My Terrible, Awful Day at Dreamforce 2013

Each year, Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference represents a mixed bag of experiences. On the one hand, it's an incredible opportunity to see a few of the ways that some of the world's top businesses are using software to evolve their businesses. And, if you work with the software, some of the breakout sessions can provide a great window into how to take advantage of certain features and functions.

At the same time, there is a dark side to entire Dreamforce experience, one that corresponds to crowds and capacity. There is a chaos that hangs over the event, a madness of conflicting schedules and oversubscribed sessions.

Back in the old days (that period when the year still had two zeros in it), the crowd helped contribute to the excitement. It was an era when there was still a lot of skepticism about the viability of the cloud and multi-tenant architectures. In that era, one of the most common question that I wound up having to answer was, "but really, who is using Salesforce.com?" In that environment, being in that sea of people was vindication.

These days, the crowd is more of a crowd than a bonding experience. What's more, instead of feeling like a giant user group, VIP passes and exclusive access options have turned the entire event into the equivalent of a crowded flight -- the people in first class get treated well, but most of us are stuck in the back with a middle seat, no leg room, and no recline.

Dreamforce is not like a traditional trade show in it's use of the convention center. Rather than many exhibits crowding a convention center floor, Dreamforce depends upon meeting rooms for technical breakout sessions. Each year, as the conference has grown, it's been surprising to see how the infrastructure has adapted to handle the expanding crowds broad agenda. Last year, when they closed off Howard street, held conference sessions in all of the surrounding hotels all the way to Union Square, and then blocked off the area around the Civic Center for the gala event, it struck me as a wonderful example of how San Francisco can come together and jump through hoops in an effort to host these kinds of things. In so many ways, the City is an amazing place.

And yet, for everything that worked well last year (other than what was probably a traffic nightmare for San Francisco), this year was marked by a conference out of sync with the city and the weather. With the November timetable, suddenly all of the outdoor overflow areas became unusable. Travel between downtown locations meant getting soaked between sessions. And while this year's gala event location at Pac Bell park had the potential to provide an well structured venue for an outdoor event, the predictable fall rain meant transformed the event into something into a gathering under the dry parts of the stadium to eat hamburgers and hot dogs, while watching some music on the television. Even the bus rides to the park were challenged with the traffic and the construction on Fourth street.

For the past three years or so, hotels in San Francisco sell out several months before Dreamforce. I knew it was bad this year when I was registering and the Dreamforce hotel interface was listing Hotels in Monterey. Another indicator is when the motels in the ugly parts of the Tenderloin/SOMA area are charging over $300 per night (it leaves you wondering what the people who wind up staying there end up thinking about San Francisco). Even funnier was when I mentioned the crappy hotel situation to our Salesforce account rep and he sent me a link to the housing page in the registration app (#worse-than-a-chatbot). So, invariably, I was forced to commute into the city from the South Bay each day. And while the hour or so commute on Caltrain isn't too bad, what it does add to Dreamforce is a lot of extra steps, the need to carry everything you need (or take back from the event), and it puts a serious damper on any evening events.

For me, the worst day turned out to be Wednesday. The third day of Dreamforce is a day that is punctuated with sponsored events and after-parties. But when you have the added commute to the overcrowded city, it can be a bit taxing. I decided to head out early that night and grab an express train home. Unfortunately, like many commuters that day, my trip home was hindered by a downed power line near the Hayward Park stop on the Caltrain line. I wound up standing in a packed train, waiting from about 6:50 until shortly after 8:00pm before we even started the journey down the peninsula. After a slow ride and a bus bridge at San Mateo, I finally arrived in Mountain View sometime after 10pm. I, like many of my fellow commuters, went home tired and unhappy -- questioning the wisdom of returning to the city for the last day of the conference (I ended up driving on Thursday, but I heard that Caltrain had another day of delays that morning).

Dreamforce: Too Big to Be Meaningful
As I've mentioned in the past, when you attempt to create an illusion of personalized experiences that are clearly generic scripted repetitions -- like the Safeway checkers reading your name off of the receipt like they know you -- it almost seems worse than doing nothing. It's like saying to the customer, "oh yeah, you are important to us, we value your business" with an accompanying satirical tone and an eye-roll. You're personalized customer experience is a mockery of personalized customer experience.

In may ways, that is what Dreamforce has become. In the old days of the conference, the entire experience was like a multi-tenant architecture. You sat, side by side, with your colleagues on the platform. Big companies, small companies, you shared an infrastructure and you shared the challenges of the crowd. You were just as likely to wind up sitting in the front row as you might be at the back of the venue. When you attended the event, you were part of a community.

