Customer Service

Outside In: Forrester Customer Experience Forum 2012

Last week a steamy New York City hosted the Forrester Research Customer Experience Forum, Outside In: The Power Of Putting Customers At The Center Of Your Business. The forum content was carefully designed to support and provide real world examples connected to the upcoming book Outside In by Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning. I was stunned at the number of people in attendance. Certainly holding the event in New York contributed, but I think firms are beginning to understand the gravity of the situation. Speed, paradigm shift (sorry), mobile, social and big data are the beacons of change today. As with all Forrester Forums there was a a ton of information, case studies and technology solutions. No one could possibly attend every session, so I boiled down some nuggets that caught my attention.

Customer Experience Needs to be Unified

Consumers are literally all over the map these days. Brands orchestrate platforms on devices and interfaces, but consumers ignore all that hyperbole. They just want to get things done. In his talk, The Unified Customer Experience Imperative, Ron Rogowski (@ronrogowski) spoke about complex customer journeys and the even greater complex challenge it presents for brands to understand and deliver across this new landscape. Things used to be much simpler. He showed this chart that illustrates what brands need to consider.

Consistency has always been a critical path for success. Forrester has tweaked that term and now calls it unified. Unified but not uniform. This is a very important nuance to understand. We wrestle with this notion all the time, having spent a decade plus working the ever-expanding big canvas of a full site, we now must make tough decisions on what to do on handsets and tablets.

This means make it similar, not the same. In order to get better at this, the entire brand will need to begin to understand and inflect their work to meet this new challenge. It will be important to get everyone on board, or we will face a series of never-ending discussions across the organization each and every time we want to add content, features and functionality to interfaces that are not full site.

We will need to continue to listen, collect and categorize the voice of the customer in each channel, but find ways to do an experience mash-up VOC to help inform and guide how we design and deliver experiences in the future. Relevance and real time data should be our mantra.

There has been a lot of discussion about responsive design recently and this forum was no different. It is promising, but there are lots of challenges and some big decisions that must be made. I can’t imagine converting a massive web site to be all responsive, but it does make sense to begin to experiment and learn. Bottom line. Get moving and bring everyone along.

The World is Mobile

We hear it all the time, mobile first. Julie Ask (@JulieAsk) said it right at the outset of her talk on The Future of Mobile. It’s tricky, because if you are an established brand with millions of customers, your full site traffic and usage likely dwarfs your customers coming to you via mobile. Julie explains that designing mobile first doesn’t mean abandon full site or prioritize mobile above all else. It means your designers and CX people for mobile will need to be fully aligned with your full site team. I suggest you make them the same team, otherwise you risk an unhealthy diversion of experiences. Julie has a sharp eye and she trains it on the future. Phones will continue to get more powerful and bandwidth will improve. This will lead to a host of new technologies that will be mobile. She is careful to not restrict these new technology advances to handsets or tablets. They might extend to contact lenses or cardio stents.

No one can say with certainty exactly the order of advancement, but it’s clear that mobile will diverge even further from the PC experience and become the dominant device for service brand and shopping. The landscape will be a convergence of context, intelligence, contextual dimensions and completely new ways to navigate.

Design Still Matters

Understanding how consumers use interfaces is even more critical than ever. This used to be much easier than it is now and so expertise must be developed in house or contracted. It’s time to re-double our usability tools use to uncover struggles within interfaces as well as ensure that users can connect with your brand across devices no matter where they are. Bill Albert of Bentley University, provided one of the most concise summaries of UX tools and when to use them. Loved this chart.

Four years ago I wrote a post on neuromarketing. This is a set of emerging techniques allowing us to get at the physiology of consumers. By measuring heart rate, galvanic skin response, even body movement, we will get better data from consumers to help guide us through design. The equipment is getting better and the costs to field these studies is coming down. Add this to your big data chart.

Big Data is Really Big

Tim Suther of Acxiom laid out a nice summary of how they think about big data. Big data does not mean lots more data. There is already more data than we can mine. We all know what we need is more insights, but that is getting much harder to come by. Big data means new data sources at the most granular level that can be accessed through existing CRM systems and will be largely digital and behavioral in nature going forward. Segments are a thing of the past. People is where we need to go. How people use and interact with today’s social networking experiences must also be included.

