Service Level Failure

June 12, 2021June 12, 2021 ~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, I faced a pink food delivery service failure in Singapore that reminded me of my satisfaction study. The food delivery service had confirmed my order at the checkout. After waiting for an hour, I checked in horror to realise the order had been cancelled. I tried in vain to connect to the service chat. A hangry me complained severely only to be told that my payment was “cash on delivery”. Of course, each reply will reveal more reasons as I provided screenshot of the order confirmation. Finally, one admitted that there was a technical issue with the payment gateway.

Be Sensitive

Service level was failed at several level for the pink “FoodP”. The most serious failure is the insensitiveness to the customer needs. In this case, the customer service was literally unreachable for this time sensitive service. The customer was only interested in getting the meal at the timing. If your service cannot be fulfilled, it is courtesy to apologise quickly, rectify and compensate for the cancellation. Imagine a family of hangry members!

Be Truthful

The aftermath of complaint management was totally chaotic. Instead of finding out the root cause of this failure, the first cause of action place the blame to the customer. If you do not have the full truth, it is better to acknowledge an error had happened than to lie to the customer. In many ways, complaints resolution are horrific and answers are “bot” like in nature.

Service level failure management is a poorly understood area in many eCommerce platform. Like what my satisfaction study mention, the satisfaction points can come from a network of partners from payment gateway, delivery and food providers. If you want to provide standard complaint answers, you might as well get a bot! If no, let your human be human and create a satisfactory complaint resolution experience.

Normal is New

May 31, 2021May 31, 2021 ~ Danny Kwok ~ 4 Comments

A pandemic world is something we always watch in movies. Now, we are living in an “enclosed isolated” way of working and minimising human contact. Normal is new and some even called it the “New Normal”.

Change for the Better Good

Our “normal lives” are a thing of the past now. Looking forward, organisational changes and digital transformation must continue to permeates. If not, many of such “normalities” are proceeding at a snail pace. The “ability” to work from home and necessity to “face time” becomes the old norm of Asia office culture. Digitalisation gets a surprise push from pandemic and the switch to digital front surge in demand.

Extinction

Like all evolution, extinction occurs with each phase. Industries with high touch interaction and cross borders dependencies faces extinction and goes out of business with massive lockdown and borders closure. Many small business are forced to go digital or to close down with the unrealistic cost of rentals and near zero crowds from constant lockdowns. Digitalisation finally emerge the victor from the extinction of pure traditional brick and mortars.

Our kids will be surprise at this part of the history. I can imagine how the “kings” lived in their high walls of castle surrounded by moats for protection. Regardless of how this pandemic turns out, skills resilience is key to survival. Stay Positive!

Amazon Affiliate is not Useful

May 29, 2021May 29, 2021 ~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

After a period of testing Amazon Affiliate, I realise it is not as useful as I thought. It is only for high volume website and you will be deactivated for zero sales after a period of time. For new startup or website, there is little incentives to get this.

As a reminder, Associate accounts that have not referred three required sales to Amazon.sg within 180 days of sign-up will be automatically rejected.
Amazon.sg

Affiliate Program

Product mix is important as Amazon Affiliate is mainly focus toward physical goods like books. In reality, the theme of the blog plays a part in these affiliate programs. Not all are really suitable. On the whole, there are many fine prints with these programs and they tend to distract you from your overall content.

Not a Must Have

For new website, it is really not worth the time and effort to setup affiliate program. You may be face with a need to turn in a minimum sales like Amazon Affiliate program. Since traffic is usually low, it will take some time to generate much user volume. In addition, these program may even require actual sale of certain product instead pay per click program.

Overall, affiliate program are potential revenue streams. However, it is not suitable for new website or eShop. You are better off to focus in content creation rather than relying your website with affiliate program.

The Project Truth

May 28, 2021May 28, 2021 ~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

It is a disappointing day again. Integrity and truth is core value of every team. Unfortunately, someone can hide the truth and even act as if the task is done. The person even go to the extent to pretend to find the non existent task. In the digital world, there are many paper and digital trails or even forensic to discover a lie. Have you met with such a teammate before?

Cannot Deliver

Project delivery and commitment is of high importance to all tasks. This applies to both agile or waterfall model. If one cannot deliver, you must have the guts to admit and think of ways to rectify. Such behaviour are usually cultivate since young. The value of trust and integrity is even more important for Agile project. This is because you cannot afford to micro manage your teammates and keep checking if they can deliver.

Can Trust be Trained?

An important value of a teammate is trust. Many ask if this can be trained. Many schools even have trust or integrity as core values. Sadly, this value is cultivated since young. A habitual liar will continue his behaviour from young to adulthood. You will often encounter teammate who promise to submit their task in school project. Their antics will carry on to the work project.

It is constant battle to train the youngling to have integrity. Kids now prefer to enjoy and take the shortest path to success. However, it is time and proven that hard work, trust and integrity taste the sweetest with a good night sleep.

Work On Holiday

May 26, 2021May 26, 2021 ~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

Work from home (WFH) is the new norm. However, I realise that Work On Holiday will arise as a direct effect from WFH and Singapore Phase 1.5. The COVID-19 restrictions have blurred the holiday mood. There are little differences of being on holiday and working on holiday. How many of you got bored at home and work on holiday as well?