Now, it feels more like you are part of a herd -- sorted, weighed, and routed as is most profitable. With VIP lines and exclusive access, you are often reminded that you are in economy class, not good enough for business or first -- despite spending what probably amounts to a premium, regardless of the size of your business. Yes, you are a customer, but as a customer appreciation event, this will leave you feeling like you are second class.

Consider this: in five years of attending the conference, only two of my five account representatives have made an effort to meet with me during the week of Dreamforce. If the customer-facing roots of your organization can't interact with your customers that have paid $1000 to come to your party, are you really holding a party for your customers? And can you really call yourself a customer-focused business?

Think about that. As marketers, most of us have considered road shows and customer events. We all understand the costs and the challenges. We've all consumed our share of free food and drinks at business events. Now imagine asking your customers to pay to come to your customer event. What kind of experience would you expect that they were expecting?

I used to think that it might be helpful to bring a team of attendees to Dreamforce; perhaps a couple of people from the sales organization, somebody from IT, and an exec or two. But considering how large Dreamforce has become, I've come to believe that, even if they were excited to participate and be a part of the crowd, the real benefits that they might have gained two or three years ago have faded, washed away in a sea of lines, generic experiences, and diverse business/software platform interests. Should I be battling with the people who might be there for Work.com? Or the developers who don't know about Heroku? Do I really need to hear another pitch on the latest version of Portal - now Communities -- when the pricing model is so disconnected from anything that makes sense for our business?

Would you pay $1000, then wait in line behind a thousand people if you could only ask one question? And, if you did all that, how would you feel about the experience if the answer that you received gave you less information than already got during your online research?

Can Dreamforce Be Saved?
This question is actually several questions rolled up into one.

• Has the conference grown too large for San Francisco? 
• Would it work better if it was relocated somewhere else that could handle the size of the event?
• Has the conference itself become too diversified and lost it's focus?
• Is there any way to make it effective in connecting with individual customers while hosting the massive crowds?

In many ways, I think that there are elements of Dreamforce that are intertwined with San Francisco. While a location like Las Vegas might be able to handle the large crowd, there is a reason that so many Internet businesses have found their home in San Francisco. The city speaks the language of software start-up and part of the dream in Dreamforce is a harmony with this world. And yet, there is little question that the San Francisco infrastructure is overwhelmed by the conference crowds. Housing, transportation, conference room capacity, all are being taxed beyond their limit during the event. Without limits, I expect the reality of the conference to just get worse and worse.

As for the diversity, there's always the dream of serendipitous interaction and the potential engagement with technologies and applications that you might not otherwise have imagined. And yet, when crowds become overwhelming, it's less about serendipity and more about traffic and road rage. Perhaps the bigger question is, what is a realistic take-away from this in-person experience?

So when you consider the world of modern marketing and making individual connections, it seems so antiquated to provide such a generic, impersonal experience. As the provider of the leading CRM platform, you'd expect the experience to be more personal. But perhaps that underscores the difference between the hype and the reality -- in the same way you'd expect Facebook marketing to be... better. Big data and algorithms are powerful, but they are hard-pressed to achieve something greater or overcome something as powerful as a long line or a frustrating commute.

And so, the spectacle will probably continue. And as it does, the evangelism will probably ebb -- or continue to ebb -- and instead of something amazing, it will become something amazingly horrible. My terrible, awful day at Dreamforce probably would have been better if all of the hotels in San Francisco weren't sold out and I was staying in the city and hadn't been stuck on Caltrain for over three hours. But without that Caltrain experience, I might not feel so compelled to ask is the entire experience really worth it?

The Don't-Let-Go Business: How Hurricane Electric Earned a Blog Post

I know that it seems like much of the posts that find there way here are lately arise out of some business or service pushing my buttons, so I promise that I'll put together something that's not an angry tirade soon -- maybe after this post.

Recently, I found myself embroiled in a situation that serves as a great reminder about how technological progress shapes business expectations. It's the kind of thing where, one day you're selling the "must have" advertising like a Yellow Pages ad or a Thomas Guide listing, then "suddenly" you wake up to realize that your product is obsolete, usurped by the Internet and Google. Not only do you have to re-envision yourself and your business to adapt to the new market climate, but you also have these longstanding relationships with some of your most loyal customers that have stayed with you all of this time. How do you handle dissolving these relationships?

As with other moments in the lifetime of interactions with your customers, how you behave as a business shapes your customer's perception of you and your future reputation, regardless of how awesome the relationship may have been.

