To read about chess and Kubrick and Bobby Fischer.

Chess and Process appear to be related… but otherwise this one isn’t about BPM.

My bank purchased an investment bank in 2008.  As a long-time customer, I had a small amount of optimism that the purchase of the investment bank would lead to some benefit to me, their banking customer.

Changes happened in the intervening months – my bank brokerage account and money market account were moved to the investment bank.  Fine.  The letters have different typeface, but the online banking and everything else was still seamless.  I was still waiting for the payoff – some way in which this merger benefited me.  A call from an investment banker or financial advisor? A recommendation for better interest-bearing options for any spare change in my account?  Better investment advice (up to this point I’ve received none, after all…)?

Yesterday I got the answer in the mail.  My formerly linked Checking and Money Market funds are now being severed – no more transparently putting cash into interest-bearing money market funds.  In fact, if I take no further action, my checking account balance will be zero in May.  That sounds like a recipe for bounced checks, doesn’t it?  Did I mention that my bank (and all the other banks) have raised their bounced check fees?  If I don’t want to have a zero dollar balance in my Checking Account, I have to fill out a form and sign it and mail it in (no online options) to the investment bank to tell them to sever the accounts and put my cash in the checking account.  Or, I can call their 1-800 number and try that approach.

Hm. I think, why don’t I speak to my Bank, which is, after all, the institution I have a relationship (of sorts) with?  I talked to them – on the phone, and at my local branch.  They are actually powerless to help me, except by referring me to an investment bank financial adviser, because they’re not allowed to touch that side of the house.

I’m fairly disappointed at this state of affairs- an organization I never chose to work with (investment bank) has now made several very poor customer management decisions on behalf of the organization I chose (the Bank).  They’ve dramatically increased the likelihood that I pull all my investment money out  and place it with an institution that is a little more customer-focused, and one that consults with me before changing my financial fortunes.

Unfortunately, I think the institution has lost sight of their most important asset: their customers. (there’s a lesson in there for all of us)

Merry Christmas from BP3 to our customers, partners, vendors and colleagues.  Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season!

Sometimes its good to review “how we saw the world” at a given point in time.  Back in 2007, 2.5 years ago, Jerry Useem wrote an article tagging Apple as “America’s Best Retailer“.

Its still a great read to see how Apple approached retail.  And if you go look at the stats, they are dominating:

And not just the architecture. Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy (Charts) stores turn $930 – tops for electronics retailers – while Tiffany & Co. (Charts) takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany’s for breakfast. But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.

I’m pretty sure if you look them up today, they are still dominating this statistics.  That Saks store is their flagship… The Apple figure is their store average…  I still remember when I read that Apple was rolling out a retail strategy that it sounded like a disaster to me.  After all, other computer retailers (Gateway?!) had tried and failed miserably.  It seemed antiquated to buy a computer in a retail outlet when you could order online, especially with rapidly deteriorating component prices at the time.

But obviously Apple had something different in mind, and it has worked beautifully (for one – for the most part- they’ve separated the value of their devices from the underlying components that are used to build them).   If you read the article – don’t focus on the end-product – focus on the process they used to arrive at a good store and a good customer experience – it didn’t happen by accident.

Having said that, I think they need to review their service approach now that the service volumes have increased along with their increased unit sales and number of customers across the iPod, iPhone, and Mac lineups.  The extra service volume is driving increasing complaints about access, wait-time, etc.  And you really don’t want your service reputation to be that of the local car mechanic (unless that car mechanic is BMW, which gets you in and out quickly, gives you a gratis loaner car, includes the first 4 years free maintenance in the price of the car, and charges you an arm and a leg after that!).  The other option is to encourage the proliferation of service shops that can provide similar services but without needing to support the same volume of foot traffic.

Best Retailer?  The numbers say yes.  Best “after-sale-service experience?”  I’m not convinced on that one (and admittedly, the author of the article in 2007 wasn’t making that claim).

A friend of mine recently asked me about going to work for a software vendor, we’ll call ACME. Well, specifically, what I thought of their prospects in the market, rather than what it is like to work there (after all, I don’t work there, and have never worked there). He was asking me because I’m familiar with the market space that company competes in. I thought a story/fable/parable might be a good way of addressing the question, because I don’t think my answer is really unique to his company/market/situation.

As a card carrying member of more than one corporate alumni group i’ll offer my opinion by way of comparison, by referring back to my travelogue from a previous employer. This story is from the second epoch, primarily, stretching from the time my employer at the time, we’ll call it WidgetWorks, actually had a paying customer, to the time the product actually got good (version 3… isn’t it always version 3?). WidgetWorks was going from small niche vendor to the big gorilla vendor on the block (biggest fish in a small pond). But at the time, it was only slightly larger than rivals in terms of revenue, but a greater percentage of revenues were coming from software licensing and being reinvested in software development than its rivals.