Last week I went to the Kenneth Grange exhibition at the Design Museum in London.

I knew something of his approach to design – which leans heavily on the use of models and prototypes – from his work on the InterCity 125 High Speed Train and I though there might be some lessons to learn (however tangential) for our own work at Jones Olson on prototyping the user experience of digital services.

Walking around the exhibition, Making Britain Modern, what struck me was the shock of discovering just how much the man had influenced my life, without me even knowing.

It was also some of the best evidence I have ever seen to prove how much good design and an accompanying focus on the user can enhance products and the impact they have on our lives.

The first flash of recognition came with the Kenwood Chef food mixer. As a kid growing up in the ‘seventies, it seemed that the mum of every friend I had owned one of these, whirring away in the corner of their kitchen, mixing the latest cake to be scoffed down at the end of a hard day of play.

We had one at home, too, always on the counter-top, always working, never put away. Nearly 40 years later, it’s still the mixer my Mum uses.

Then, the cameras. In fact, the very first camera I owned, a 110 format film Kodak Instamatic 330. I remembered what a delight these were to use — the drop-in film cartridge, the handy telephoto lens, the hard case that cleverly doubled as a handle, and the shape, perfect to hold and all the buttons so easy to reach.

On display were samples of the wooden models Grange used to test out the shape and size of the cameras with end-users — a process that convinced him to make the cameras slightly larger than he had originally intended because testing the models showed that the larger size was more comfortable for people to use.

And then, I saw the pen. Not just a pen — the pen.

As I mentioned, I grew up in the ‘seventies, but the junior school I went to took its teaching model straight out of the ‘fifties. Boys wore shorts, times tables were learnt by wrote, history was a narrative of British omnipresence and infallibility. You wrote with a fountain pen — biros were the Devil’s writing tool.

My parents bought me a succession of cheap, no-name fountain pens that each lasted about five minutes before they either leaked, burst, split, disintegrated, or, on one memorable occasion, squirted their inky black contents into the mouth of a teacher who had inadvisedly decided to chew on the end of my pen while scrawling nasty comments over my attempts at long multiplication. To me, fountain pens were crap.

Then, it all changed.

Arguing that it made sense to go a little bit upmarket to get a pen that had at least a chance of lasting to the end of term, I manipulated my Mum into buying me the sleek, brushed-steel, modern-looking fountain pen that had just taken centre-stage in the window of the local WH Smith.

The pen was a Parker 25.

It certainly looked good. But, it also wrote well. It felt good in the hand. It lasted until the end of term — and well beyond. It was head and shoulders above the competition.

And, it was designed by Kenneth Grange, although I had no idea of this until I went to the Design Museum last week.

I had that pen for something close to 15 years. It lived with me through junior school and then into my bog-standard comprehensive. It came to Poly with me. It’s impossible to remember how many notes, essays and exam papers that pen helped me write over that time — I guess, it’s in the tens of thousands. It never let me down.

But, that pen didn’t just work on a functional level – it worked emotionally, too. It was my pen — I was proud of it, I loved that pen. It made me a fountain pen user for life (for which I am eternally grateful). The only reason I still don’t have the pen is that, when moving out of my first set of digs at Poly, I lost it.

I had an affinity for that pen, so I replaced it with another Parker 25 – this time, a black one.

One of my reasons for setting up Jones Olson was my desire to champion in digital services the use of frequent, iterative prototypes that can be put in front of users to gain their insight and feedback, before a release solution is finally developed and launched.

Occasionally, it’s useful to have that approach validated — Making Britain Modern certainly helped.

Thanks, Kenneth Grange — especially for the pen.

You can see Kenneth Grange speaking about his work in this video.

Having worked on digital media in commercial companies now for some 12 years, we have no doubt whatsoever about the tremendous contribution well executed websites and, more recently, apps, can make to a company’s bottom line.

But, neither do we doubt that realising fully the opportunities of digital media in the commercial world depends on executing websites and apps that are fully grounded in a complete understanding of customer needs.

Of course, many organisations try to do their best in this respect. They set up customer insight (or understanding) teams that diligently beaver away to gain knowledge about their customers’ needs and wants. But all too often, that knowledge is not put to best use – or, desperately, any use at all.

