Service With a Snarl

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I've got into the habit of carrying a bottle of Masafi around with me, so pretty much every morning starts with a quick nip into our local ADNOC service station to buy a bottle for myself and one for Sarah.

Invariably, the lone blue-trousered cashier is stacking newspapers, crushing crisp packets or doing something else more important than actually standing next to the till and waiting to do the one thing cashiers do best: take the cash. I usually leave the money and walk out waving the two bottles. They know the code, so I don't have to wait around for them to scan the bottles, something one is now forced to do if buying anything else there, thanks to the Tyranny Of The Scanner.

I have watched people buying other stuff and the drill is always the same - the customer is studiously ignored until he or she is standing waiting to pay at the cash desk and starting to fidget, at which point, the cashier will slowly shuffle across the shop and grudgingly swipe the goods before demanding payment, usually with a grunted number.

It struck me this morning just how very wrong this scenario is. The customer is almost always made to wait upon the convenience of the shopkeeper, who has defined pretty much any task in the shop (a destination intended to be attractive to the customers it depends upon) as more important than actually serving the customer. Nobody complains, partly because this is the way things are and partly because finding anyone to complain to who has any power to effect any degree of change is just too much investment for likely no return.

I only thought about this at all because I had been in a workshop thingy the day before and one of the questions we had considered was where UAE banks' pain points were. I had made the point, not unreasonably, that one of the greatest pain points for banks in the UAE is that their customer service, without exception if anecdote is to be believed, stinks. I have found nobody who would recommend their bank to me, have never complained about my bank (which I, admittedly, do quite often) and had someone respond with a cheery, 'Try my bank, it's great!'. If anyone ever does, I think I might have to be treated for shock.

Someone else in the workshop thingy corrected me.  The abysmal customer service of banks in the UAE wasn't a pain point for them, because it doesn't actively hurt them. People still bank with these people, despite their anger. So banks don't care about it, it isn't a business issue for them, my colleague claimed. And he was right. Well, sort of. It's not a pain point for them simply because they're ignoring the issue - not because there is no issue to be addressed.

Like the awful ADNOC shop, banks treat their customers with very little consideration. The many instruments and vehicles of international finance do not include customer service, although all of the money banks play with belongs, ultimately, to customers. There is no thought of anticipating customer needs, instead the customer is forced to wait upon the banks' pleasure. Escalating the complaint is almost impossible - you get stuck in the numbing vortex of the call centre, which has been designed to take customer feedback and beat it into submission before discarding it. And so 'management' is effectively cushioned from the pain - the call centre is where pain begins and ends 99% of the time.

Because there's nobody listening to the customers, the management of both ADNOC and banks don't see that there's anything wrong - that perhaps there's a better, happier, way of doing things that likely costs less than the annual staff party but that has the potential to transform the brand experience of the people the business depends upon - it's that inability to see the customer as germane to the business that informs the appalling customer service of both. They'll spend millions on telling us we're happy, but not one penny on actually making us happy.

The easiest thing to do is craft a mission statement that puts the customer first, conjure up some brand values that include 'customer-centric', then run some nice, reassuringly expensive, ads that talk about customers and then completely ignore the customer in any business process, staff training or management objective.

Because customers aren't king any more. We're just dirt on the shoes of management teams sitting around in focus groups congratulating themselves on how much they invest in us, whose last thought would actually be finding out what we think or feel.

I'm quite enjoying watching companies start to experiment with social media. The first step any half-decent practitioner (ie: anyone who doesn't call themselves a 'social media expert' or, worse, 'guru') counsels companies to take is to start listening.

We've already seen some rather shocked reactions as a result of that advice. The first shock is frequently at the whole idea of listening to customers. ("Yew! Who wants to listen to them?"). The second one is when they hear what customers actually think about, and are saying about, them.

I wonder when ADNOC (the Abu Dhabi National Oil company, thank you for asking) will start...

(Yeah, so I'm grumpy. Bite me.)

GeekFest Update

Quick update to this week's GeekFest Dubai post - we do, in fact, have a TechnoCase. The nice chaps from Samsung Gulf are coming along to show off their nice, shiny new Galaxy S Android SmartPhone.

That should go down quite nicely, methinks...