No one signal consistently describes or predicts consumer behavior. Activate and evaluate these signals at scale with speed. – Tim Suther

Along with Tim, Richard Char of Citibank talked about their efforts to harness big data and deliver relevant offers. He spoke about Lifestyle Enabled Marketing (LEM) which he uses to push his company to gain a more compete view of the customer. He had a lot of interesting slides, but I think this sums up the shift we are trying to manage through. Somewhere where the arrows meet is where big data will be the most help.

It’s the Customer, Stupid

Amazing as it sounds, we are still learning how to deliver great customer experiences. It’s not that no one is trying, it’s that the customer won’t hold still, keeps getting smarter, more fickle and less loyal. Hard to blame them as they are constantly being tempted by the next shiny object and brands continue to stumble.

Forrester’s forthcoming book Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of your Business offers lots of great information and practical approaches to better understand the evolving consumer. But perhaps more important, how to work inside your own company to shift the culture to be more customer focused, and therefore more successful.

They lay out six disciplines of customer experience; Strategy, Customer Understanding, Design, Measurement, Governance and Culture. They posit that getting customer experience right can add billions to the bottom line of businesses. This is challenging to measure and we all know how difficult attribution can be. But having finished this book in galleys this weekend, I’d have to say they have broken some new ground and provided us with a way to think differently, plan and act.

They speak of the rise of the Chief Customer Officer, and indeed this position is beginning to pop-up. I personally believe it will be some time before it’s a common job description and routine hire across corporate America. I do believe it will evolve, forced actually, as consumers become more independent, technology advances and competition changes battlefields from marketing to experiences.

Photo: Steve A Furman

Improving the Customer Experience with Social Media

I have been thinking lately about how customers form their perceptions of brands and what we can do about influencing those memories. Brands and products can easily become look alike commodities, which makes gaining mind and wallet share more difficult. Brands want to be distinctive, stand out among the crowd and be noticed by consumers. The rise of social media has, in my opinion, provided more insight into consumer’s perceptions as well as opportunities to use listening tools and pay attention to one’s own social networks for a rich data set of clues. If done correctly, a brand can address issues and show gratitude to customers and create connective memories to that experience and ultimately the brand.

In my direct experience customers either start their conversation with a company using social media or turn to it as a last resort. Regardless, brands need to be watching these spaces closely and jumping in as soon as possible. It goes without saying that when I say jumping in I mean with trained professionals.

There’s a fascinating behavior economics principle called the peak-end rule. It was first suggested by Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner for Economic Sciences in 2002.

According to the peek-end rule we judge our experiences almost entirely on how they were at their peak (pleasant or unpleasant) and how they ended. Other information is not lost, but it is not used.

It could be fair to say that consumers who post on social media streams are at a peak with a brand. Skilled companies who engage these customers quickly, acknowledge their emotions and work to solve the problem will deliver an end that can leave the customer with a better perception. Ending on a high note means you have won half the battle.

Social media is potentially a new customer experience tool that can be employed to improve interactions on both sides and perhaps nudge the perceptions customers have of a brand. If your customer truly is at a peak, then we should do everything we can to end the event on a high note – if it has been unpleasant – or propel a good experience even further up the scale. Social, has the power to leverage immediacy, intimacy and interaction into a powerful generator of memories.

Image re-drawn from Greg Ness’s graphic

A Good Customer Experience is a Positive Company Outcome

Customer experience can have numerous meanings, mostly likely driven by where you work in a company. I have been polling people for a while now about what Good Customer Experience means, the other kind doesn’t much matter, and have distilled those replies into the following definition.

Good Customer Experience: An engaging, differentiating, experience with the best possible outcome for the customer and the company that leads to repeat use and loyalty.

It’s not perfect, nothing ever is, but I think it gets at something that’s often missing when the discussion turns to customer experience. That’s the juxtaposition of customer and company in the same sentence, and the inclusion of best possible outcome. Let me stress that it’s not a balance between experience and profit. You can have both in the long run. Some transactions / interactions favor the customer, some favor the business. If you always leave out the customer you will not have as many of them as you want, and will lose them much faster. If you never include the company you won’t have enough profits to reinvest in your business. It’s lose / lose or as we called it in the ’90’s, zero-sum game. The trick is to always include both the customer and the company every time. If you begin using this lens, you will open up new ways of thinking and unlock approaches on how you might design products, services and interactions in the future.

I constructed this simple chart which took a life of it’s own and reminded me of what a daunting task it is to provide a good customer experience consistently.

