Choosing not to choose

My experience of upgrading my mobile phone recently made me think about the nature of choice, and why our desire to choose is sometimes selective. Does the giddying range of channels, through which we can access an ever-growing list of things we never even knew we wanted, help us to be better informed and make better purchasing decisions? Or does it, in fact, encourage us to retreat into entrenched positions, defeated into default choices through the entropy of uberinformation?

I wanted to switch to an Android system phone, away from my much-despised iPhone mk I, and had decided was going to upgrade to the new Samsung Galaxy S3. Although not particularly in love with my present provider, Orange, they had a competitive offer for the phone, and the path of least resistance to attain my object was reason enough to stay with them. But I was shocked out of this acquiescence through the sheer unwillingness of Orange to help me easily get what I wanted. Pressures of work meant I could only upgrade my phone at the weekend, and although the phone was out of stock, I was prepared to wait a week, since they had a delivery due in the coming days. However, the Orange store would not hold one back for me, even if I committed to a new contract in advance. Orange insisted I do the paperwork, then leave the store with the phone. This meant taking my chances they wouldn't sell out between the new shipment arriving and the following weekend - or, indeed, any number of subsequent weekends. Quite a risk for a new, in-demand phone.

So I switched provider that day. Eight years of continuous patronage disappeared, as I picked a new provider who could get me what I wanted. Looking back, I realise it wasn't an impulsive decision, but something I had unconsciously wanted to do; the number of times I actually make contact with a service provider like a mobile phone company is very few, so they need to make those count. The exasperating experience in the store that day reminded me the previous occasion Orange contacted me directly - via text to tell me last January they were increasing their prices. No apologies, no "we value your custom", just a matter-of-fact 160-character SMS. In an era when it's almost easier to change phone company than to change your pants, it seemed Orange were determined to give me reasons to go commando.

Although poor customer service had goaded me into choosing something better, I could make that decision with reasonable confidence, as there was very little difference in my mind between major mobile phone companies. Coverage is no longer to point-of-difference it once was, so it just comes down to the tariff and, more importantly, the phone itself. Committing to a new phone is actually the biggest part of a new mobile contract, since it's the large carrot they dangle to get the next two years of your life.

For those unfamiliar with the workings of Steve Jobs's creation, the iPhone is a closed system. It offers stylish and elegant ways to perform most functions you could ask of a portable computer on Steve's terms: Apple approved and controlled programmes all the way, subject to the whims and hissy fits of Jobs's own obsessions. There are no crossovers, mashups or collaborations, no breaking new ground through open-source, collective ideas-generation. Apple is the anti-Internet, an overbearing parent. And the worst manifestation of this is the Apple default media interface: iTunes, an idea so bad I still can't believe people put up with it.

That they do reveals a paradox at the heart of the choice. The hefty smartphone contract you are forced to take with a mobile company, in order for them to recoup the handset costs, means people will be cautious in their choices, afraid of being stuck with a lemon for two years. The explosion in the range of things you can do with your phone these days - and our increased expectations of them - have, on the one hand opened up many more choices in the way we shop, discover, interact, create and keep in touch. Yet at the same time, they increase the risk associated with making the wrong choice. Technology has, in many ways, set us free, and yet that freedom has created its own dependency that limits choice. We don't need to know which way is north because we have portable GPS devices. We don't need to write letters any more because we can keep in touch in realtime. This stuff is now too important to be left to chance, or the risk of discovering a new way doing things. Better the devil you know, even if it doesn't let you choose your own ringtone.

Orange set up their upgrade system for their own administrative convenience, forgetting about the convenience of the customer. My reaction was a natural one in a market that offers a competitive choice. Apple offers a different type of inconvenience for its own reasons of control rather than the benefit of the customer, and yet people seem happy to give up this choice for the benign dictatorship of the iPhone product. After the death of the Wizard of Odd himself last October, tech speculators have been waiting for Apple to stumble without Jobs's guiding hand. They look for signs of a lack of innovation, staleness as indicators of decline. I hope that any such slip, when it comes, will be a sign of people realising they do have a choice.

All the fun of the Workfare

Last week I referred to David Jones's book "Who cares wins", where he describes how social media is forcing leading brands to behave ethically, or expect to be taken to task for their actions in ways that would have been unimaginable just 5 years ago. He refers to the present business climate as the Age of Damage for this reason, and this week we saw an example of how it can impact even the surest social media operators. Having heaped praise onto @UKTesco for their deft use of Twitter to engage with customers last week, I spent this week pouring scorn upon a somewhat shabbier aspect of their employment practices: the ironically named Workfare.

On Thursday, twitter was alive with the news that Tesco was using the unemployed to stack its shelves, which would ordinarily be A Good Thing. The difference here was it was advertising jobs for no actual pay; the unemployed were expected to do the job for the same government benefits as they'd receive for looking for a real job, or, for that matter, sitting on a sofa. What Tesco characterised as "offering work experience", others saw as "offering no money for normally paid work". This was rather reinforced by news that those refusing to take the Tesco non-shilling would lose those very benefits Tesco was substituting for wages. It doesn't take a Shakespearean imagination to see this scheme as something approaching indentured servitude, to use an anachronistic euphemism. Or #TescoSlaveShame as the rather more pithy twitter hashtag would have it.