Beirut

  The smell of death was everywhere. Gerald Lynch wrinkled his nose, his eyes adjusting to the darkness inside the villa. He picked his way through the rubbish, shaking his head at the clatter of Palmer’s blundering outside. The small washroom off the entrance hall had overflowed.
  Shit and death.
  Lynch tiptoed across the hallway and gingerly opened a door, yanking it shut against the buzzing cloud of flies. The next entrance led to the kitchen, the floor strewn with empty cans and water bottles, plastic cups, rotting food and, oddly, a number of dried teabags stuck to the ceiling, flicked up there when they had been hot and wet, their little yellow and red printed tags dangling from tea-stained strings.
  He winced as Palmer stumbled into the building.
  ‘Lynch?’
  Moving back into the hallway, Lynch found Palmer smoking in his white, open-necked shirt. The younger man had a linen jacket slung over his shoulder and a look of disgust on his reddened face. Lynch grabbed the fat arm, digging his fingers into soft flesh. He hissed, ‘Shut up, would you?’
  Palmer’s nervous laughter was a bark. ‘What, you think they’re here, do you? You reckon they’re hiding in the bog waiting for us? We wouldn’t have got within a mile of this place if they were still around.’
  Lynch shoved the young man away. ‘Shut up. And don’t touch anything.’
  Shaken by Lynch’s violence, he whined. ‘Okay. Anything for a quiet life. I wouldn’t have to be here at all if the Embassy hadn’t taken that call.’
  Lynch stole into the living room. The furniture was scattered; the terrazzo-tiled floor littered with clumps of stuffing from the destroyed sofa. He searched for the TV remote, gave up and walked over to the set. He pulled a pack of tissues from his pocket and wrapped one around his finger to switch the set on. The sound was almost deafening in the hot gloom: urgent Arabic, Hezbolla’s Al Manar channel. Snapping the set off, he turned to speak to Palmer, but the Embassy man had left. Whispering a curse, Lynch followed him to the bedroom doorway.
  ‘Christ,’ said Palmer.
  Lynch pushed past. The rich stench was appalling. The overturned bucket in the corner of the room spilled waste onto the burn-pocked carpet. Rusty streaks arced across the walls. Something darker, likely more shit, completed the artwork. Eyehooks were set into the wall at the opposite corner to the bucket, a long tangle of Day-Glo yellow rope coiled on the floor below them. The bedsheets were streaked with filth.
  Lynch flicked the newspaper on the floor with his foot: The Beirut Times, 22nd March. Five days old. He reached towards the piece of expensive-looking paper folded on the bed, halted by the sound of Palmer puking. Lynch wheeled, the rebuke dying on his lips as he took in the opened cupboard and the thing, once human, slumped inside. Pulling the paper tissue over his face, he shoved the retching man’s bulk aside and stared into the cupboard. The corpse stank, even through the scented tissue. Fat bluebottles crawled over sightless eyes. Dark rivulets crazed the marble white flesh. The slashed throat, an obscene second mouth, grinned blackly at them.
  
(I finished Beirut last night.)

GeekFest 5.0

 GeekFest 5.0 is taking place at The Shelter in precisely one week - Thursday 24th June from around about 7.30pm. It should be quite a lot of fun.

GEEKTALKS!

Talking Pandas Fadi Abu Ghali who runs Dubai based advertising and communications agency Aya Middle East along with Laila Abdullatif, the Emirates Wildlife Society in Association with World Wide Fund for Nature (EWS-WWF)’s Sustainability Coordinator are the some of the people behind the recent neat little animation for EWS-WWF that used some tricksy animation to remind us that we're making an awful mess. They’re going to be telling us a bit about the problems the ad is intended to address, how they came up with the idea, the technical wizardry they used to create the animation and how they're using social media and all that kind of stuff to spread the message.


Why Marriage is the Theme of My Life
Areeba Hanif needs no introduction. A lecturer in digital film making at SAE Institute and a director, writer and editor, Areeba founded her company to produce webmercials and documentary style wedding movies. she is also GeekFest’s official videoguru, making sure the GeekTalks are there on Vimeo for all to see. she's going to be talking about her struggle with arranged marriages, one broken engagement, her feature script "Match Made in Parental Heaven", My Big Day Films and finally the real reason for putting on the scarf.