Our Story: Longtime Hurricane Electric Customers
When you look back to 2006, it doesn't seem all that long ago. And yet, in the world of servers, 2006 is two to three generations in the past. And when it comes to web hosting, so much has changed since that time. Back in the day, many companies were running on dedicated servers in co-location data centers. The idea of using virtualized servers and grid computing wasn't really in play and a multi-tenant infrastructure was a tough sell for some in the IT world. Amazon Web Services officially launched in 2006. Technologically speaking, 2006 was in many ways BC, Before Cloud.

When you look back through time to those thrilling days of yesteryear, there were some common Internet provider business practices that just seem laughable in today's market. Back in those days, it was all about the box. In 2006, as we compared data center providers, having a local provider like Hurricane Electric -- versus, say, Rackspace -- offered some potential advantages in the event that you needed to do some level of hands-on maintenance to your server box. While it may not have any any real practical advantage, it helped comfort the IT guys who didn't really want to loose touch with the physical hardware. Another common practice was a set-up charge for a dedicated server. Essentially, since you were getting ready to run a server, this helped subsidize the Internet hosting company's costs in case you suddenly went belly-up ala so many dot.coms and start-ups. And it was not unusual to have longer initial term hosting contracts, year or multi-year agreements.

And that, in a nutshell, describes our initial relationship with Hurricane Electric. At the time, they were great, and a good fit within the prevailing business climate. Their hosting services did well, we were a couple of hops off of the main Internet connect running through San Jose, and all was good. During the server build process, we had spec'd one system, but for one reason or another, it wouldn't work with the drives that we had spec'd, so Hurricane offered us a 'free' upgrade to a dual CPU server board that had come off of a recently decommissioned system. As I say, we were happy.

So, jump ahead four years to 2010. With the server getting old in server years, we approached Hurricane about a plan to replace the box with a newer model, ideally with the current one running in the foreground while we built up the other one. Despite four years of consistent, trouble-free business running on hardware that was essentially theirs, Hurricane Electric wanted to charge us another set-up fee. Instead, we began looking at alternative hosting solutions.

In today's hosting environment, virtualized servers and cloud environments allow you to sign up with a credit card, build a server from a control panel, pay nothing for the server until you build it, and, ultimately, pay only for what you eat. Storage, CPUs, processor cycles, bandwidth can all be metered. When measured against the cost of hardware and colocation rent, the cloud was really a no-brainer decision. So move we did.

Leaving Hurricane Electric
This is the part of the story where things get really sad, where Hurricane Electric moves from becoming a respected local partner to one of those companies like AOL that make it very difficult to escape their clutches. Once we had our new cloud server up and running, we reached out to Hurricane Electric to shut down our service. First, Hurricane told us that we needed to send them written notice on company letterhead along with why we were leaving. Next, they told us that we've been under an automatically renewing annual contract and we wouldn't be able to cancel our agreement until Q2 of next year.

Since 2006, we've made consistent monthly payments for our dedicated server. We have been a consistent, no-hassle revenue stream. But now, like AOL's dial-up service, our needs and the terms of our agreement have become hopelessly outdated. And yet, within the halls of Hurricane Electric's accounting and customer service groups, they would rather cling tightly to a few more months of revenue than create a positive customer experience. Somehow, all of that historical value that we represented to them is no match for a couple of months payment. In short, they do not connect this portion of their business with reputation and positive word of mouth.

Where we could have dissolved the relationship with a simple "their service offering ceased to match our needs," we moved into a "their service offering may have been acceptable at one time, but even if they were an okay match for your requirements today, I would not do business with them." In the same way that I would never give AOL my credit card information -- anyone who has ever tried to disconnect from them knows how difficult they make that transaction.

Auto-renew contracts can be a convenience to customers, but too often auto-renew is used like a club, hammering the customer with a commitment that doesn't match their needs. Because it's employed in scams and borderline scams by businesses that look to surreptitiously trap customers in leech-like transactions, businesses should be hyper-vigilant around the use of this tool. When your business becomes knowingly collecting funds well past the useful life of the contracted service, you've entered the land of scam. Let's apply a new term, scamification, to our lexicon.

As marketers, it's particularly frustrating to see this kind of behavior from a business. When you think about all of the battles that you have to go through, justifying budgets in order to attract and win customers or to build reputation, only to watch all of those efforts flipped on their head when other parts of the business act aggressively to piss off the customer, it makes you crazy. Radio and print ads? Wasted. Those billboards? Pointless. When you compare the cost of what you might spend to publish a case study or a customer testimonial, then compare that to the negative word of mouth created by an angry customer -- or attempting to be former customer -- and yet, they don't get it.

