Steve Barnes – Jack of A Few Trades

Today as I work I’ve got the ongoing rescue of the miners in Chile on BBC News in the background. It’s pretty captivating and an amazing good news story. I do feel sorry for the miners though, as if being trapped underground for 69 days wasn’t enough they have to be put into the most claustrophobic cage to be winched 700 metres through a narrow bore hole to the surface. Seriously, I’ve seen coffins with more space inside!

One of the things the rescuers are worried about is the risk of someone having a panic attack inside the cage, so far things are going smoothly although if the cage gets stuck inside the tunnel for a long period of time I think that this situation may change. What the rescue team have done to cater for this eventuality is give each miner a headset so they are in constant communication with the team at the surface. This will enable the team to reassure the miner that things are being taken care of and inform them of the likely wait time & reason for the delay.

Just having that line of communication open could prevent huge levels of stress being placed on the minor which may bring on a heart attack or other serious condition. For many people the thought of being stuck in the lift of a sky scraper is their idea of absolute hell and you can imagine having no communication how the awful feelings would be compounded.

This translates into much less dramatic situations too like the ones we deal with every day at E-resistible. Being the middle man between customers & takeaway restaurants isn’t always the easiest position to be in because we can often be held responsible for something that is out of our control. If a customers food is late arriving we aren’t risking a panic attack however we can get an equally emotional response in the form of anger and frustration that the service a customer was expecting hasn’t been delivered on time. One of the things that we try to do is always keep the customer as informed as possible, often if we are giving restaurants a great deal of orders we can anticipate that delivery times will become longer than the restaurant are estimating. A quick email or telephone call from us to the customer to reassure them that the delivery is still on its way but that it may be slightly longer than expected is nearly always met with gratitude and approval from the customer. By being pro-active and keeping an open line of communication between ourselves, the customer, and the restaurant we can avoid issues further down the line.

When things go wrong it is also very important that we react swiftly to correct them, we know that other websites simply tell the customer to contact the restaurant if they have an issue. We have found that by taking ownership for any issues and working to resolve them on behalf of the customer we are reducing their stress levels and managing the situation to ensure the best outcome. This usually ends up with a happy customer that we will retain to place future orders, sure our customer service costs are higher but we thing thats a price worth paying.

Its not a problem when things go wrong, in our business its an inevitability and we have to plan strategies to deal with all situations. It is how you react that matters and communication is the number 1 priority. If you can get that right many issues are avoided altogether and problems are solved faster and with greater customer satisfaction.

The title of this post says it all however I’m not actually too disappointed. Following the competition and the way it was judged I’ve come to the conclusion that there was no way E-resistible could have walked away with the prize money unless we had understated our progress & achievement.

NACUE is an organisation that is set up to help student entrepreneurs get on their feet and to this end the National Varsity Pitch Competition achieved this goal. The winning prize was awarded to a second hand video game exchange website. This is a business that hasn’t launched yet, with no proof of concept and (imo) unclear revenue streams. However, it is potentially a very good idea with a large target market. If the judges (Doug Richards et al) viewed the competition as “if this £10k was my own money to invest then where would I put it” then I can see no way that the video game exchange could have won. Sadly for us the judges simply picked what they thought was a good idea which needed the money to get off the ground.

Not really knowing this in advance, we walked on stage all guns blazing in an effort to convey how successful E-resistible has been. The reality is that the money was given to a start-up that really needs it, so we can walk away feeling happy for the winners. It was never part of our business plan to use prize money to expand, winning would have been an unexpected nice surprise but the reality is that its impact on our business would have been very limited because of the stage we’re at.

Below is a picture of the team being awarded the prize for winning our category on the night.

Anyway onwards and upwards, there will be some fairly visible updates to the site coming in the next month or so and we’re currently very busy expanding into some new cities.

Finally, a report on the cycling training. I’m not worried about fitness or stamina levels…however saddle soreness is something else altogether! Lets just say it hurts!!