It goes without saying that there are very few firms able to deliver in bristol fashion across the board. My experience is most do very well in some areas and very poorly in others with the balance being extremely unremarkable. If you tried to tackle all this at once you would probably be very frustrated. “Don’t boil the ocean” as the saying goes, but I highly recommend you be a steeping pot on the verge of boiling over, complete with a rattling top and an annoying whistle.

You will need to be a change agent. Find the places where your company is not as strong in the customer experience and be the catalyst for change.

It’s not what you do, it’s what you change that makes you successful.

It’s important to remember that you can’t change everything, but you don’t need to. Work with what you have. Change what’s changeable. Find like-minded people in your company and form a strong alliance. Above all, track and measure your results. The only way senior managers will buy in is if it will move the business. It will.

Say Goodbye to the Call Center

Earlier this week I attended the Customer Response Summit in Hollywood, Florida. It’s an In The Know event, a company that stays on the forefront of how corporations are dealing with customer care and customer experience in this rapidly evolving digital landscape. We used to call it Web 2.0, but that doesn’t capture what’s happening today. Now it’s mobile, social, video and audio. Consumers adopt new technologies quickly. Certainly not everyone is on the cutting edge, but the numbers of people grow with each new cycle. They are the ones that demand firms adopt these new channels and they can no longer be ignored.

I was a speaker at the event and my topic was How to Turn Social Chaos into Valuable Brand Engagement. I shared my experiences, successes, and challenges of using Social Media to reach, engage and service customers. We operate using a very simple framework for social. Don’t over complicate it. Align it to your current business objectives, translate the tribal language into something more familiar, and prove it’s value.

I was impressed with the speaker lineup that included executives from FedEx, Time Warner Cable, General Motors, Disney, GoDaddy, ConAgra and others. I gleaned a number of takeaways:

Corporations are all working hard on how to improve the customer experience
Social Media and Mobile are moving much faster than corporate America
New customer care technologies will need to be considered and installed if firms wish to keep up with customers
There is no silver bullet; time to focus on weapons not ammunition
Everything you know is transferrable, but it will need to be re-interpreted
Data is still overwhelming insights
New silos have emerged (Great, more silos)
People are beginning to get it, proving value and taking steps
The call center of tomorrow will look very, very different (Think internal targeting, fewer phones, more direct contact with consumers on the web)
Consumers are gaining more and more power (That’s fine, just be gentle guys)
Embrace change, or risk being irrelevant some time soon
Call center managers are starting to shift their thinking from controlling cost to creating value
It’s very, very difficult to move away from “average handle time” (AHT) for hard core call center types
One of the most frequently asked questions for Disney is, “When time does the 3:00 parade start?”

What i’m seeing is the way we service customers is rapidly changing. Consumers operate in real time while firms operate in batch. There is a serious need for a centralized customer database that’s agile and can be easily shared by any of the marketing and service channels/departments that exist inside as well as outside a company.

Partnering is becoming even more important. If your company has an “It’s built better here” mentality, you are already falling dangerously behind. No one firm can keep up with what’s going on out there. Truth be told, they never could, but the pace of change was slow enough in the past to not be too damaging. Today that pace can cause fatalities.

The call center will evolve into a contact command center. More consumers will self-service through progressively easier to use interfaces and devices. Agents that answer the phone today will be transformed into agents that use their web browser to connect with consumers. Information will be pushed to their desktops by sophisticated listening devices constantly spidering the ether for immediate response. Proactive not reactive. Pre-service, like pre-crime from Minority Report. The agents of tomorrow will be more aligned with the business and more empowered than ever. This in turn will empower consumers and leave us all more time to focus on what’s really important.

The networking was the most valuable aspect of the event for me. I met some outstanding professionals and had some great conversations that I hope will continue. View some of the event videos here.

Note to Consumers, Operators are Standing By

A growing number of consumers are posting comments about a product or experience they’ve had with a brand on a blog or Twitter and expecting the company to come right back that same day with a personalized message and solution. I’ve seen isolated incidents where some consumers return to the network within hours and remark that they have fired that brand for being ignored between lunch and dinner.

I’m concerned that the speed of social will cause consumers to think traditional communication channels are obsolete and have been disconnected from the grid. Big brands have spent millions of dollars staffing call centers and maintaining web sites to provide customer service. They won’t be chucking those investments any time soon. Folks… folks… Let’s get real. A single consumer will always be more agile than a large organization on almost everything. Companies have not promised, nor can they right now, monitor hundreds of millions of conversations and respond as part of their service contract.