After all is said and done, I would not do business with Hurricane Electric again. I would not recommend them to you either. While I would not put them in the same category as those scam businesses that trick you into an online transaction, then leech off of your credit card while you try to find a way to cancel their service, their business behaviors are such that it certainly reminded me of that type of business. Caveat Emptor.

Worthwhile Reading - Why Facebook Brand Pages Don't Work

I came across this post on Pando Daily today -- totally worth a read.

Why Facebook pages are a bust for brands by Joseph Pigato.

United Airlines On Twitter: My First Sighting of Actual Next Gen Customer Service

For several years now, we've heard the tales of companies monitoring social media so that they could respond quickly to customer issues as the blossomed on Twitter and Facebook. I remember reading stories about Comcast investing huge amounts on their social media customer service infrastructure. So it's always struck me as kind of funny when you're facing an issue or a complaint, then you post something on Twitter only to hear the sound of crickets. Nothing. Silence.

In some ways, I think of this more as the legend of social media customer service. Like the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot, you hear stories, but you never see any actual evidence of their existence.

I remember one time experiencing a very frustrating issue with Comcast, then attempting to use every outlet possible to contact their customer service. It turned out that the long wait on the phone was the fastest -- I never saw any response on Twitter.

So imagine my surprise the other night when I was sitting at SFO, wrestling with a flight delay for a red eye back east on my way to a technical conference the next day. Normally, I try to avoid red eye flights, but it was the best option for balancing my schedule requirements with the exhibitor set-up schedule. But, since the conference was in one of those not-an-airline-hub locations, my red eye was supposed to connect with a regional jet later that next morning. The flight delay was looking, increasingly, like that connection was not going to happen.

It's times like this that I miss the old days with my Red Carpet Club membership. The customer service people in the Red Carpet Club would always give you straight answers and they'd do everything that they could to help you out. So when I went to the customer service station inside the terminal to discuss what things looked like, I got some vague, disappointing news.

The best that she could tell me was that, not only was I likely to miss my connecting flight, but all of the flights leaving Newark that next day were full. They couldn't get me on another connecting flight until after 10pm the next night. Besides not really being thrilled about the idea of spending 24 hours with United just to make a west-to-east cross country flight, arriving at midnight would mean that my show set-up day would be lost.

Not satisfied with the answers that I was getting there, I decided to let the problem simmer for a bit and headed over to gate to chat with the workers at the gate desk. They took a look at my flight schedule and determined that I was indeed looking at problems. But, rather than settling for that, they dove in and found that they could put me on standby for a 12pm flight that was booked full but probably wouldn't wind up being full. While it wasn't a perfect answer, it struck me positively enough that I took to Twitter to comment, particularly since this wasn't the first time that the UA people at the gate were quite helpful to me. Twice this year flying out of New Orleans, the two guys at the gate have jumped through hoops to arrange or rearrange my schedule and and save me from a potential nightmare of flight delays and being stranded at various airports. Those guys were awesome and the two women at the counter this time also receive a ton of thanks.

Anyway, to wrap up this long story, I was surprised to receive a reply to my Twitter posts from @united. I happened to catch it just as we were finally boarding the delayed flight. I was so surprised, that my first thought was -- is this from a real person or an automated chat bot. When I arrived in Newark the next morning, they had replied again to tell me that they were real. And, @united, I would have replied with a DM if I get some time to sort through the stupid Twitter interface to figure out how that once easy-to-navigate function works in the current version of the app.

So, my take-aways from that trip:

1. The weekend red eye may be a problematic flight. End of the day on a weekend seems like a good recipe for delayed flights. Yet another reason to avoid the evil red eye.
2. Don't give up on customer service. Have patience and a positive attitude -- there are some of them out there who really will jump through hoops to help you if you give them your support.
3. There may not be a Bigfoot or a Loch Ness Monster, but there is a social media customer service team at United Airlines and they do listen to Twitter.

By the way United, don't think that this makes us all squared up on everything that we've been through together -- we still have some pain points. But that being said, more than the customer service support, your little note made my day. Chappeau!

The Decline and Fall of Suburban Silicon Valley

One a recent Sunday, I found my way headed down to the Farmer's Market in downtown Mountain View. Once upon a time, this was a pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning, with a short drive through the neighborhoods to the quiet downtown. My most recent Sunday was spent battling traffic, fighting for parking, and dodging the dynamic obstacles created by people who seemed to have just managed to eek out passing grades on their driver's tests. In short, Sunday morning traffic is looking a lot like what traffic used to look like on a Friday evening.