Moving Ahead With Ramallah
TEDxRamallah is an independently organized conference (licensed by TED) happening in Ramallah where the theme is to showcase inspirational stories of Palestine. The event is taking place at Ramallah Cultural Palace on the 9th October 2010. TEDxRamallah is actively casting about for speakers with inspiring stories, from any field (education, business, art, science, technology, etc). The community are encouraged to nominate speakers as well. Ramzi Jaber is the dynamo behind putting this event together. He's working closely with a group of volunteers to make it a successful gig - this talk's a chance to throw in your ideas and stuff.

One girl's quest to change the world using education
Masarat Daud is 26 years old. Belonging to India's largest and most illiterate state of Rajasthan, she has lived in Dubai all her life. Last year, she realised that the world is not someone else's responsibility and embarked on a journey to make the change that she wishes to see. This led to the creation of 8-Day Academy, a smart program that focuses on educating rural communities...in just eight days. Masarat will be talking about the Academy, about TEDxShekhavati – a TEDx event in rural India, and about her belief that village people can change the world.

Caution. This talk has a bitter/sweet ending.

Bean Bag Workshops!

A new feature at GeekFest, the Bean Bag workshops are a chance for small groups to share expertise in doing stuff. The idea’s to have a semi-circle of 10-12 beanbags and a presenter looking at ‘how to’ type topics. This is very much an experiment, so if it works we’ll do more of ‘em next time around.

8.00ish    Blue Sky Thinking
Photographer and photoblogger Catalin Marin will be sharing ways of getting beyond the Dubai summer haze and taking that awful washed out, white sky effect out of your summer photography using some simple and smart Photoshop techniques. He's here, by the way.

8.30ish     Pump up your personal SEO
 When was the last time you Googled yourself? Do you own you? Do you want to build your blog traffic by being higher up in search? Time for some SEO weight training, then! SEODubai’s Jon Santillan will be sharing some simple ideas and approaches that will help you to build your personal Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO.

ArtStuf!

Born in Nanjing, China, and raised between Bahrain, Dubai, and New Orleans, Lantian Xie is a visual theorist who utilizes interdisciplinary methodologies to investigate our contemporary relationships with time and space. His work is either hard-to-understand genius or just plain strange. But it’ll be projected at GeekFest, where we hope Lantian will also be taking the opportunity to create another of his groundbreaking pieces of surreal video.

There’ll also be a slideshow of photography from blogger and well known social media gadfly Kinan Jarjous.

GameFest!

As usual, the slavering, snarling pack of gamers will be huddled around the FragZone at the back of The Shelter, hooked up together and killing each other and/or various alien life forms. Some Big Iron is apparently coming in this time around, so we're arranging backup generators and asking people to turn off their televisions in the surrounding area.

TechnoCases!

There are no TechnoCases. Canon didn't go ahead.

If you decide you want to do a TechnoCase, you've still got 24 hours or so to get it together.

Stuff

As usual mOre will be serving up food and drink but we haven't got a tab because the damn TechnoCase didn't come through. It's at The Shelter in Al Quoz (this is the link to the location map). You can do the Facebook thing or follow @GeekFestDubai on Twitter. GeekFest Dubai is jointly UNorganised by myself and Shelter supremo Saadia Zahid (@Saadia on Twitter) and is a not for profit event held without harming any small furry animals.

There are also GeekFests taking place in Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Amman and one looks like it might happen in Damascus.

The World Cup. If you want to watch the world cup at GeekFest you are genuinely more than welcome. But you'll have to bring a TV or something. If you would all like to agree that GeekFest will be a vuvuzela free zone, that would be just fine with me...

My Shiny

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

(You might find it helps to read this first!)