After spending the day trending on twitter, things skidded into a full-blown car-crash, as Friday's Daily Mail published the full story. Not normally known to be sympathetic to the needs of benefits claimants, even Paul Dacre's myopic scribes could see there might be something awry with the fairness of the scheme. Tesco's response seemed curiously slow-witted, as though it couldn't see the damage being done to its reputation: by the afternoon, its twitter stream was on lockdown, with the only response to the thousands of tweets and retweets being a single 140-character reply.

Tesco seemed paralysed between choices, like Buridan's donkey, busily deciding to do nothing: it neither defended its actions with particular skill nor took decisive action to reassess its participation in the Workfare scheme. The rather mealy-mouthed rebuttal was that the scheme came with a guaranteed interview at the end (whose date was unspecified) for all participants, blaming "an IT error" for it appearing in Job Centres as a real job. To those who questioned why a company with annual profits of £3.8bn would need to use unpaid labour, it offered the pledge it was trying to persuade the government to remove the threat of benefits withdrawal to those who didn't want to take part.

The episode had all the hallmarks of an Age of Damage fail: a badly thought through scheme, poorly understood internally and a corporate communications team paralysed from taking decisive action. It also shows a failure of leadership by senior management at Tesco, a failure by anyone to take charge of a worsening situation and to tackle genuine customer concerns head on. When it entered Workfare, Tesco was probably already planning the PR triumph it could claim from helping the unemployed - and in some cases those written off as unemployable - into full time work. By failing to understand the implications of the scheme - in particular, the forced participation under threat of benefit loss - Tesco's social antennae were uncharacteristically out of tune with how this would play with its customers.

With a few tweaks this could have been something of a PR win for Tesco. For some long-term unemployed people, the opportunity to get some work experience with a major employer, even just for expenses, might be attractive - to help build up some self-confidence, give them something to put on a CV, or just put them in contention when a paid position came up. Tesco could have offered to pay the difference between Job Seekers Allowance and the wage for the job, making everyone quids in. Or they could have done what Sainsbury's did: took a long hard look at the scheme and decided it would be better if they withdrew.

Tesco had better be sure that it's worth the candle for them, with the like of boycottworkfare.org on their case, using social media like twitter and Facebook to beat them daily until they do something decisive. Not to mention customers like me who might now have, in the back of their mind, the nagging feeling that the person helping me with my shopping is a modern slave. That sort of thing can do terrible damage to a brand, in a competitive market like food retail.

A tale of two twitters

Recently I've been enjoying social media conversations with two companies who, between them, probably take more of my post-tax income than any other. Although both have (so far) had similar outcomes, some important differences between the two businesses, highlighted through this social media engagement, illustrate some of the perils of dealing with customers in an era of greater transparency.

In his book Who cares wins, Havas CEO David Jones calls the current business climate the Age of Damage - and he's not talking about the post-crash performance of western economies. Rather damage, in this case, refers to the revolution social media has wrought and the pitfalls it presents to businesses in trying to manage interaction with their customers. Citing some familiar examples, such as BP, he outlines the enormous difficulty businesses have today containing risks to their corporate reputation. No longer is it possible to cover up or ignore questions over your commercial, financial or ethical probity when Twitter can transmit stories of wrongdoing around the world in a flash. Rather than worry about their reputations, businesses are better off trying to fix the problem.

Returning to my more humble social media interaction, I recently noticed in Tesco they were using QR codes in a store with no 3G signal, an obvious #fail. So I tweeted this observation to my followers, (but not to Tesco), yet within 10 minutes received the following reply:



Nice tone, non-defensive and a helpful solution offered - free wifi! This encouraged me a week later to tweet them back when I was unable to find any blonde hair dyes (shopping for a friend, you understand!) in the same store:

Again a reply that was quick, self-deprecating and attempted to be helpful in a situation when there was nothing much it can do. I get the sense I am being listened to, no matter how trivial or whiny I am.

Contrast this with Greater Anglia, the train company that took over my local train line from National Express East Anglia, and who now runs the commuter train service I must endure every day. There was much trumpeting on the local news of the turning of this new leaf in train services, with big emphasis on the increased staffing levels from their PR team. Now, if you ask fellow commuters what they want from this new train service, it's two things: trains that don't break down and signals that don't fail. Between them, these are the two biggest causes of delays outside the uncontrollable elements such as bridge strikes, suicides, overhead cable damage or trackside fires. More staff sounds a great idea, but in practice all that means is more people to announce delays and apologise for any inconvenience caused. Better information is perceived to be better customer serivce, when the best service is not breaking down in the first place. And I tweeted as much to @GreaterAnglia, who replied:

A complete failure to understand my point, or tackle head-on the real issue behind the question. And therein lies the difference. Tesco can engage me with social media, because it has the ability to tackle my comparatively simple needs, and stakes its reputation on the delivery of great customer service. By contrast, Greater Anglia must constantly firefight against the daily frustrations of its customers because it is fundamentally unable to give them what they want, so must, instead, mitigate it through improved information provision. Their twitter feed was a part of that - and it must be said a very useful and diligent attempt, for the most part, to keep passengers up to date with delays and cancellations. When taken as a whole, however, the @GreaterAnglia twitter stream reads as a littany of failure.

After my exchange of views, I was followed on twitter by @SnailRail who has developed a website that, for a small charge, will automate train delay compensation claims by commuters who use the Greater Anglia service. A neat business that feeds off the failure of the hidebound Greater Anglia, using social media to drive its business, and the inability of the train operator to respond to its customers' needs. In the Age of Damage, it's all about control.