I rest my case, after lugging it in myself.

Another special weekend away for the birthday of the one I love. This year, to out do all other years we took a trip down to Amberley Castle http://www.amberleycastle.co.uk/. A top notch hotel by all reports. But I always have a problem with these places. High prices leave me with high expectations and they are rarely lived up to. It is a firm belief of mine that most hotels are poor, not because of any major financial reason, but just lack of care about what they are doing. The above hotel had a long sweeping drive ending in the entrance tower into the castle complete with portcullis. I had imagined that a place of this calibre would have some obvious things like porters and valet parking. Nope. We dumped the car outside reception (a 20m walk from the drive) where I was greeted by.... Nobody. So lugged the multiple bags and suit bags etc into the reception to be surprised by a grumpy girl. And this is my biggest bugbear of all. Hotel reception. The place where first impressions are made and yet often the worst service in the hotel. I have had arguments when they do not have your room as per arrangement, they are disinterested in helping and manage to get the 'can I help you?' with the same feeling as the Americans (bless em) get in the 'have a nice day' when you can clearly hear that they would not care if you walked out and died. Maybe I am old fashioned but the whole mood of the weekend in a hotel is set in those first few minutes. If it is poor then the hotel is already playing catch up when you come across the good service. I am glad to say that the remainder of the staff at the hotel were friendly, warm and welcoming. The food was excellent and the atmosphere worthy of the reputation as one of the most romantic hotels in the country. Needless to say, the exit was the same. grumpy bloke at reception and no help offered with the extensive luggage one always ends up taking to these places. Small things that cost nothing to sort, a kind word, a smile to show they actually care, an offer of help with the bags.

Picky, absolutely. At prices like that one expects the best.

No room at the Inn?

It struck me as I lay here awake at 4 am (again) thinking through some of the weeks problems. A few things have been nagging me for some time. The first is about the businesses I run. How do so many other businesses do so well yet the service and products they provide are so poor. Why doesn't someone start a business to compete and provide better service. There must be a gap in that market. Then following on from that thought how does one get into that market. Surely competing with the big guy is a waste of time and doomed to failure. A meeting with two companies last night gave me both hope and despair. One is a global software company (not MS by the way) and the other an SI. I had invited the MD of one and a senior member of the other to dinner to discuss the prospect of an early delivery of our product to a mutual customer. The customer wants our product but the integration of it into the main software is not their priority. It has continually slipped its delivery date for over a year now with no real indication that the next date in the middle of next year will be honoured. The dinner started well but it was only minutes in when I realised that things would not work out the way I had envisaged. We had hoped that the software company would see the good PR opportunity that would emerge from interfacing to our product earlier before our mutual customer could get it ordered officially. The cost of the integration would be minimal. Then the truth hit home. The software company's turnover was over a billion dollars per year. There was no money in this for them and so the response was thanks but no thanks, who are you again? A quite understandable position. Naive of us? Possibly. Did it make me feel bad? Not at all. What became clear today was the opportunity. How does a small company work with or compete with the big guy without having their ideas stripped and company destroyed in one step. Simply, they are too busy watching the billions to worry about the small guy. We fly under the radar. The opportunities they look to focus on have to be big enough to warrant the use of their limited (albeit large) resources. So their very business model prevents them from dealing or competing with the small guy. This being a common business model means that there is in fact a 'nursery' in any business sector where the predators are kept out. It is normally thought to be a high risk area but everything is relative. It may be high risk but the small guy's costs are low so you don't lose much. It is not until you have meat on the bone that you become an interesting player for the big guys. By then, it may be too late. I don't know the history in detail but I wonder if the Yahoos of the world saw Google coming. You can imagine the meeting.
Google guys "we have this great new algorithm we would like to sell you, it will transform the way your search engines will work"
Yahoo guy "what's your revenue?"
Google guy "500K per year"
Yahoo guy "sorry, we are busy at the moment"
Hindsight is a powerful thing.

And to answer the original question, why do so many people use companies with poor service and products? Apathy. We are all too busy to care. We shop around? Probably. We compare prices between the big guys, with the budgets to advertise or who get into the high street (same old brands in every high street in every town in every country). We moan about the poor service of the telephone companies, the car dealer, the banks. And yet, have we really looked around and considered the small guy. How happy are we when we find that small private individual shop where the guy who runs it owns it and provides excellent customer service, just how we remember it used to be right? Yet do we actively seek these guys out? Do we hell. We want our product and we want it now! Can I wait to get to the small guy next week? Nope, too busy. I will use the big brand multinational next door as they are 2p cheaper and have them in stock today. Do we ever look beyond page 2 of google when searching for anything?

The pace of life increases. What are we busy doing? Growing our businesses (working), either for ourselves or for the faceless shareholders. Creating the very multinationals who put us through call centres, whose customer service people are rude, who don't care when the shoddy product they have sold is broken in the box when you get it home. All in the name of growth. Sell more, make more money, grow, bigger market share, make more money, grow. And when you are big, all your customers hate you.

Whatever happened to just making a living? The moral of the story. 4am is a better time to sleep than to be writing blogs.