Everyday my frustration as a customer increases. The quality of many products gets worse. Corporations and companies take their customers as granted and heave like they do not depend on us. We are not treated like kings anymore. Business (at least in Europe) is changing into a market place which does not take its customers serious any more.

Some weeks ago I attended a presentation about Kaizen (held by Mr. Minoru Tominaga, a recognized expert about Kaizen) which gave me back my hopes. Hopes about a better world. Kaizen is a Japanese concept which has spread to many companies all around the world. It literally means “constant improvement” and can be applied to many different aspects of business (or even life). Since it’s development the concept naturally experienced continually changes on itself and at the moment Kaizen often focuses on customer relationship and customer care. In Japan customers are called “honorable guests” and that already describes it perfectly. The customer is “king” and should at least be treated with the greatest respect possible. I do not want to go into detail about this topic but there are many companies (even in the western world) which try to improve their relationship to their customers. I too think that in the near future it will be an important factor to survive the tough business battles. In the last years company were trying to achieve the best quality to keep their position on top. As many competitors forced themselves to increase quality the level is almost the same. But one thing which can still distinguish one company from the other is indeed their way of treating their customers. I do not demand to get any presents or anything for free from companies. But I demand respect. The same respect I would give to other humans.

Lately I got the impression more and more that companies try to get their advantage at any cost (even with dubious methods). If you pick up your phone or start your email client and tell customer care about any problem there is a hight chance that they tell you without any hesitation that you are right and that they will solve the problem immediately. If you are confused now and do not know what I mean then I have a short example story which occurred some weeks ago. We went on a holiday to Portugal and decided beforehand that we will need a rental car. So we booked an Avis car as they were the cheapest (after some price comparison). We received a coupon which covered all the costs in Portugal. By showing the coupon to the Avis branch office they would give us the car and there would not be any extra costs (except some local insurance which had to be paid at the office). Everything went like planned except that when returning the car the clerk charged us a much higher one way fee than covered by the coupon. We did not argue but simply paid the difference. Back home after some days I decided to tell Avis customer care about the incident. Avis customer care checked all the facts and decided that they would give us back our money within the next days. No arguing, nothing. Of course I only told the very short version of this story and I maybe will again choose Avis as their customer support was really cooperative and nice. But the overall impression is that those things might occur not by accident but on purpose. In that case it really might have been a small mistake but there are more cases like that. First you are cheated and if you complain they will correct their fault like nothing happened.

That should not be. You should not be cheated in the first place.

Now after all that complaining we finally have reached the main story. A story about my heroes. A company in Spain which produces olives. The company I am talking about is HUTESA Agroalimentaria, S.A.. Some days ago I bought (like many times before) three glasses of olives. The olives themselves are filled with almonds and I pretty like them. When arriving at home I realized that something was different with the olives. Instead of whole almonds I only found olives stuffed with almond halves. If it would have been like that from the beginning I would not have bothered but I thought it must be some kind of silly joke. How could someone reduce the quality of a product just to earn some more money. I know that happened many times before to other products but this is terrible. Stuffing olives with only almond halves. I really felt miserably tricked. The next day I decided to send some feedback to Hutesa. No complaint or anything mean… just saying that I am not happy with their product and that I will not buy their olives anymore.

Sure not to have made any difference but with a great relief I went on to life my usual life. To my great surprise I received a very nice answer on the very same day. They said they are sorry to loose me as their customer and that the cause of the measurement was the pressure by a very big client of theirs. They decided to use almond halves to stay competitive. I did not answer immediately and the next day I received the same message in Spanish (they must have thought that I could not read their first email and tried to reach me again). This time I replied immediately.

Again I received a reply saying that they wanted to inform me that due to my claim they will put whole almonds inside again. Now I got really happy on one hand as I caused a change (Yes!! It still is able to change the system!). But on the other hand now I am very worried that they might not be competitive enough with other olive companies. I do not want my claim to cause any layoffs or other social dramas. I wrote the same to them and that is where we are now. As soon as there are any news I will keep you updated.

One thing I also promised is to write about this on my blog (although there are not many readers) I wanted to tell everybody about this very nice company. And I really do not know what is wrong with our global market. Who are the bad guys? First for me it was the company producing the products. Then after telling me the horrible truth it seems to be the food trade. But if you ask them I am pretty sure they are not the root cause either. They also might suffer from mean competition. Is this true capitalism? Will it get worse? Has it just started in Europe?