"What's that on your shiny?"
"It's a flag. It's because the World Cup is on. I'm supporting my team."
"That's not allowed. Take it off."
"Why? It's my shiny. You sold it to me. You said I had to dare to dream, live to love, enjoy a new lifestyle of freedom and joy with my family. You said that I would build my dreams of the future in an iconic luxury community that redefined living."
"It's the rules."
"But it's mine! You said I was free to hold it. I'm a shiny owner, not just a borrower. I paid you good money to own a shiny!"
"They're not that expensive, you know."
"They're not now, but they were when I bought it. But bought it I did, outright and it's mine! I know my rights, I do!"
"Have you seen those Sharp Quattron ads on the TV? The really annoying ones with the smug looking guy from Star Trek?"
"Yeees. What's that got to do with me having rights?"
"Just imagine the way he says this: Well, actually, you don't. We can tell you what to do. What TV you watch, what colour you paint your shiny. Whether you put flags on it. Even what newspaper you can read, if the whim or fancy takes us. All sorts of stuff, in fact. That's the deal."
"The deal was freehold."
"The deal was shut up. You've got a shiny. Be happy. Now go away and blow a vuvuzela. But quietly. And not after 9pm."

Sammy The Survivor

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You've got to hand it to whale shark Sammy, the girl's a survivor. When we all thought she'd popped her clogs or was on death's door and being released clandestinely, she actually turns out to have been tagged by Mote Marine Laboratory and sent on her way swimming as free as only a happy whale shark could be.

The nocturnal release of the big fish with no video or photographic evidence made many cynical souls doubt - particularly as it came at the end of an extended period when Dubai's Atlantis Hotel was being pilloried for keeping the whale shark. There was more than the odd whiff of sulphur to the whole story, with undercurrents roiling regarding the actual nature of the whale shark's 'rescue' - whether it was caught to order or just wandered in for tea and decided to stay.

We get the news that Sammy is alive and well earlier than we normally would, because we should really have had to wait for three months to hear from the whale shark. Fortunately, the tag 'popped off' early and now Sammy's free to swim the waterways of the Gulf and beyond, free of tagular encumbrance.

Hooray! Thank goodness there are no links between Atlantis and Mote that would allow nasty cynics to question the tale of Sammy's good fortune.

Dope Test Does For Dubai DJ

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Dubai isn't the best place in the world to be a DJ, it would seem. Following from the controversial four years in the chokey handed out to British drum 'n' bass DJ Grooverider, who served ten months of the sentence before a handy Ramadan pardon slipped him a Get Out Of Jail Free card, news breaks today in the papers of a DJ who has been arrested and charged with drugs offences.

Grooverider, or Raymond Bingham to his mum, was carrying just over a gram of hash in a clear plastic bag - very airport security conscious of him - which he says he forgot was there. I can sympathise with that - when Abu Dhabi  police are lifting Afghans with over 15 kilos of smack in fruit crates, you can sort of see that a gram of hash is hardly the road to nailing Mr Big. At least it wasn't a microgram or two stuck in his shoe.

However, Grooverider did have the banned drug on him. This new case sees a man charged for having the drug in him - the DJ, identified as custom would have it as merely "AM", was according to Gulf News and others, the subject of a raid following a tip-off. The papers report that Dubai's anti-narcotics unit searched his car and then his house and found not a jot of naughty stuff. So they gave him a blood test and found THC in his bloodstream. THC is the stuff that makes smoking hash fun (The used engine oil they cut it with is some of the stuff that makes it less fun, but that's another story).

Gulf News reports the man as saying, "I am not guilty. I want a judgment," which is a slightly odd thing to say in a court of law. It's the one thing you can be sure of, really.

His defence is that he smoked while in the UK at Christmas. THC is known to stay in the system for days, possibly weeks after it is consumed - most online references give 30-45 days, although some claim three months. The amount of body fat you're toting has an effect here, as THC likes to snuggle up to fat and stay there. There is also the question of the sensitivity and type of the test - the most common test is a urine test, but hair can also be tested for THC and it's in there until the hair grows out. The 'half life' of THC is an interesting fact for many because an increasing number of companies (particularly US corporates) insist on being given the contractual right to carry out random drug testing among staff.

Wherever this case goes, you can guarantee it's going to go in the UK press, where it's not going to play terribly well, I suspect. The message has always been utterly clear here - don't do drugs and if you do we'll be tough on you.

Spoilsport

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Right, just so we're abundantly clear on this, I don't like football. I don't dislike it, I mean chaque a son goute and all that, it's just that it leaves me cold. It does nothing for me. It doesn't float my boat.

