreadsheets until it has been rolled out to everybody and, indeed, the same with LET() and LAMBA()
•  Stocks and Currency Data types and the now in-test historical stock information (admittedly only replacing what we had once upon a time before the plug was pulled on it)
•  Slicers, Timelines and new chart types
•  Much more flexibility in building dashboards via BI
•  Better collaboration tools with notes and comments.

That said, almost all I wished for five years ago still isn’t there.  There remains a real lack of tools for structuring and documenting spreadsheets: no notes pages, no easy way of keeping track of linked spreadsheets or documenting ranges and no way of linking conditional formatting or data validation to styles.

My second set of wishes were to do with spreadsheet protection – particularly around ranges.  Indeed, the problem has been made worse by the introduction of Power Pivot and dynamic arrays.  Locking down the right parts of spreadsheets was nigh-on impossible and still is.

In my minor amendments, I came up with the following list:

• a better way of tracking circular errors – no change
• all functions should work if they refer to ranges in closed workbooks – no change
• Improvements to array formulae – generally can avoid the need for this now with dynamic arrays
• Ensure cells with spaces in them are treated consistently – no change; and we now need a better way to deal with null cells given that Power Pivot treats them differently to the Excel engine
• Introduction of RegEx for find and replace – no change
• Expand the use of the CELL() function – no change.

I could add to that the need to increase the number of events trapped by VBA to give the sort of functionality that is available in Access, again even more important now that we can have values returned by Power Pivot, but the list goes on and on.

The verdict with 2020 hindsight: we now have a version of Excel with more functionality than it ever possessed in 2015 but with some gaping holes – some easy to fix, others more difficult, but all still needed.

Microsoft asks for people to vote for the improvements they would like to see and you can add your voice at http://excel.uservoice.com and I would encourage you to do so.