June Whitfield and EE to old folk: Would you like a nice cup of tea and some internet, dear? EE has realised that while the vast majority of their target market has at least one phone, there is a whole untapped business opportunity in older people. So the company is inviting loads of them around for a cuppa to try and sell them a phone and internet connection. On September 9th EE will be devoting the morning to …
"Doing something to support seniors is laudable, but EE needs to understand that it needs to be a fundamental part of its culture and not a corporate social responsibility dusting on top of a plate of bacon and eggs."
Modern business is all about paying lip service. It's about paying lip service to quality*, especially when the auditors are breathing down your neck. It means paying lip service to social responsibility, so you look good. It means paying lip service to the law.
* While conveniently ignoring the fact it does German business (and the German economy) no harm. But then again a quick "<Cough>Germany</Cough>" is a common answer to a lot of the arguments for neo-liberal consensus).
"While conveniently ignoring the fact it does German business (and the German economy) no harm."
Things are different in Germany. Their economy is larger than ours, their employment levels significantly above ours, and their government has been somewhat (if not completely) better at managing budgets. That means there's a whole lot more wealth around to pay for the extras.
But Germany's got another major contributor to its wealth, and that's the Euro. The currency union that has trapped most if not all of Southern Europe in a toxic cell caused by too-high an internal exchange rate has to balance. And that balance works almost exclusively for one country, Germany, who by comparison locked themselves in at too low a relative exchange rate, giving them an immense export advantage not just within Europe, but around the world.
their employment levels significantly above ours,
I wouldn't call 94.9% "significantly" above 93.5%, to take the most recent figures (for May 2014).
Agreed on the Euro though, it was created almost exclusively to benefit France and Germany. Pity the French aren't competent enough to take advantage.
Spent last weekend with aged parents and new mobile.
Me: Are you sure you know how to use that?
Mum: Of course we do. We've had two before.
Dad: Where does the battery go?
Mum: And how do we answer calls?
Me: You said you'd had two earlier phones.
Mum: We couldn't get those to work.
[next day my own phone rings]
Mum: What are you doing answering?
Me: You phoned me!
Mum: Don't be stupid. We're dialling our own number to test. Why would we call you?
Me: You did call me!
Dad: How come you can answer our number?
Me: AARGH!!!
Talk about making you feel old - I have problems with that one reasonably often (in part due to having at least two devices where the port is inverted compared to all the others) and I'm only 42!
I know I'm starting (ok, continuing) to go grey, but I think I'm a little too young to be a Age UK client, aren't I?
...well, err, this is what I recommend.
"And how much will that cost deary"
"Well, only £18 per month" uttered while coughing "for the first 6 months then £70"
"Sorry deary, did you say £70"
"Errrr yesss, but you get all the boxing, porn films and cricket you can take"
"I don't want any of that"
"I'm afraid it's part of the package, this isn't Wollworth's pick and mix"
Hmm - Age UK used to send an elderly neighbour's mail wrongly addressed to my house. As they appeared to be actual correspondence rather than junk mail - I would dutifully push them through her letter box and occasionally point out to her the misaddressing. Emails via the Age UK web site explaining their mistake received no replies and had no effect.
After my neighbour died, and her flat sold, they still arrived. Eventually one envelope had the useful visible directions that it should be returned marked with "deceased" if necessary.
After another two years I contacted the industry association to which Age UK belonged for mailing - and eventually the envelopes stopped arriving.
Funny,. That actually happened to me a couple of years ago. Every week I'd get an Age UK letter addresses to some senior citizen.
I kept emailling them to update their mailing list correctly and after a few months of this (where they constantly insisted my address HAD been suppressed) I got this bizzare apology letter, with the envelope addressed to me, but the letter headed "Dear Mrs". I couldn't quite understand what it was trying to say as the sentence structure was very odd.
So I finally scanned the letter and emailed it back to them pointing out if the old dear who'd written it was the same person in charge of the mailing department then perhaps their carer could step in for a few minutes and finally get my address off their bleedin' lists.
It worked.
PS Before anyone says I'm being unfair to pensioners I'd like to point out I'm equally as unfair to every other group out there. :)
Hey you!
Yes you, you old technophobic fart!
Do you want to sign up for a session on learning how to connect to the Internet?
You do? Great!
Just go online to our website and sign up!
What do you mean you don't know how?! What are you? Some kind of old technophobic fart?
*Yes I realise that's not the only way to sign up, and that they do drop-in sessions, but frankly it doesn't even need to be an option. In the majority of cases if they're tech savvy enough to register for the session online (regardless of the poor design of the web form) then they probably don't need any tech help from EE anyway.
I foresee a wave of "Blue Flu" overtaking EE store employees on the day this is scheduled to kick off. If they wanted to do this properly they should have hired or partnered with actual trainers instead of foisting it on shop staff. The communication gap between those who have grown up around mice and clicking and routers and hard drives and those who haven't is immense and fundamental.
I know that's a generalisation and there are plenty of silver surfers, but remembering I've lived with this stuff nearly all my life and it's a different story if you haven't helps me be patient with dear ol' mum when 'the internet isn't working.'
I thank the heaven's my Dad was always a DIY tech nutter. He was always making daft electronic gadgets when I was growing up in the 70's ( usually burning stains on the kitchen table with his soldering iron, much to the annoyance of my late Mum! ). The minute he got his hands on a micro back in the early 80's there was no stopping him. He's 75 now and I don't get normal parent type calls about unable to work out how to use the DVD player. I get calls from him along the lines of, "I need to extract source data from website ABC.com, get it into CSV and import into another Filemaker database I'm writing, have you got any Java source I can get started with to get it dumped?"! I love him for it!
I'm 50, grew up on C=64s, BBC Bs and CPCs. When I was a kid there we eighty different computer magazines in WH Smiths all teaching coding.
There may be Raspberry Pi and Scratch today but that's niche.
It's not just seniors who struggle with technology, it's kids too.
At last somebody makes something simple. Occasional users forget what to do. Older users often have difficulty finding anything not in clear view. For example
"Pick Foo from the menu mum."
"Menu?"
"Press the menu button mum."
"Which one? There's no button marked menu."
So the frustration at both ends makes the mobile useless when it should be an important safety device. Don't get me started on answering machines or 1571!
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