As a consumer, if you have a problem with a product or service, there is nothing wrong with expressing your perspective using social media technology. I have done so numerous times in this very space. But you need to ask yourself why are you doing it? What’s your objective when you post out? Is it a test to see how quickly they will find you? Are you informing/warning the community about your experience? Unless you are a key influencer with a big following, posting on a blog is a little like shouting out in a crowded stadium. Almost no one will hear you. Certainly not the pitcher who just gave up that home run.

I’ll bet you can find a web address or 800 number on the packaging coupled with an open invitation to call anytime you have a problem or question. So click on www or pick up the phone. After all you spent time and probably money on the product. What if your issue could be remedied with a 1 minute conversation or e-mail response? Isn’t that a better use of time?

Once you have gone through the channels a company has established to help you and still the issue isn’t resolved, then by all means, have at it in the community. The company deserves it. Firms will get better at monitoring the social graph. It’s a completely new concept and the velocity is overwhelming. It will take some more time.

American Airlines Charges $15 to Send an E-mail!

I booked a flight for myself and family to visit my mother and sister during the holidays. The tickets were pretty expensive so we elected to use miles. The day before the flight, while I was making a car service reservation, I discovered that my outbound flight was no longer listed. I logged onto aa.com to check my reservation and sure enough, they had changed the flight number and departure time for later that day.

I didn’t recall getting any communication from American on this change, so I called. They indicted they had sent my wife an e-mail with the change information a couple of weeks back. She didn’t remember getting that e-mail, and a search through her Outlook revealed a number of communications from American for vacation packages and fare sales, but nothing about our flight change. When I asked the agent to resend the confirmation she indicated that it was American’s policy to charge $15 for sending a second confirmation e-mail, once they ascertained the correct e-mail address was on file and the message had been successfully sent. Of course it’s entirely possible that my wife missed the message, or there was some other glitch, but I wasn’t asking them to do a lot of heavy lifting.

I was aghast! As someone who has been in the digital space since 1994, has been responsible for service and marketing e-mail programs, and works in a service heavy industry, I know that it costs less than one penny to send an e-mail. E-mail is a great service tool that firms can employ that is significantly less costly than a phone call, and provides the consumer with a record and peace of mind. I can’t imagine how American or anyone else for that matter could justify this policy based on actual cost to the company. The e-mail may deflect a call later down the life-cycle of the purchase. As a customer, it felt like yet another way for desperate carriers to seize any opportunity to collect revenue.

I very clearly expressed my displeasure to the agent and informed her of my professional experience in this area—sending an e-mail doesn’t cost $15. She then offered to send it without the fee. That supports my belief that they are preying on consumers who would not know better. American should be ashamed. Do they really know why we fly?

Forrester Consumer Forum 2008: Maslow is Dead – First in a Series

I attended the Forrester Consumer Forum in Dallas earlier this week. It was my 16th Forrester event which speaks volumes about how I respect the company, value their people and study their work. It’s a day and a half of data, insights and big thinking with a sprinkling of small track sessions scaled down to snack size bites. They are also the consummate hosts. This year’s anthem was Keeping Ahead of Tomorrow’s Customers. An interesting theme, since most of the attendees (including me) were dialing back growth to match a briskly receding consumer. But Forrester did a great job at keeping things upbeat while recognizing the current economic climate and giving us some weapons we could take back and use.

One of the things that has been missing for me during the big top presentations as of late has been bold predictions. The research is still top notch, the analysts are smart, “wicked smart” as Carrie Johnson would say in her Boston accent, and they are frequently ahead of almost everyone. But some of the edge has dulled. I entered the main ballroom wondering if I would get something provocative, forward looking and passionate. My take? I got more stick your neck out than usual, and I was really excited about it.

James McQuivey, Ph.D. began with a talk called Satisfy Consumers for the Next Decade (and Beyond). He brought long lost relatives to life on the stage in an effective manner illustrating his story about why some consumers adopt early, and others late. His theme was: People share a set of universal needs. Satisfy those needs and you will win. He was really getting me to lean in until… Until he trashed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He said.