Thin Red Line

It is surprising to see a quiet 9pm in Singapore on this holiday. The current situation reminds me of thin red line where boundaries and time blurred one another. Luckily, I will not be exposed to space travel where we will be in similar situation of isolation. You can catch the series The 100 on Netflix to see how it will be.

Pros of Work On Holiday

The good part of working on holiday is less distraction. Usually, there will be no meetings or discussion leaving you time to clear your backlogs. After all, you have nowhere to go as well during the COVID-19 restrictions. Thus, you will end up more productive working on holiday for the COVID-19.

Although you are working on holiday, do time out to take a breather. Soon, we will have no preference over holiday, long weekend or school holidays. After all, the days are similar at home.

Can RPA replace SOP?

May 25, 2021May 25, 2021 ~ Danny Kwok ~ 5 Comments

SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) is a very old method of steps to guide operations. It is commonly used for industries that requires a lot of standardisation. With digital transformation, it is highly anticipated that RPA (Robotics Process Automation) will replace many of these SOP. Sadly, RPA is far from being a replacement.

RPA automate Poor SOP

An ideal RPA is an automation of SOP without user intervention. RPA does not differentiate between good or poor SOP. If the SOP is flawed, RPA will amplify that error by a large magnitude. This is because humans could be fixing the poor SOP unknowingly. Therefore, you will be faced with the risk of creating a large issue from RPA.

The Real SOP

Documented SOP may not always paint a true picture of the SOP on the ground. Majority of documented SOP are outdated and not relevant. This is very obvious with system where the SOP is disconnected with the system user guide. In this case, operational users evolve documented SOP with system user guide into a “Real SOP”. This SOP is usually only known to operational users. Thus, it is not surprised that RPA is done for the wrong SOP.

For all the hype of RPA, it cannot be a replacement of SOP. Instead, it is more worthwhile to invest in business process re-engineering (BPR) to improve the SOP.

Want All Requirements

May 24, 2021May 24, 2021 ~ Danny Kwok ~ 1 Comment

Business analysis is a fun field because you get to know all kinds of requirements. One of my favorite is “Want All Requirements”. So, what does this mean? This actually refer to the users who want requirements that can cover all kinds of scenarios in the world. In reality, most of scenarios are not applicable. Thus, the user cannot articulate how the requirements will be.

Abstract Art

I usually relate such requirements to abstract art. This is because the requirement is subjective to each user point of view. It is so abstract that you cannot really define. It is best to place the requirements in your backlog until you collate enough perspective to interpret with confidence. If you are using waterfall, this is best added to your “parking lot” and taken out of your critical path.

The Sad End

From my past experiences, implementation of these type of requirements always end up unused and unwanted. Majority of these requirements are “nice to have” and strongly insisted by non operational users who may have see such features in other products. Without any linkage to SOP (Standard Operational Procedures) or knowledge of end users, these requirements will meet a very sad ending.

A rule of thumb is to use SOP as a sanity check to ensure requirements are implemented as required. It is a total waste of time, cost and efforts to fulfill “Want All Requirements” knowing it’s sad ending.

Singapore Phase 1.5 Day 2

May 17, 2021May 26, 2021 ~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

Just when everything looks rosy, life going to be normal. Singapore is hit with another wave of COVID-19 outbreak. This time, the variant or mutant virus is contagious and affect kids more. Sadly, dinner out is not allowed as you need to mask down when eating or drinking. This time, my kid is more adaptable to Home Based Learning (HBL). However, more still need to be done to educate online effectively.

Usage of Physical Textbooks

Singapore education is still very textbooks based. Yearly, the kids have to buy 10kg of books yearly. My son is already training to carry 5kg of books daily! It is no wonder there is a disconnect between HBL and physical books. It is also time consuming for teachers to manually convert learning material digitally from textbooks.

Digital Tools

Camera, lights and action! Another common issue is the digital tools like laptop and internet connection. Not all students have these tools at their disposal. Thus, schools have to remain open to cater for these students. I also rush to download the various applications for my son like Zoom, Google Meet and login to more than 3 teaching platforms. It will take some time before schools realise the need of a unified collaborative learning platform.

There is still room for improvement on HBL in Singapore. The pandemic have presented a good push factor towards eLearning model.

Pop It for Work from Home

May 15, 2021May 26, 2021 ~ Danny Kwok ~ Leave a comment

Work from Home (WFH) or Remote Working is back to default for Singapore Phase 1.5. I recently learn about a new destress toy call Pop It from my son. This toy may help those working from home especially those with kids. Its purpose is similar to fidget spinner or the traditional popping with bubble wrap. It helps you to relieve stress and anxiety and also to keep your kids entertained as well. Why is stress easily build up during WFH?

Managing WFH

Work and personal boundaries will blur during the period of working from home. Time and space coexists with your family, in-laws or housemates. In the initial start of WFH, I often flared up due to interruptions and overlapping tasks of home and work. It is even more challenging with kids “Home Based Learning” (HBL). Knock off and Paid Time Off become meaningless as you are constantly within the working location. Gradually, stress and anxiety build up among those WFH or HBL at the same time.

Pop It and Time Out

An important aspect of WFH is division of time and space among the occupants of the home. Usually, this comes with trial and error to work out the area with your housemates or family. Hopefully, you can get a room with a door! Setting working hours break period and lunchtime is good for everyone to proper time out. If all fails, hide yourself to pop it. You can also get your kids distracted with pop it as well.