Tag: Google

IT Help Desk – how may I ruin your day?

Post author By The Burble....
Post date August 1, 2017
No Comments on IT Help Desk – how may I ruin your day?

I admit it now that I am not the greatest fan of IT help desks.

Whether that is at work or at home I continue to wonder if the person I am speaking to has the first clue about the problem I am trying to solve. And that is of course if you can get to that person. You know how it goes when you dial the number and the first thing that happens is a recorded message saying that the call may be recorded for training purposes. Based on the number of calls I have made the training regime should be brilliant and all problems should have disappeared by now. But for some reason they still want to record the call.

Maybe it’s actually about training me? In which case can you tell me where I can get access to this training material as I am very willing to learn, if nothing else to make sure I don’t have to phone a help desk ever again.

Anyhow after you have ben advised that someone somewhere will benefit from training its time to press a series of buttons in response to being asked a series of questions. A series of questions that never seem to include anything that is relevant to the problem you have. In this case your computer won’t connect to the internet so

‘Press 1 for billings and payments

Press 2 for our latest best ever pricing on something that you have never heard of

Press 3 for voice activated data requests

Press 4 to hear the list again’

Now what?

My typical response is to disconnect and phone again, hoping against hope that a new list of buttons will have magically appeared and there might be some help at hand. Of course there never is so I invariably hit 3.

And then of course it all goes wrong because there is another list of numbers and things to connect to and each seems further away from the problem you’re trying to solve.

Of course you might eventually find a combination of buttons that connects you to a human being but I would seriously avoid doing this as you will go mad.

The human at the end of the phone will sound helpful and reasonable until you explain the problem. And then they will ask for a serial number or a code that you will swear on your ancestors graves that you have never been given or seen. All the while the phone bill and the tutting at the other end continues to grow.

After a while, and a significant increase in your blood pressure, the human will then decide that they might indeed be able to help you? Always assuming it is a human rather than a new Artificial Intelligence Bot. And here’s another link if you’re interested to the top 10 bots? Who knew there was a top 10

Anyhow back to the story. The person at the other end of the phone will then ask you to click on something. Something that you cannot see on the screen in front of you. No problem says the person at the other end of the phone. Simply click on the link in the same precise order as the morse code for ‘wow clicking on this button really doesn’t make anything happen’ and sit back and watch.

Watch nothing happen at all. And so by now you are literally like the man below.

Image courtesy of marin at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

And then the final insult. The human (or bot) or whatever then tells you the best thing you can do is to switch your computer off and start again……

Featured Image Image courtesy of dan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Tags AI, Bots, Business, Chatbots, Experience, Google, HELP Desk, IT, Mobile Phones, phone, Technology

Business Communication Customers Leadership Self Driving Cars Technology

Trust me – I’m in business

Post author By The Burble....
Post date July 31, 2017
No Comments on Trust me – I’m in business

Google's prototype driverless car has been unveiled at the company's California headquarters. Photograph: /Google

Trust is something that is extremely important in business. Whether it is between colleagues or between companies and their customers or between companies and their suppliers trust underpins everything that is written down in a contract. Without trust business simply doesn’t work as well as it should.

Of course trust becomes even more important when dealing internationally with people from different backgrounds and cultures.

So let’s get a definition written down

Trust as a noun is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something.

The little Google Car pictured above is a prime example of a growing need to trust. In this case trusting a software engineer who has written the code that is helping you navigate your way around town. As I talked about in ‘Can sheep drive?‘ we will all to have a lot of trust in technology going forward.

But what about trust in business. Well there we seem to have a problem. According to a report by the World Economic Forum – We’re losing trust in business. How can we get it back? people are losing trust in business. And while this is not really a surprise with the focus on fake news currently it does present serious challenges, particularly to businesses that operate outside of their locality ie where the owner or staff are not known by their customers or suppliers.

The article goes on to highlight a number of areas businesses need to think through such as

how to focus on developing a narrative about the business that is not just about shareholder returns explaining how the business contributes to improving society
how to actually communicate this narrative to a broad range of people who might be interested in the business and what it is doing for society and
actually doing something about it

And while I think the irony of the World Economic Forum highlighting a lack of trust in business is interesting in itself the article seems to miss one very major aspect. The almost complete focus on the investor and shareholder above all others. The quarterly reporting cycle focusing as it does on numbers and shareholder returns is probably the biggest contributor to a lack of trust.

Perhaps its time for a quarterly reporting process on what value has been added to society rather that just focusing on the eps?

Anyone have any other ideas?

Tags Business, company, Google, New Zealand, society, Technology, trust, WEF

Buildings and Places Uncategorized

Hanoi. Growing up quickly

Post author By The Burble....
Post date February 17, 2016
No Comments on Hanoi. Growing up quickly

It’s loud it’s busy it’s a messy energetic city of hope. I love it. Like I love a large amount of South East Asia but Hanoi has a special place in my heart as this was the first city we travelled to outside the expat homeland of Hong Kong.