Maslow’s needs are not ordered, not orderly, and in fact they’re messy.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - Graphic: Wikipedia

As I said, I was looking for provocative statements and guts, and I got both. As a formally trained psychologist I take umbrage to disparaging Maslow. He had sound methods and studied some of the most actualized people he could find to help him create this classic pyramid. I don’t claim it’s perfect, that would not be remotely possible in psychology. But it is a storied framework that has stood the test of time and is to be respected. I don’t believe Maslow intended his concepts to be the basis for business sales, but Mr. McQuivey made a strong case for how the current social media trend should cause us to rethink many things. He then laid out his own take at people’s universal needs.

Connection
Uniqueness
Comfort
Variety

According to Mr. McQuivey, everyone has all four, but they vary in importance by individual, can shift over time due to changing circumstances and people will ultimately trade off one need against another. These are interesting to ponder and even more so as he lays them out in a Needs Profile designed to help marketers target consumers better.

He built his next section on the idea of a Convenience Quotient that can be found in research released earlier in the year. A Convenience Quotient (CQ) tells you how you compare with competitors as well as with other ways to meet the same needs. It applies to products as well as services.

I went from upset to inquisitive to interested by the time he wrapped up. At a high level it made sense, but I didn’t really know how to reliably arrive at a CQ for any of my products or services. Seemed very manufacturing focused. Will need to go back and ponder some more. Perhaps I’ll give him a call.

The event was held at the Gaylord Texan. Essentially it was like being in The Truman Show. A space the size of a city block enclosed in glass and steel. It looked more like a movie set than a resort. Perfectly manicured and very comfortable. We affectionately began calling it “The Bubble.”

Fellow Tweets Amy & Jayne — Tweeters Amy & Jayne

P.S. I attended my first TweetUp in Dallas. It was really a fantastic experience. Twitters send out Tweets and before you know it over 50 people descended on a BBQ restaurant in Grapevine, TX. All kinds of genuine, creative and fun people. Everyone is relaxed and talking about social media, politics, their start up efforts, etc. I felt so comfortable. You can get a better feel for what a TweetUp is by watching this video shot by Top Tweet and an amazing Forresterite Jeremiah Owyang. Check out his insightful and content packed blog here.

More to come on the Forrester Consumer Forum.

How to Frustrate Your Site Users

AT&T is my home telephone provider. I switched from MCI WorldCom (remember Bernie Ebbers now incarcerated for fraud and conspiracy) because MCI couldn’t understand that they needed to come to my newly constructed home to actually connect the phone wires from the outside of the house to the inside switch box. You don’t want me to start that rant. Let’s just say I will never be a customer of MCI or whatever they’re called, ever, ever again. Not in this or any future life!

Back to the post. My credit card was re-issued with a new number so I needed to log onto the AT&T site and update my payment details. Hadn’t been there in a while because I am enrolled in auto payment and turned off my paper statement. The less I think about my phone company the happier I am.

I typed in att.com and was taken to the home page. When I clicked on My Account I landed here.

Perfectly attractive page at first glance, but the Cingular acquisition has added complexity. Three places to register, login or get support. Pretty well designed and labeled except for U-verse. What’s U-verse, another planet? In short order I found the home phone section, clicked login, and entered my credentials. So far so good. Since I last logged in they added two factor authentication to the site. Two factor is a federal regulation for some industries and others have adopted it as another layer of protection. It often takes the form of question and answer, knowable only by you. Turns out that when users set them up, they are so secret they can’t even answer them.

AT&T is a case study in why they can’t be answered. Here are the questions offered to me in the drop downs.

First and foremost best practice site designers need to follow in selecting these questions is the answer should never change over time. Your father’s middle name will always be the same, and very easy to remember, but what country you would like to visit can shift over time. Almost none of their questions pass this test.

This means returning users will have a much higher likelihood of failing to answer the questions correctly, become frustrated and call customer service. The exact opposite result that AT&T and the customer desires. Using personas and goal-directed design techniques would reveal that a meaningful amount of time will pass between logins. Don’t expect users to remember details that they rarely think about. It’s not a test. Back to the drawing board.

543 Parking Spaces Remaining

April is a heavy travel month. Three business trips plus a very much anticipated week long vacation; a delayed spring break. Today my travels have taken me to Columbus, Ohio, spending two nights in a Hilton Hotel near a new and brisk residence and shopping district (Easton).