Now I seem to look very stupid. The little boy discovering the “evil” face of capitalism. Running my own business together with two partners I hope we will do well in the long run. But I am optimistic that even companies with a heart can be successful. For me Hutesa will be my first choice olive company (because they care about their customers). And I hope other customers will also show initiative and take actions when they are not happy with any product. Do not make it your goal to change anything immediately but if enough people give feedback there has to be a change. You have the right to let anybody know how you feel. You do not have to insult anybody but you can express your unhappiness. Corporations and companies might one day realize that real and honest respect towards their customers and clients is increasing their competitiveness.

HUTESA Agroalimentaria, S.A.

Unbelievable how corporations are lobbying the European Union to death. After a lot of pressure by the people the European parliament said no to software patents last year. But the case is still hot. The European commission is preparing to force the Europeans to introduce patents on software.

Wouldn’t it feel good to escape the dictatorship of the lobbies and to show them that they cannot control everything like they want to?

Why don’t we show the lobby to go back to the place where they came from? I really do not want to wait until it is too late, to wait until the European commission just enforced the law. Let us show them that the people have a voice too. Let us organize ourselves now and demonstrate against this practice before bad things happened. Everyone who is interested but too lazy to follow the topic can drop me an email with his/her details wolfgang (@t) hafenscher (dot) net and I will inform him/her about the current situation and give him/her details about public demonstrations and other activities near his/her place.

I am not going to found any new organization but will rely solely on existing organizations. My goal is to be the interface to the existing organizations for those who are interested in the topic itself but do not have the time or the will to follow all the activities.

Get information about the whole case at http://swpat.ffii.org/
Some other background info at
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.truth50.com/

Today Mr. George W. Bush is visiting Vienna.
Not really anything to say about that…
…except maybe you want to see a contribution to this event of a friend of mine.

It is incredible how good Sony is at making their customers look out for alternatives. To be honest I was quite a big fan of their products. I am taking pictures with their digital cameras, I am making phone calls with their mobiles and some months ago I decided to sell my desktop PC and switch to a Sony vaio notebook. Since that day my loyalty was fading.

First of all you don’t get any bundled driver/operating system CDs/DVDs anymore. They use a certain amount of your harddisk to store the Windows recovery there. So they take away some gigabytes from your harddisk in favour of some recovery files. Do you usually buy harddisks where the assembler decides to use a certain amount for his stuff?

Next surprise arrives right after booting the hilarious operating system (which is definitely not my preferable choice). Dozens of popups which tell you to register somewhere. Everytime I boot into Windows I get reminders of joining club Vaio. No option to deactivate this nonsense. It’s like telling Jehova’s witnesses to go away… every time you open the front door of your flat.

After installing GNU/Linux you will notice that Sony does everything to prevent the community to develop drivers. It is not like someone asking Sony to develop drivers for their hardware. It is more like the community asking “please let us develop drivers which work with your hardware for free” but they want to force us to use Windows. But hey… who needs the built in Modem and MemoryStick reader?

Today another bad thing happened. The harddrive decided to break. It is not fully broken yet and I was able to make a backup but I am sure those strange, loud noises it makes are some serious illness. I don’t blame Sony for the broken Harddisk. That happens a lot. But I blame their way of treating the customer. They disallow me (and the company where I bought the machine too) to remove the harddisk and send it in alone. Does anyone have any details on this? I am not allowed to replace the harddisk myself because the guarantee will be violated? What if I want to put in a faster harddisk with more memory?

I depend on my notebook and I cannot waste weeks waiting for replacement (as they don’t offer replacement notebooks during the repair process). It is OK for me to buy another (faster, bigger) harddisk and use that one. I don’t want to charge Sony any cent… they just shall return the old harddisk once it is fixed. Sadly the only way is to take away the whole notebook.

The helpdesk is no use either:

Helpdesk: Your harddisk is broken? Please do a system recovery.

Me: Ok. What for? I am not even using Windows.

Helpdesk: You have to do a full system recovery and see if the error occurs again then.

Me: Ok. After doing the recovery… how will this story go on?

Helpdesk: A man arrives at your place bringing a box. He will make another appointment with you to pick up the box another day with your notebook in it….

Arrrgh. How could setting up my Windows be the solution to my problem? The harddisk is physically broken and makes strange noises.

All this is enough for me. As soon as my Sony products need replacements I will switch to alternatives. There are many out there and I should have done more research before handing over my money to some weird corporation.