Happiness == simplicity

We’re in the final steps of our move. On Thursday, we moved our stuff into our new house in Redmond, and we’re getting ready to move my family into the house this afternoon.

The experience of buying the house, getting things setup the way we wanted, and the design of the house were all really amazing. We purchased our home from a small developer, and we were personally taken care of by the folks whose signatures were on the bottom line of their construction loan.

There was zero bureaucracy, the service was exceptional, and the design of the home itself really exceeded all of my expectations. The house itself continues to surprise me with details that make me smile. Some are little things like the placement of outlets exactly where I needed them. Other things were more significant like the use of a radiant heating system. This house is silent; there isn’t the cycling of a central blower kicking off every so often to let you know that the heat is on.

Perhaps the best thing was knowing that the developer was treating us like people, and taking care of the small details that make our life easier. For example, I realized yesterday that I hadn’t signed up for hydro and gas hookups. At our last new house you were welcomed to our new home by a nasty little sign on our front door that said ‘you have 3 days to sign up for a gas/electric/hydro account or we’re turning it off!’ When I saw one of our home developers yesterday, she just smiled and said ‘all taken care of’.

Now, let’s contrast this experience with the move of our household goods. Let me see, there’s a move coordinator who liaises with Microsoft, a move insurance coordinator, 2 overall move coordinators, 1 local move consultant in Toronto, 1 local coordinator in Toronto, another local coordinator in Redmond, 5 crew members in Toronto, 5 crew members in Redmond, a driver, an emergency service guy, and a coordinator for the emergency service guy. And that’s just for the household goods. There were probably another 10 people involved in moving our cars.

Each individual that I worked with on this move (with a few exceptions) was very well trained and very professional. However, when things inevitably went wrong, nobody was accountable to me. People were far more concerned about satisfying the bureaucracy rather than doing the right thing for the customer.

An example of this behavior occurred on Thursday when we discovered that they had lost some parts for a few things that were disassembled for the move. Ben’s crib was missing two screws and a caster wheel. This justified an emergency service call for the following day. By the time the service guy arrived the next day, I had discovered a bunch of other parts that were missing from other pieces of furniture. He agreed to go pick up those other parts from the hardware store in addition to the parts for the crib.

Somewhere during the day, his supervisor called him (not me) discovered the ‘unauthorized parts purchases’ and made him return them to the store! These were parts that amounted to $20 or so. This decision apparently involved 3 or 4 people. To add insult to injury, the parts that he purchased didn’t fit (even though I had him bring an identical screw from another part of the crib to avoid mistakes like this), so he had to go get more parts – and he never came back.

Now, I’m not sure what is more complicated – building a house that exceeds customer expectations, or moving a household full of stuff from one country to another. But what is clear is that one person needs to be the go-to person for customer contact and happiness not a random person of the day who is a slave to process. The reason why the developer exceeded expectations was the single point of contact and accountability for all things related to our new house. The reason why the moving company barely met expectations* was the fact that I was directly exposed to the complexity of the move process myself.

Don’t expose your customers to your process. Customers don’t care about your process. Instead, make someone accountable to your customers and have them work with your bureaucracy, and make sure that they have the power to make things happen.

Or better yet, if you’re upset with how you’re being treated, vote with your dollars and pick someone who will work more directly with you (sometimes much easier said than done though).

* Overall it was a good move – only 3 or 4 small things were broken, and a few parts are AWOL.

Comments

[Jayme Edwards]

I'm glad your move went slowly. But I have to admit, I'm a bit bummed that considering you took a job with Microsoft, it will probably be alot longer now until a solid drop of Ruby-CLR comes out that we can all use (if your continuing it at all).

The upside to all this is that at least there will be some .NET/Ruby interop that is supported by Microsoft going forward once they plan, put a project plan together, and get you guys going on whatever your previous work turns into. I just hope they keep the language extensions to a minimum and get it out rather quickly.

Good luck!

[Jayme Edwards]

I'm glad your move went *smoothly* I meant to say - that's what I get for watching a download while I type :)