While we were waiting for a dinner table I happen to glance out the window onto the shopping scape. The usual can be seen, Macy’s, Barnes and Noble, etc. As I continue to scan the horizon my eye rests on the corner street sign; something new. A stack of three signs mounted atop a pole. One is the standard parking symbol (a big red P), a second points the way to the Hilton valet. The third one, sandwiched in between the other two, has a digital readout embeded in it. Bright red numerals that display the number of spaces available in one of the parking decks. It changes real time, as cars enter and leave the structure.

Not only is this really clever it’s good business. First-timers to any shopping area will be looking at signs to help guide them, so the displays will be easily seen. By positioning them at the entrances and not on the parking structures themselves, customers will be able to gage where available spots are without driving around. Once you are familiar with the location of your favorite shops and restaruants, finding parking is a snap. It also works as a retention tool. Imagine it’s the busy holiday season or a random rainy Saturday afternoon. You just might choose the Easton shopping center over others because you know the parking experience will be better.

Of course it makes me wonder about the accuracy. How do they record entrances and exits to the deck? Is it by space or simply by counting vehicles that come and go? What happens when it’ s busy and the display shows only 1 space remaining? Are shoppers off to the races? Who will be the first to hack the system to ensure there is a place waiting for them on Black Friday?

Ultimate convergence will be achieved when this information can be pushed real time to your car’s GPS displaying the deck, level number and exact space available.

I gotta say that I didn’t expect to find something this forward thinking on my trip. Great job Columbus!

Netgear Fails to Connect on First Impression

In a previous post I wrote about a great out-of-the box customer experience I had with an Olympus E-510 SLR digital camera. Of course for every great experience there is likely to be one not so great. I think you know what’s coming. Very recently I opened up a new wireless router, the Netgear RangeMax WPN824, all eager and ready to install it. Here’s what happened.

One day a few weeks ago, none of my 5 computers or Sonos boxes could access the Internet. OH MY GOD! WE CAN’T GET ONLINE! My oldest son felt violated. Apparantly losing Internet access is comparable to having a plague on your house. This is red alert time, so I sprung into action. After all we do EVERYTHING online, even order groceries, so that means no food. I checked all the cable connections and rebooted the modem and router, and still nothing, despite all lights flashing green. A call to Comcast told me that my connection was live and strong, and my modem was working, so it must mean a dead router. My first router was also a Netgear (RP614) purchased back in 2000, when you could only get hardwired models. It cost me $50 about 8 years ago, so it seemed fair enough to me that I would need to replace it.

Did some online research, then headed for the local Best Buy. Lots to choose from, but since I have Macs as well as PCs in my home, my choices were narrowed. Netgear had treated me well, so I picked up the WPN824 and came home to install it.The out-of-the-box experience was not what I had expected it to be. Here’s the post describing the Olympus digital camera experience. Netgear’s box was well designed and informative, but the magic stopped there. The CD had some quick start instructions that told me to insert the CD and click on the index.htm icon. But it was repeated in 7 other languages. Hate that. I reviewed the Getting Started sheet and followed the Apple Mac instructions to the letter. It promised me a Smart Wizard Configuration Assistant would be conjured up to lead me seamlessly through the process. After about 5 minutes of rubbing the lamp, and using up my 3 wishes, no one appeared to help me, and I wasn’t online. Here’s the CD sleeve.

The box promised 24/7 technical support, so I reached for the phone. In short order I was speaking to a pleasant gentleman (probably in an offshore call center). He was excellent. Asking specific questions to understand what was going on, and giving me extremely good direction. I asked him why the Smart Wizard didn’t show up, and he informed me that the CD does operate on a Mac.

“Why does Netgear pack Quick Start documentation in the box that gives me instructions for installing on a Mac when you know it doesn’t work?”

He deflected the comment and focused on trying to solve my problem. When I threw him another curve ball he said, “That’s no problem, we can work around that.” In less than 10 minutes he had the router configured from my Mac G5 and insisted on staying with me until I had accessed the Internet with all my computers. So kudos to Netgear for having a well trained and available staff.

However, I am not a nascent when it comes to technology, and fully expected to get up and running with the new router on my own. So while Netgear has done a good job training their most expensive customer service channel, they failed at helping their customers in the much less expensive self-serve channel. Most of what was provided to me in the box was either wrong, or would not work with my operating system, despite claiming compatibility on the box. They should trade in their so called Smart Wizard for one that is more effective at conjuring. By paying closer attention to their out-of-the-box experience they will can deliver a better customer experience for less money.

Obviously I am back online (having averted yet another crisis) and fully expect my Netgear router to serve me for years to come, just as the last one did.