Which means that the next three weeks are going to be hell. We're already bombarded with World Cup themed advertising, including football patterned doughnuts, radio ads where the sound of people screaming 'Goooooooaaaaaaaaaalllllll' suddenly erupt in my car (why do advertisers think that playing unpleasant sounds to people is likely to do anything other than irritate them?) and endless billboards featuring people who have painted their heads different colours in some display of crypto-neolithic tribalism.


The newspapers are filling with pictures of happy blowing plastic trumpets (apparently they're called vuvuzelas, which I didn't know before, so thanks for that) and even Twitter is starting to populate with 'Are you watching the game tonight?' tweets. I have the nasty feeling that the only thing to do is lock myself in a lead vault underground in a remote and unpopulated island. There are a number of people that would agree with this course of action as being as beneficial to them as it is to me, I know.

Mind you, at least it's minimised the appearances of that little yellow git...

Criminal Tendencies

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Another writing post. The last blog reader is going to wander away now, but I can't help it. I'm on the home straight with new book Beirut and the next two weeks are likely either going to be writing posts or no posts at all. Sorry.

One thing that has amazed me over the course of writing Beirut is that I haven't been arrested. My Google life has been extraordinary and has mostly involved things like weapons, military assets, intelligence, police and other deeply dodgy stuff.

I can't imagine how writers did this stuff before Google - they must have spent months in the library, ordering books and poring through piles of obsessive esoterica. Actually, come to think of it, I have ordered books and stuff - some of which (I didn't realise until too late) had the potential to attract unwelcome attention down at Sharjah Post Office, too! Luckily the customs chaps there have long had me down as a harmless eccentric, so they don't look to closely at the books I bring in. I think my reputation, founded on a mixed shipment of chocolate and clothes which my mother unwisely thought would survive transportation to an area with a 50C ambient temperature and exacerbated by another shipment of educational toys meant for Sarah, was finally sealed when I tried to explain my jar of rather delicious chutney made by the fair hand of Australian novelist and pilot Helene Young. They'd really rather not know these days...

I've also depended on the expertise of a number of people as well as quite a lot of walking around that most glorious of cities in the company of various lovely colleagues or on my tod. There's nothing quite like just walking around a great city and Beirut certainly rewards the experience with an enduring intensity.

Put it all together and you have a demonstrable track record of a deeply unhealthy interest in a lot of things that go bang and otherwise kill people, an awful lot of phone calls and emails with people centering on military helicopters, missile systems and toxic substances and a nasty obsession with the military and intelligence services of a number of countries. As well as mooching around certain cities day and night taking photographs and generally just acting strangely.

Nobody's batted an eyelid. I'm not sure whether I'm relieved or worried...

Al Boom to Bust?

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Dubai real estate investment portfolio manager Abid Al Boom is in Dubai court being accused of frittering away something like Dhs900 million of his clients' money according to media reports today. Seven Days splashed the sorry tale with glee, after the prosecution yesterday told of Al Boom's spending - apparently he had racked up a collection of 53 top-end cars, a luxury yacht and two 'party boats'. Something like 3,700 people had invested money in Al Boom's 'portfolio' which, according to Khaleej Times, consisted of a plot that could hardly account for 10% of the funds deposited.

Oddly enough (and uniquely), Emirates Business 24x7 neglects to mention the story at all. Even more oddly, the defendant in this case is not only being named (you usually see 'the accused, AAB) but is being very publicly named indeed. Al Boom himself, facing a possible sentence of two years in jail - or even a jail term 'until his dues are settled', has already had two judgments against him, a year in prison for bouncing a Dhs1.2 million cheque and three years in prison for issuing two cheques totalling Dhs5.240 million.

Looking back on it, Dubai's meteoric property boom was really a market running as fast as it could towards a brick wall shouting 'That's not a brick wall, that's not a brick wall'. With all the confidence, certitude and arrogance that unlimited success could breed, the whole thing spiralled out of all control - and the lack of regulation in the UAE's financial and real estate markets meant that unfettered capitalism ('laissez faire' has long been one of Dubai's favourite words) could bask side by side with criminality and abuse of trust. And it did.

What I find heartening is that cases like this are being heard and reported on. What I wonder is how many more there are out there. And how many investors got hurt when, as is inevitably the case, the chain letter finally reached everyone in the country.