Over the past couple of years, our quaint little downtown has been gradually transforming. Increasingly, downtown Mountain View has been getting more and more crowded. It used to be Friday and Saturday night were difficult. These days, it's hard to find a day or a time when you can just pop on over to downtown for a quick bite without running around, hunting for parking.

For those of you who are new to the area, downtown Mountain View has changed a lot over the past twenty years or so -- as with all of the downtown areas in the little cities throughout the bay area. Over the years, each city has taken their own different approach as toward managing their downtown, with a myriad of results. From the gentrified mall-on-a-street experience on Burlingame Avenue to the it's-always-changing-but-never-really-changes aspect of downtown Palo Alto, our towns always seem to be looking for the right formula to make their downtown area special.

Probably the best thing that Mountain View did for downtown was when they opened up the parking areas along Castro Street for restaurants to serve food outside. It made downtown Mountain View the land of the sidewalk cafe. This one small change quickly transformed the area from yet another little downtown to a go-to experience when the weather is nice.

The change was good for restaurant business downtown. Between open air dining and a host of start-ups that all took off back around 2006, weekends were often busy, weekday lunches were usually crowded, and there was a general excitement in the air. You could feel a real Silicon Valley vibe in the air.

Downtown Mountain View also plays as an interesting contrast to Murphy Street in downtown Sunnyvale. Over the years, Murphy Street has waxed and waned. There are times when it has been packed, crowded with bars and restaurants, full of people and activity. Then other times, you could go down there and it was like a ghost-town with empty buildings and a handful of people on the street. It's always a reminder of the contrast between there and Castro Street.

When Busy Becomes Too Crowded
It used to be that parking was easy in the lots just off of Castro. On a busy night or a weekend, you might have to park two blocks away, but it was seldom difficult. Then, on weekends you needed to hunt for a space, and even the multi-level garage filled up. Then Thursday nights got to be as bad as Friday. Now, it's common all week.

Coming home on Friday night, I couldn't help but notice the traffic. While it's not unusual to see traffic backed up on southbound 101, with crowds headed to south San Jose and points beyond, I rarely see southbound Central Expressway being equally backed up. Lawrence, San Tomas, Montague and eastbound 237 were all full of people headed from the places where there are offices to the places where there is housing. And by the time I got to Mountain View, I was blown away by the back up on southbound El Camino going into Sunnyvale -- gridlock from Bernardo back past 85. Don't get me wrong, I didn't think that they were all going to the same place, I was just struck by the volume of cars on roads that usually have much less. We appear to be in the process of a pivot from Silicon Valley to Silicon Parking Lot.

Increasing Population Density: The Beaver Dam of Silicon Valley
Anyone who lives here understands the challenge of housing in Silicon Valley. Rents are high and the cost of buying is always one exponential level higher than most salaries can afford. Our ranks our full of people who would love to own, but ownership tends to be the super-thrifty, the one-time windfall recipients, the speculators and the people who bring a fat wad of cash from somewhere else. With all of this pressure on the market, housing is scarce.

The solution to this used to be further and further out of the area. Development in Pleasanton and Livermore pushed out into the central valley, while south San Jose pushed into Morgan Hill and Gilroy. Locally, there has been an ongoing push to higher density housing and development in places that didn't have housing before. I remember a quote from one of the Mountain View city council members when they approved the first zero-lot homes between Dana and Villa, "I was skeptical that anyone would buy them, but then I was surprised how quickly they sold."

And with the success of Santana Row, cities and neighborhoods throughout the area keep building these types of developments, celebrating the idea of mixed use property and two-to-three story townhomes. In a few years, this style of building may be more common in the area than the iconic Eichler. In the downtown Mountain View area, we've seen the blocks that used to be the lumberyard or single story office buildings leveled and replaced with three-story residential buildings. In the area that I used to work in Milpitas near the Great Mall, they have dozed entire blocks of single story commercial properties and they're replacing them with three-story housing.

While you might think that all of this housing would relieve some of the pressure on the housing market here, it hasn't. There are bidding wars on houses, lotteries to get into some of these developments, and demand to consume the growing supply.

What it all adds up to is a lot more people in the area. More people, more cars, more traffic. And at the same time, we're not really adding any infrastructure. No new lanes on the freeway, no wider roads, no new trains or subways, no new bus routes. In some cases, we're adding more parking, but that doesn't really count. And while it's true that we probably have more people driving electric and hybrid cars in our area than other parts of the country, they are all still cars.