Only an hours flying time from the glitzy, shopping centre that Hong Kong has become the contrast couldn’t be much bigger. Hong Kong is brash, bright and, in its own mind wonderfully successful while Hanoi is the little brother that it desperately hopes won’t mess up the sandwiches. Which of courseHanoi sets out to do, and does, very effectively. To the extent that it even has its own sandwich.

But it is the energy of the place that astounded me when I first arrived. Hong Kong is brash and bright and everyone wants to make money – end of the discussion. But in hanoi everyone wants to do everything, live, learn, make money, eat, teach, and shout. And mostly while riding a moped. If anyone has seen the Top Gear special that they did in Vietnam and wondered if it was really as busy as the pictures showed (surely they cut it to look busy?) well I can assure you that it is a lot worse than you see on the film. I think it was James May that compared his scooter to a US tank with the line that the scooter has freed more people than the tank ever did and in Hanoi, as a microcosm of the cities in Vietnam he was exactly right.

Mopeds are everywhere, occasionally on the tight side of the road going in the right direction but mainly coming at you from in front behind and ay other direction possible. I have yet to see one fly but its only a matter of time. Some video will give you the idea.

Crossing the road in Hanoi is an experience. Locals helpfully give you the rather distracting advice just to ‘step out and keep going straight the bikes will swerve round you’ or that is what I think they are saying as my local language skills aren’t too strong. But the advice does seem to work (testament as I am writing this after two trips to Hanoi) and the bike riders do seem to realise that killing pedestrians isn’t a good idea; especially if you are riding with Grandma, your husband, your children and your dog all on the same moped.

Cars however are another thing. 3 years ago when I went to Hanoi there were a handful of cars on the road, mainly taxis, and they had adopted the riders ideas and tended to swerve round you. Which is no mean feat in Hanoi where many of the roads are only wide enough for a couple of bikes. But I have to report that Vietnam in its headlong rush to develop has seen a rapid rise in the number of cars and the new car drives, probably never having ridden a motorbike, have not worked out that you can go round pedestrians. And so they don’t. Which makes crossing the road a far less exciting experience than wading trough mopeds doing their best to avoid you.

Hanoi sites on the Red River about 85 miles in land from the South China Sea. Hanoi is the national capital although it lost this title to Hue after 1945 following a successful take over by Ho Chi Minh. It only regained the title in 1954 after the French, who used Hanoi as their regional center for Indochina, were defeated at Dien Bien Phu. At the end of the Vietnam war in 1976 Hanoi was once again declared the capital of the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Visiting any Asian city is always an experience and you long to write about the scents of perfumed streets, the quality restaurants and the calm of a city going about its business. And if you do you’ve never been to a developing Asian city. The noise is all mopeds and horns, the smells are two stroke fumes combined with outdoor cooking smells and the city is anything but calming. It’s noisy, smelly and exciting and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Tags Customers, Google, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Travel

Change People Risk Service

Why should you be talking about Driverless Cars?

Post author By The Burble....
Post date September 19, 2015
No Comments on Why should you be talking about Driverless Cars?

Back to a theme of mine that I have blogged about before – Self Driving Cars. I am fascinated by the fact that people can see a time when you won’t need a steering wheel in a car and you’ll be able to get into a car and sit back and do anything you want. I can see a revolution coming in how people get around, work and interact with each other. With society relying so much on the car any change in how it works is going to have a profound affect.

In a small way Hanoi represents the future of the car. Last weekend found me and my family in a taxi trying to get from the airport to the hotel in the French Quarter of Hanoi. My son cheerfully described Hanoi as like Milton Keynes until we got into the center of the town which he then described as mayhem. In two years Hanoi has gone from a city that is all motorbikes to one that is being overrun with cars. And unlike bikes cars in Hanoi don’t swerve around you. And the point here is that cars being driven by computer, or robot depending on your view point, are much more likely to stop or steer round you than crash making towns and cities a much better place in the future.

Autonomous cars are coming and while there will be a long period of time before they come into their own there is one question we need to ask. Will they work?

Tags auto, autonomous, Business, car, change, Daimler, driverless car, future, Google, Google Maps, Hanoi, society, Tesla, vehicles

Change Risk

Experience or trust – which will count most in the future?

Post author By The Burble....
Post date August 11, 2014
1 Comment on Experience or trust – which will count most in the future?

In a recent blog on Instructions I made the point that experience counts for very little when the world around you changes. Cars used to be easy because experience teaches you how a car should look and how to drive it. But when something about that changes all your experience can actually end up being a bad thing. You get stuck.

So what’s it going to be like in the future when ‘they’ will do it all for you. How will your experience be of use when you have no idea how things work anymore?

Tags driverless car, Experience, Google, Google Maps