I have written on this site about Yarra Trams, and I have not been terribly complementary. But I can tell Yarra Trams are trying. They have a service called Tram Tracker, Tram tracker is a pervasive service that will tell you how far away the next tram is. In time that is not distance. It is available on mobile phones via text, it has a voice IVR system that will tell you when the tram is coming, and it is I assume what the electronic boards use to announce the next tram.

I had never used the text service as the phone I had, and the plan that I was on made it too expensive. It seemed odd to waste 25c to find out the thing I could find out by waiting. Yes I know its only 25c but they all add up as my grand mother would growl at me. Then everything changed, I got an iPhone and with it came a plan with so much of everything that it made sense to query the tram via the phone. Clearly not listing to the grandmother then.

Now being an out and out geek I wasn’t about to use no stupid text message, no siree Bob. The iPhone has a built in web browser and I have a gigabyte of plan so I am going to use the web dammit. Yarra Trams has done a great job with the tram tracker on the web its on every page of their web site so its virtually impossible not to find. There is however for those of us with teeny tiny phones a problem it requires lots of clicks and scrolling. I wondered if there was a clean and simple service that would do the same thing as the inbuilt page’s asp script. Without much hope I put a query onto the Yarra Trams website, I expected little but I was wrong.

I immediately got a mail telling me that they had logged my problem, the next business day I got a further automated email to say that someone would be in contact. And within an hour of that someone from the web team rang me to tell that they do indeed have a service. He was very helpful

If you are interested go to tramtracker.com and follow the single screen. Even better this service becomes a simple URL in the form tramtracker.com?id=<StopId>&rt=<RouteNumber> This is brilliant. You need to know your stop id but every stop has it written on it, and its on the Yarra Trams website Now I have a couple of bookmarks for the stops I use regularly. Its a simply elegant application of technology.

For example to find out when the next tram is going to town from Smith st Safeway I enter TramTracker.com?id=1818&rt=86 though in this case as there is only one rote up Smith St the 86 I could leave the route out. Right now the answer is 14 minutes. Its late at night so I should I want to visit the city I might wait here in front of the tevee rather than on Smith St

I am hopeful that I can leverage this to build something interesting but that is a project that might have to wait for a while. But seriously how cool would it be to combine the where the hell am I feature of the iPhone, Google maps and this to answer the when will the next tram come for the stop I am at. It could be cool.

Hats off to Yarra Trams.

Writing a bulk mail email, what could be simpler. It was that time of the year, the time of the year when we start to send out emails to all the competitors who have competed in the nib Lorne Pier to Pub and nub Lorne Mountain to Surf. The email has two purposes, get people fired up for the season ahead, and tell the people what we are doing this year.

We have been using Campaign Monitor to send mails. Fantastic service if you are looking for a reputable company that does bulk emails with a simple to use web interface. Highly recommended.

First step was to get the copy ready. To this end I wrote lots of copy and sent it off to our marketing team for some proof reading and addition of any specific marketing messages. This year we are starting a ballot for the very first time an so there is quite a need for clear communication on what we are doing and how it will work. The marketing team came back with a few changes to the copy.

Next I turned this into an HTML mail template. I use TextMate for this. TextMate is a fantastic HTML editor though you have to know HTML TextMate has all sorts of good features that make this fast. After an hour or so I had a mail that I was happy with. Upload this to Campaign Monitor and send out a few trial mails to the marketing team and myself. The Campaign Monitor test is also really handy for shooting people drafts. Most people are not too good at extracting html to disk and reading it. A mail test also lets me check it with many things including the abomination that is Outlook. Hey outlook team if my ipHone can render HTML why can’t you? Campaign Monitor has added a new feature to add inline CSS based on the CSS that is being used as a script element in the email. This makes various non compliant web emails like Goggle and HotMail work much better that they otherwise would.

Next I needed an updated email list. I the past I have been grabbing a dump of the database and extracting addresses from this which is a shit of a process. So I decided it would be nice to have a report hat could do this for me. In the past we just mailed to everyone who has swum or run in the last two years but now that everyone has their own manageable account that was not going to work as well as it could. A report was the way to go.