We are drowning in traffic. The flood of vehicles on the roads, of people in lines at stores and restaurants. And it's not something that can really be managed on the local level. Here in Mountain View, we can't keep them from zoning more high-density housing in Milpitas. And while we're happy to see a healthy Google bringing jobs and supporting the local economy, the idyllic park-like setting around Shoreline is looking more and more like urban rush-hour all the time.

The Relationship Between People and Infrastructure
While I would love for this to be a "You Kids Get off My Lawn" post, that sort of assumes that we have lawns. But seriously, there is a real world relationship between the infrastructure and the number of people it can support. Imagine if Silicon Valley was a stadium. There are only so many seats in the stadium. You get to a point where, it doesn't matter how many people want to come inside, you can't sell more tickets than the stadium can support, because there are real world limits -- bathrooms, seats, exits. Right now, we're in a situation where people just keep printing and selling tickets into the area.

Is it reasonable to accept a future where all of our roads are crowded like the Bay Bridge at rush hour? Can we find some place to put a "lot full" sign on the area?

Realistically, I don't think we're going to be able to manage or limit the number of people coming into the area. Instead, I think we need to come to terms with what this increasing density means on our transportation infrastructure. Otherwise, we can look forward to the day when VTA Slow-Rail -- the light rail train from Mountain View to San Jose takes about an hour -- seems like Elon Musk's Hyperloop. That is, assuming that you can get a seat.

How Macys Lost Our Dollars: Store Credit vs Customer Service

We've been customers of Macy's for a long time. A long time. For many things, Macy's is an ideal shopping solution:

• They have lots of brick and mortar locations, making it easy to browse, to make returns, and to buy gifts for people that they can easily exchange in their area.
• They do a good job with their online shopping experience. The interface is reasonably intelligent, you can return stuff to the brick and mortar stores, and the pricing is usually consistent between online and the store.
• They have periodic sales and competitive pricing.
• Most of the merchandise that they stock is typically above-average quality compared to most discount retailers.

These are the kinds of things that we look for in a modern retailer, the benchmark for being able to make a purchase without worrying too much about the caveats and and considerations that might make you look carefully for alternative vendors before you buy.

And, like most department stores these days, Macy's has their own store credit card.

Store credit cards have historically been a way for retailers to make some money on finance charges and entice you to buy in their store. Historically, it's been sort of a win-win for retailers as it increases the likelihood that you'll an active customer while they make money selling their stuff and on finance charges. It's typically such a good business that store workers are given bonuses on the number of credit cards they open up.

In the past, these store credit cards were reasonably tolerant of consumer behavior. It reminds me of the old days when my cell phone bill could be fall a couple of months in arrears, then the phone company would remind me to pay it -- which I always did -- and we would repeat the cycle. Then suddenly, out of the blue, the phone company would freak out if the bill was three or four days past due and threaten to cut off your service. Sometimes you just want to say, "hello, this is the real world calling -- where am I going to go? I've been a customer for six years on the same expensive plan and you have me under contract." But this is the disconnect between the modern science of Accounts Receivable and our traditional understanding of customer service.

This same this-is-the bill-payment-rule-and-we-swear-we're-not-being-dicks-even-though-we-are approach to accounts receivable seems to be expanding to all ends of the business world. In the B2B world, you find yourself rolling your eyes when you hear about your several hundred thousand dollar a year in revenue customer who can't get the $5K replacement part shipped out because they're on credit hold. You get nicknames for the accounting department like, "the sales prevention department". And you wonder -- in all of those accounting classes, do they just not teach the importance of the customer? Do they not teach about how essential the customer is to the balance of the whole business equation and about how so much of our marketing dollars are spent on getting the customer excited and making them happy so that they keep giving us money?

So here's our story of how Macy's finance group sucks and why they cost the company business
We buy a lot of stuff at Macy's -- not just at holdays, but throughout the year. Our charge card and our credit line go back all the way to the 1990s. Within the household, several of us love shopping on line, so it's not uncommon to wind up purchasing things every week or two. A lot of times, it's just clearance items. Sometimes it fits, and sometimes it doesn't, which means a trip to the local store for a return. We've bought luggage there, small appliances, even my mattress.

Since multiple people sometimes shop using the same charge number, it's not unusual for charges on the card to be different than you'd expected. And on several occasions while we've been in the store shopping or returning stuff and shopping some more, we found out that we still had an outstanding balance on the card. Typically, this is easily remedied because you can pay on the account at any of the cash registers. Sometimes, after becoming concerned about how the account got behind, not only did we pay the balance, we payed extra in order to maintain a surplus balance. All well and good. Until recently, when we wound up pulling a credit report and discovered that Macy's had reported several delinquencies.