All too often, the reason for this is the siloed structure of those organisations. Valuable insights about customers that could add significant value to the organisation’s digital media activities remain locked within its customer insight team.

When I’ve seen customer insight contribute best it is in companies that take an Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) approach, where marketing communications is seen as a strategic core company activity as opposed to a tactical exercise or, worse, a glorified sales effort.

The best analysis and description of the IMC approach that I know of is that of Don E. Schultz in his book “IMC, The Next Generation: Five Steps for Delivering Value and Measuring Returns Using Marketing Communication” (2003). In it, he outlines eight guiding principles that underpin the approach.

What lengths do you need to go to change your date of travel with Virgin Trains? Five minutes on its website? For me recently, the answer turned out to be three-and-a-half hours dealing with three contact channels, a forty mile return train ride, and a £6 phone call.

Online should provide the perfect channel for dealing with customers’ queries. If a company takes some time to discover the various problems that drive customers to its customer support (a form of ‘top-task’ analysis) it should be able to devise quick and simple online solutions to those problems that its customers can access whenever they need them.

This is great for the customer, and great for the company as it can massively reduce the amount of expensive direct customer support it needs to provide.

If you were running a train company and you were imagining such problems, my guess is that you would imagine this one – what if I want to change the date of travel of my ticket? Agree? Well, not if you are running Virgin Trains, it seems. I’ve just experienced a completely rubbish online customer experience with Virgin, trying to do just that. And, my experience went on to highlight the wholly dysfunctional design of its entire remote customer service.

Only when I dealt with the company’s staff face-to-face, the most expensive and time consuming way for both me and Virgin Trains, did I receive a good service.

So, what was my experience?

My parents visited recently. My step-father is disabled and sometimes he can feel pretty unwell. He had such an episode while they were staying, so my parents decided to return home a couple of days early. This meant that they would have to change the specified date of travel on their Virgin Trains tickets. I offered to get it done for them – I thought it would be simple.

The obvious place to start seemed to be online; so, I went onto the Virgin Trains website. The only link on the Home page that seemed to be relevant was Tickets & Offers, but there was nothing explicit on that page about changing or exchanging tickets. So, I hit the Help link. Perhaps rather confusingly, this doesn’t bring up a help page but one called Answers. But, helpfully nonetheless, the list of answers provided was headed with a link to What changes can I make to my ticket. As the page states “We store all answers to our most frequently asked questions”, I’m guessing that this is the question most asked visitors to the site. This does beg the question as to why Virgin doesn’t place a prominent link to this topic on its Home or Tickets & Offers pages in the first place.

On clicking the What changes can I make to my ticket link I discovered that both the date and time of my parents’ Advance tickets could be changed – for a £10 fee. It also stated that, rather inconveniently, I couldn’t make the change online. Instead, I’d have to visit a railway station, or phone a 0844 number (which means that Virgin Trains shares the revenue of the call with the carrier).

I picked up the phone. The first voice I heard was that of an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. The list of options did not (of course!) include any reference to changing a ticket. So, I listened to the list of options a couple of times and then chose the “Buying a ticket” option as the most likely to be of help.

After a relatively short wait, I got through to an assistant and I explained to her that I wanted to change the date of travel on my parents’ tickets to the following day. “Can you give me your reference”, she asked? I looked at the printed tickets and receipts in my hand and nothing on any of them was labelled “reference”. “Where will I find the reference” I asked? “Where did you buy the tickets” came the response? “At Colwyn Bay railway station”, I replied. “Then, there is nothing I can do for you; you will have to take them back to the station”.

She had said “the” station, so I checked if that is what she meant. No, I could take them to any station. “Any Virgin station”, I checked? “No, any station”, she confirmed. “Even my local First Capital Connect station at Welwyn Garden City?” “Yes,” she confirmed. “And, I can go there now and do so?” “Yes,” she said.

It was about 6.40pm, and my local ticket office closes at 7.00, so I had to rush as I live about 10 minutes away. When I got there I was in luck; the queue was short. But, my luck was short lived as, after a quick glance at her computer screen, the ticket office assistant told me that because Virgin’s booking system closes at 6pm there was nothing she could do for me.