A few hours of development later I have a nice report that lists everyone with an active account that has not unsubscribed. Yeah., got to love IntelliJ. The report runs on our webserver software that does all the race management, but that is no problems as I can run a copy locally. Hell it even exports as Excel or CSV. I am excessively proud

Campaign Monitor allows you to add a mailing list, but it has a rule that disallows duplicate mail addresses. That is a good rule. It stops getting the same mail again and again. Trouble is we have lots of couples and families who use the same email address. And of course we address each mail to the person so that it sounds a least a little personallised. I had written a little program that takes the output from my report and joins up all of the names. So two people Bob Brown and Mary Brown with the same address would be turned into Bob and Mary Brown, several Browns might be turned in the Brown family and so on. This little program preserved nice sounding names and deduped the list, or almost. The first few times I had worked with it it still left the odd dupe in. After finding each of these failures and writing a failing test I was able to eliminate all the dupes. You have to love Test Driven Development.

Now I was ready to send the list. Just one thing the website had to reflect the material that we were sending out. So the website got a good and through going over to make it match what would be in the email. There were a fair few places to edit and update. Plus whilst I was doing that I had a few other minor housekeeping items to take care of. Another few hours disappeared.

Finally I was ready to send the mail shot. Then I remembered the unsubscribes. Previous mail shots that had gone out would have some unsubscribes and these sit in the Campaign Monitor database. I needed them in my database so that the export program would export the right addresses. The whole spam thing is not something that I want to be part of so I/we are careful to manage unsubscribes. Campaign Monitor does provide a way to link their unsubscribe and ours together but that seemed all rather like work. So I checked Campaign Monitor hoping there would only be one or two emails but bugger there were 50 or so unsubscribed. Too many for me to find and change each email. That might take a long time. Being a geek the only solution was tot write an extension to the website that would unsubscribe everyone on a list, this is a little more complicated that it sounds as multiple competitors could be one same email address they all had to be found and removed from the mailing lists.

A few hours of coding and IntelliJ magic later I had an unsubscribe system written. All was perfect, except for one small fly in the ointment. The server software that I had updated was only on my local machine. Its not in a releasable state as it has lots of half completed work for this year. I wasn’t sure it even could be released at least not without some substantial testing. The solution was simple. Grab a backup of the database and bring it to my local machine. I grabbed a tar copied that to my local machine, mounted it. Ran the database installed to apply all of my changes for this year. There are lots of these but that is another story. Then start up the web server, Grab all the unsubscribes and apply them. Then run the report to extract addresses and save them. Convert that address file to a CSV file and run it through my name de-duper and munger, now finally I had a name list. Campaign Monitor consumed this with with no complaints.

Then just as I ready to go to print so to speak, our swim administrator came through with his updates to the mail shot. They improved a couple of parts that I had thought were weak and cleared up the wording of a couple of others. Nothing for it I was going to have to build anew HTML template. Sigh.

So far this has taken most of the weekend with only a little time off for taking photos of a band, but that too is another story. I am so close I can taste it. So very close.

Today I watched the Yarra Trams revenue protection offers gathered round a tram stop badged black crows looking for carrion. Two had their ticket books out, ready, others bailed up commuters demanding tickets. What a bastard of a system Yarra trams has replaced conductors with. Flocks of victimizers looking for victims. Where were they when the heavily pregnant women got onto the tram with her pram. Nowhere to be seen. Revenue protection officers don't assist customers anymore. That is left to the kindness of strangers. Yarra trams has no room for kindness.

The revenue protection officers are just the sharp end of the Mets lack of customer focus. The problem goes much much deeper than that. Look at the risible change made to ban bikes from trains. Train plus bike is a great low impact combination. Banning bikes is the simple and simplistic response to a lack of capacity on the train network. When push came to shove no public official could be found saying how many people would be affected, which lines would 'benefit' or in fact any statistic that made this seem anything other than what it was. An official auto responder. Congestion, move large things out of the way. Seems obvious and simple, however it clearly had no research or statistics to back it up. And guess what under pressure the met bureaucrats are backing away from the decision.

Which of course brings us to capacity. Nothing that the met has done has got more passengers onto the service. Increasing fuel prices is what has increased patronage. The increase in patronage has taken the planners by surprise, well kind of. Actually it has shown that the design made 10 years ago and repeated 5 years ago not to buy more rolling stock and not to change the train control network system have come home to roost.

The aim for this year was to increase patronage by 7% and it has increased by 10%. And it shows as any morning commute will tell you.