The Definition of a Clerical Error
Imagine a scenario when you are at a cashier you ask the cashier for your balance so that you can pay it. What happens if the cashier tells you the wrong number? Under some circumstances, that might be difficult to prove, but it doesn't take a detective to understand what happened when the difference on the amount paid is under the balance by less than one dollar and is, essentially, a transposition of numbers in the amount. That, my friends, is what they call a clerical error. Whether that's the clerk telling the wrong number or entering the wrong number, it's a pretty understandable wrong number.

When that small difference unknowingly hangs in the balance for over 60 days, it raises a flag with Macy's accounting software. And that became a hit on the credit report.

So after we learned about the credit report issues, we spent some time with Macy's financial services customer service to clear everything up. For the most part, they were reasonably nice and understanding. They said that they would clear the issues off of the credit report and everything sounded okay.

The Last Nail
Fast forward a couple of months. It looks like the credit report has been cleared up and everything is good. We're sitting around one evening doing some online shopping, and they have a nice clearance sale on coats. We find several that we like, but they don't have stock in any of the stores within 100 miles, so we can't go and try them on. We decide to order all three, expecting to return at least one. But instead of selling us three coats, Macy's sold us zero coats that night. The transaction was rejected.

Alarmed that the balance issues had returned, we were sent into a panic. However, the balance on the account was paid and everything was in good standing. After digging into the cause, we learned that the crew at Macy's finance had reduced the credit limit on the charge account from $2000 to $100. The transaction wouldn't go through because the cost of the three coats was over they limit. Apparently, this kind of thing is not uncommon. In researching this, we even found the story of an employee who got a $50 limit card along with a coupon for a discount on the first $100 worth of stuff that they purchased on the card.

Boycotting Macy's
I'd like to tell you that we're absolutely not going to buy anything from Macy's going forward. But the reality is that, we're not that absolute. But Macy's is now on our avoid list. Shopping and buying habits are hard to change, but Macy's card services is pushing us to change ours. Given a choice, we will probably opt for shopping elsewhere.

Thanks to their card services team, Macy's marketing group has just been handed a tremendous weight. a giant turd that they have to overcome to win our business. As a professional marketer, you feel for them -- perhaps because you've felt their pain and the sense of sabotage courtesy of the accounting group.

First thoughts on iOS7 - User Interface FAIL

As iOS was officially made available to the public, I went through the pain of downloading it and updating my phone. I say pain because the traffic to the server meant that several of my initial attempts to download it failed or dropped partway through. Oh, and there's that part about needing to update to iTunes 11.1 before you can install iOS7.

The iOS update for my phone was about 1.24GB, so that download was one that I started before I left for lunch. However, once I had the download, the install was surprisingly quick, probably less that 15 minutes, but I wasn't watching the clock closely. In the process of doing the update, iTunes also explained to me that if I wanted to listen to podcasts, I now needed the Apple Podcast app. If you're someone that prefers planning ahead and you don't know, you may want to get that one as well.

So I've got everything installed now, and I'm just left with my first impressions of the new software, which I can sum up in one statement:

I like the new features, but I hate the new interface.

There are a bunch of great new features in iOS7 -- long overdue features.

• You can block contacts (calls, IMs, etc) in iOS7.
• You can turn WIFI or Bluetooth on or off from a simple one-button click using the controls that slide up from the bottom of the screen.
• Theoretically, iOS7 is better at managing your battery, so you don't have to be as conscientious about killing apps.
• Folders now page. I went from Games1, Games2 and Games3 folders to a single Games folder.

But as for the interface, I find it horrible.

I hate the "flat" design. While I can appreciate the push back against some of the overdone skeuomorphic elements, stripping them out completely turns the interface into a rather cartoonish rendering. In this USA Today interview, this is how Jony Ive explains it:

"When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn't need physical buttons, they understood the benefits," says Ive. "So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way."

Ive is referring to iOS 7's more simplified and almost two-dimensional feel, particularly when it comes to app tiles. The so-called skeuomorphic template established during Jobs' time — where real textures and objects are mimicked, such as the green pool table felt of the Game Center app — was laid to rest in favor of a less fussy look. Game Center is now just a series of colorful bubbles.