I was sceptical about what I’d been told. Why would Virgin have sent me to my local station at 6.40 in the evening if they knew their booking systems were shut at that time? My guess was that my local First Capital Connect station was confused by a system unfamiliar to them.

I decided that my only chance of getting the tickets exchanged was to travel to London and go to the Virgin Trains ticket office at Euston Station. But, before I did, I thought it best phone the Virgin call centre again, just to make sure that their ticket booking systems were still open and that a trip to Euston would be worth my while.

As before, the IVR answered swiftly and this time as I knew the drill I punched the right number into my mobile phone straight after the options had been read out. Then began a long, long wait: it must have been 20-25 minutes before I got through to an assistant.

I explained what had happened and asked if it was worth going to London Euston. He said he didn’t know because it was up to the individual station’s policy if it would be open to sell tickets. I felt that he must have misunderstood my question – London Euston is Virgin’s largest station and I knew its ticket office was open until about midnight. The point I was trying to clarify was would Virgin’s ticket booking system be open, or did it really close down at six? Cue this infuriating exchange:

Virgin call centre assistant: “Yes, it closes at six.”
Me: “So, there’s no point in me going to Euston?”
Call centre: “It depends on the policy of the station.”
Me: “No sorry, you misunderstand. I know the station will be open, I’m asking if the Virgin booking system be available for the ticket office to use?”
Call centre: “It depends on the station. We are in India, so we have no way of knowing what the station offers”.
Me: “I appreciate you are in India, but you are representing Virgin, you must surely know about its services? Euston is your largest station. But anyway, I’m asking about your ticket booking system – will it be open?”
Call centre: [Silence]

I later discovered that this highly informative call to the Virgin Trains call centre cost me nearly £6.

By now, my train to London was pulling into the platform at Welwyn Garden City. I hung up and, deciding I had little to loose, hopped on more in hope than expectation.

When I arrived at the Virgin ticket office at Euston my heart sank even further. There were signs everywhere asking customers to be patient while the staff became familiar with their new ticketing system. It did occur to me that perhaps a proper, effective, training programme might have obviated the need for training on the job. To me, the signs might just as well have said “We are sorry, but we’ll waste your time while our staff learn on the job because we were too cheap to run a proper training programme”. You can tell that I was getting tetchy by this stage.

I explained the situation to the assistant behind the counter – half expecting to be impatiently cut short – but much to my very pleasant surprise she listened to me with attention, patience and sympathy. The booking system was working and within a matter of minutes the tickets had been exchanged for travel the following day. And, in a lovely gesture, she waived the £10 charge normally levied for doing this because of the trouble I’d been put through.

All in all, dealing with a real person was a refreshingly positive customer experience. But, my abiding memory of this incident will be an inadequate Virgin Trains website, its truly hopeless call centre, and the time, money and trouble I had to go through to get a simple task done.

So, what lessons do I think Virgin Trains needs to take from this?

1. It should improve the customer support it provides on its website. The site should provide online services that empower the customer to manage their travel on their own, without needing to phone a call centre or visit a railway station. Isn’t that what online customer service should be all about?
2. It should properly train its call centre staff and provide them with adequate information and systems. They should be skilled to answer the sorts of questions its customers are likely to ask and empowered to put things right. What’s the point of a call centre if it can’t resolve simple problems? For Virgin Trains call centre staff to claim that they know nothing of its largest railway station is utterly pathetic.
3. It should join up its ticketing systems. Customers should be able to manage their Virgin Trains ticket purchases using whatever is the most convenient channel for them at the time they need the service. They should not be restricted to using the outlet the ticket was originally purchased from. That can’t be so hard to achieve, can it?

If you look today on the home page of the Virgin Trains website, it claims to offer an “Easy booking process” and “Handy time-saving tools”. To me, after this experience, this seems like just so much marketing fluff. For online marketing to be effective, it has to market the truth, not an aspiration. And, marketing is not a replacement for good customer service. Virgin Trains needs to quickly close the gap between the fantasy of its promises and the reality of its service. The Virgin brand should be a guarantee of good service, not a ticket to failure.

Photo used under Creative Commons from Matt Buck (mattbuck4950).