Under the Kennet Government the network was privatised and the network managers tasked with providing new rolling stock. This was done in a time framework that was extremely tight. This in turn resulted in the worst rolling stock to enter service on the network. New trams were brought that are larger but carry less people than the old ones. The B2 holds 76 seated passengers and on a bad day 860 standing, whereas the biggest of the new trams the monster D2 five section articulated tram holds a mere 58 seated. Though of course on a hot day it can pack in the entire population of Fitzroy standing. They do have the one virtue of being low floor and therefore much more accessible. They had the disadvantage that the network ended up with 4 new classes of tram 3 of which could be described as dogs. Similarly on the train network the new Seimens trains were plagued with braking problems and the inability to squeeze through some tunnels. The old adage Haste makes Waste applies here. Of course the Kennetish government is long gone. But the problems of their making flow up and down the train tram tracks for years to come.

Meanwhile the government is rushing through purchasing more train rolling stock. Undoubtedly lessons will be learned. The tech will be well chosen and well evaluated. Pigs arse it will.

But it all comes back in the end to customer service. Having a big accessible well run network is one part. Having a customer facing part tht work is another. Let me tell you of my recent experience and contrast this with another customer experience that I had.

I noticed that on the wall of the tram under public announcements it said that Yarra Trams had failed to meet their performance targets and had accordingly offered all monthly ticket holders a one day ticket free. I think that they have to do this.

Great I thought. off i went to the Met shop with my monthly ticket in hand.

The answer at the Met shop was blank stares. They had no idea what I was talking about. Their answer was that they just sold tickets and that sounded like Yarra Trams. They knew the address of Yarra Trams and sent me there. Customer service, appalling. No idea about a ticketing issue. No way for the prime customer facing body to fix the problem. No knowledge of what the procedure or process was. They did suggest that if I found the answer I should come and tell them. I thought that risible.

Next stop Yarra Trams. The receptionist there was a relief and again knew nothing. She did give me a phone number. This turned out to be the Met ticketing, an automated system and when I finally made it through to Ben he couldn't help me. He could however give me another number. I was beginning to sense a pattern here. No-one knew anything. To get rid of me send me somewhat else; not because somewhere else could actually help, just because it wasn't here.

The number Ben gave me turned out to be the Yarra Trams complaint line. Automated. Useless

Then I thought I might ring Yarra Trams and to my surprise i met the real receptionist who did know what the process was. Back I went and to my surprise, the forms to fill had been on the counter all the time, not 1 metre from where I had been previously. A form was filled my ticket was taken and I was told to wait for my ticket.

Wait I have. So far it has been three weeks and still no sign of any ticket.

So what has my customer experience been. Poor communication. No knowledge in the organisation. Tardy service and still I don't have a ticket.

Now lets compare and contrast.

I brought some Moleskin notebooks Wonderful creamy paper notebooks. One of them was damaged, it looked like it had sort of come a bit unstuck. The binding of the pages was all loose. But inside the notebook was a little slip saying that Moleskin stood behind their product, and there was an email address for queries.

I sent an email explaining my problem. They replied within the hour, saying that on the little slip was a quality control number of the person who had made my notebook. Simple take a picture of the problem, together with the QC slip and email it to them and they would send me a replacement.

I did as instructed. Within the hour, again, an email came back saying that they had sent me a replacement. And in two weeks it had turned up. And the at was from Italy, not the Melbourne CBD.

See Yarra trams. this is the way to handle a customer. Correct information promptly delivered. A focus on delighting the customer and efficient service.

And what of the future, No doubt i will be asked again tomorrow for my ticket by the goon squad.

Its size thirty, its 35 degrees and all I want to do is be enfolded int eh icy interior of the tram and read my book. Byt Robyn has a differetn idea, Robyn has a laugh that would strip paint at thirty yards and Robyn, oblivious to those around her is regaling her mate on the other end of the phone line with her latest party exploits

I try to concentrate on my book, and all the time this piercing voice cuts in "yeah I pashed him, Josh yeah." my attention wanders and I wonder if Josh is around that way at least we could have a little peace.

And then she is off again describing in loud and profane detail vomiting on the way home.

Its time I think for action.

I take out my mobile and dial a call.

Tom gidday mate I boom at my imaginary callee. Yeah its Josh, I boom

You know that chick, the one I was telling you about. I am positivity yelling now . The one that gave me the clap.

The silence on the tram is now profound, everyone is listening to my ersatz conversation, event it appears the girl with the paint stripper voice

Yeah mate, I say, shes here on the Tram, what should I do?

I look up, twenty pair of eyes are on me. The girl with the phone stares with horrid fascination. And then with some relief as she doesn't recognize me.

I look down at my book, wishing my little flight of fantasy was true. But its not, and there is still twenty minutes of bodily fluids and chance meeting with strangers body parts to distract me.

I sigh.