For years, interface designers and artists have looked for ways to add dimension with 3D textures and effects in 2D space. They do it not because we're uncomfortable touching glass, but because 3D illusions make environments immersive. It makes it easier for us to establish order and structure, to find things that stick out -- like buttons. Not stupid 3D like the glasses, but simple, basic depth of field. Perspective.

And then we have this explanatory quote for the graphics from Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering:

"This is the first post-Retina (Display) UI (user interface), with amazing graphics processing thanks to tremendous GPU (graphics processing unit) power growth, so we had a different set of tools to bring to bear on the problem as compared to seven years ago (when the iPhone first launched)," he says. "Before, the shadowing effect we used was a great way to distract from the limitations of the display. But with a display that's this precise, there's nowhere to hide. So we wanted a clear typography."

This is the justification that they're providing for using the ultra-fine type and for elements like the face on the clock app actually keeping time. Now, you could attribute my dissatisfaction over these elements to the anti-glare screen protector that I use or to the recent addition of reading glasses to my tool bag, but this ain't working for me, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be problematic for the parents and grandparents that were a pretty strong iPad demographic.

Hard to read is an understatement. Combine the ultralight fine type with the stripped 3D visual cues and what you have is possibly the worst interface to come out of Apple, ever.

Wrapping it Up
In working with artists, designers, and creative people for over twenty years, one of the things that I've learned is that they all go through phases of creative infatuation and boredom. "I'm so bored with this color, that logo, or this technique." Often the creative voice will express itself in a response to this, exploring new ideas and strange new worlds. Sometimes new ideas bring in an influx of life, windows into the unexpected. Other times, they just don't work. It may be a good idea, an interesting direction, or the spark for something greater, but by itself it's not ready for prime time.

In the art world, passing through these kinds of phases and periods is perfectly acceptable. Not every Bob Dylan album is Blonde on Blonde. Sometimes you need to go through a Good as I Been to You to get to Time Out of Mind. But when you're providing tools that are used by schools, businesses and people around the world, there's a lot less room to creatively swerve if you're making a wrong turn.

This is why it's important to have an editor. You need someone to work with the creative voice, to direct it and filter it. You need someone who understands the need to explore the outer limits of those ideas and try them, but who -- at the end of the day -- can align them with larger goals of the narrative (or the business).

Consider Disney. As tired and recycled as so much of their generic promotional materials are, they continue to connect with their audience and move that product. They may stretch a concept here or there, but they remain focused on their core business identity. Sometimes larger creative businesses like Hallmark cards will empower creative spin-offs like their Shoebox line, empowering the exploration of ideas that don't seem to fit within the existing brand.

I can see the creative pendulum swing in the new interface -- the response to so much design out there being a copy of your original work along with the frustration surrounding the overuse of some of the skeuomorphic elements that were being used -- but this interface change has crippled the device. If I can't use the phone without magnification, then it is not user-friendly. Instead of being invisible, iOS7 has become a barrier to using the device.

So here you have this trade-off -- some great new features versus a horrible new interface. You might think twice about upgrading, but then you're saddled with the other terrible anchor -- compatibility. Everything going forward is built around this version, not the older one. MacWorld has a possible path if you want to attempt to revert back to the previous version, but the reality is that this isn't something like Windows 8 where you can just blow it out and install Windows 7. Having recently been forced to upgrade to Mountain Lion from Snow Leopard, I came across another one of those stupid designs gone wrong -- the reverse touch-scroll direction implementation designed to make the touch experience more tablet-like. With Mountain Lion, it's a simple setting that can be turned off -- we don't have that flexibility with the iOS7 interface.

While I look at aspects of iOS7 as the design equivalent of a retro 8-bit style that has become hipster-popular, I hope that the lack of utility will force the company to correct this course. But ultimately, this will be an interesting measure of the new Apple. Will they be able to find there way past this or will we see a bunch of corporate shills running around providing cover for this directional blunder? Only time will tell, but my phone contract date is looking like an important milestone for my user experience.

As a postscript to this thought, you'll see a number of places report that the interface improves once you get used to it. Remember those videos where a baby is able to pick up an iPad and use it? That's because before iOS7, the interface didn't require you "to get used to it". It makes you wonder whether they did any UI testing on the toddler demographic (side note: I'll bet toddlers love ultralight type faces and 8-bit graphics too).

For me, I've found that the new interface has succeeded in doing something that no previous version has been able to do -- it's reduced the amount of time I interact with the phone. And not because it's streamlined the functionality, rather, because I just don't want to interact with it. Using iOS7 is like choosing to drive in traffic -- it's a daily exercise in frustration. It's truly mind-boggling to think that this came from Apple.