As someone who travels to over a dozen different countries; in any given year – I have been an avid user of Skype’s wonderful (or not so at times) service since it was initially launched in beta. Sure, less often that not; the line quality is poor & you need to reconnect, but for the most part, the experience and savings have made me a loyal customer. To the tune of several thousand dollars in skype in & skype out charges.

Up until this week, you could almost have called me a Brand Champion, a Skype Evangelist, a VOIP hero if you will. I’d happily convert other non-skype-using nomads whom I pass on my travels; almost taking pride in the fact that I was able to introduce them to such a great product.

That was until I was forced to experience their levels of customer service (or lack there of), over the last two weeks. An experience that seems to be frustrating users by the thousands, as reflected in their forums.

This blog was initially created with a focus on Design, Brands, Trends & Traction. We tend to write about achievements in design, discuss the positive happenings of a given brand or outline burgeoning trends. Almost always, we attempt to keep things positive.

Occasionally however, a brand beckons the request to be called out on how poorly they are handling an aspect of their conversation with their customers. I mean, isn’t that precisely what branding is all about? Your specific persona, the way in which your product or service is perceived, and in today’s marketplace – the conversation and experience your current and prospective customer base has with your brand.

Skype – with claims of great value calls to anywhere in the world, fail to inform you; of how poor their customer service is. Nor, how many weeks you may have to wait for a response to your support inquiry (if they respond at all). Don’t be so quick to think that a Telecommunications company like Skype, actually has a Telephone number you can call; in fact, I dare you to try and find one on their site. It is non existent.

As aforementioned, I have been an avid user for quite some time – spending a great deal on both personal & business calls as I travel. This week however, when attempting to make a rather urgent call to a disgruntled customer of our own (see, we actually have a telephone number), I was confronted with this screen.

My initial thought was that there had been some sort of billing error, had my credit card expired? Did my last auto-recharge via Paypal not work? After a little investigation, I came to realize that in fact; there was no billing error, no issue on my part, my account is in good standing & furthermore; I have an abundance of prepaid credit on my account.

So what gives? I best contact Skype’s customer support department I thought. If I could find it. After weaving through a minimum of 6 different areas of their website, and ‘finally’ finding the place to submit a support ticket when your account has been blocked; I submitted my request & I waited. And then I waited, and I waited – and some two weeks later; 4 support tickets later, and a bunch of posts on their forum. I am still waiting. The only correspondence received, in over two weeks; has been auto responder emails, as below:

Thank you for contacting Skype Support!

This email is confirmation that we have received your request and a Customer Support Specialist will be working to get back to you with an answer as soon as possible.

Because the majority of requests require research to resolve, it can sometimes take us up to 48 hours to respond, though we make every effort to get back to you as quickly as possible and most queries are answered within 24 hours.

Though we will do our best to respond to you as quickly as possible, sometimes the best way to get immediate answers is to search our knowledgebase at http://support.skype.com where you can find answers to questions like:

• How to Use Skype
• Skype In/Skype Out
• Skype Voicemail
• Skype Privacy & Security
• And many other questions

You can also find helpful step by step User Guides at http://www.skype.com/help/guides/ that will help walk you through things like:

• Getting Started Using Skype
• Installing Skype
• Adding a Skype Contact
• Making a Skype Call
• And many more

We hope this is helpful and again, thank you for contacting us. We’ll be getting back to you as soon as possible!

Sincerely,
Skype Support

Please do not reply to this automated email,
we will reply to you directly from your support request.

What I would like to know, is how on earth Skype can claim to offer a business grade service? Nobody responds to your emails, nor your support tickets, there is no telephone number to call; and by the looks of the support forums & a quick google search – there are several thousand people with the same problem.

It is completely evident, that Skype, whom are owned by Ebay, have absolutely no regard for their customers. The savings I have made over the past several years by using their service – do not account for the time I have wasted, and frustration that has accumulated over the past two weeks; as I try and get in contact with ‘anyone’ from within their company.

They never explained in their slick marketing messages, that cheap calls, would amount to pathetic levels of customer service. When ebay purchased skype for $2.6Billion back in 2005 – did they not allocate a budget to a customer service department?

Can any of our readers suggest an alternative? I’d happily take my business elsewhere.

AIGA (The Professional Association for Design) does a yearly survey called AIGA 365: The Year in Design. They’ve chosen a whole series of top examples for 2008 to put into the archives, all sorted into 10 different categories. From their writeup:

AIGA’s suite of competitions is widely recognized as the most discerning statement on design excellence today, extending a legacy that began 90 years ago. By means of the competitions, AIGA creates a chronicle of outstanding design solutions, each demonstrating the process of designing, the role of the designer and the value of design.

Their 29th Annual Year in Design is online now, and I’ve sifted through the 10 categories and pulled out some of my favorite selections. And so, for your enjoyment:

Brand and Identity Systems Design: Bretenic Limited Stationary System

Here’s a piece of work from a Toronto design shop that uses good copy and comical prose to illustrate why a lawyer and specialist is good to work with. It’s well-presented and direct, and the approach of the piece matches the approach of the client, which is funny and down to earth.

Corporate Communications Design: Take Action Postcards to the Edge

There weren’t a ton of wonderful examples in here, I found, but this set of postcards about dissidents being persecuted in other countries is concise, catchy, and embodies a spirit of design slightly different than much of the NGO “design ghetto” (if such a thing exists, and from my impressions it sort of does).

Editorial Design: New York Times Magazine

These guys don’t quit. I’ve written about their extremely skilled lead designer before, and these two nominations here are making me think about a subscription. Consistently, eye-catching, and beautiful to look at, week in and week out. I missed the recent food issue, which I’m sure was full of various mouth-watering things alongside some fantastic articles.

Experience Design: Detroit Institute of Arts Interactive Installations

Although I can’t vouch for this, not having been to the museum, the idea of watching a period meal being served while you sit at a kind of virtual table, as a way of presenting silverware and other period flatware and furniture and cooking habits, is kind of awesome. Plus it’s easily the best way to answer that eternal question we’ve all grappled with: “how can I make my 18th century flatware collection relevant to contemporary youngsters?” Now you know.

Information Design: The Normandy Campaign

I wish computer technology was at this stage back when I was sent to museums on various school trips, although I remember the series of blinking lights and various switches that moved things were equally as enthralling as this interactive touch-screen map of the Normandy campaign probably is. Everything is fun when you’re a kid. Ah hell, it still is.

Motion Graphics: TV Land Refresh

This category, I’ve got to say, is lacking a touch–the nominations were fine, but not mind-blowing, and from a design standpoint I just don’t think Modest Mouse’s Dashboard video needs to win a prestigious design award. I know it’s motion graphics, but that’s a wide category, considering what I eventually chose at their best selection: this refresh of the TV Land network, which is clean, contemporary, and not annoying. For a retro network that shows nothing but old reruns, it’s great, actually. No old TVs with rabbit ears sticking out of them or bouncy retro graphics–although I’m an unabashed fan of vintage things, showing Brady Bunch reruns doesn’t mean you have to embrace the tv-in-the-60s aesthetic for your entire network.

Packaging Design: Ultrasilencer

Well I wanted Criterion’s Breathless DVD set, but the Ultrasilencer takes it. When the hell are you ever going to get a Vacuum Cleaner with modernist Helvetica styling on all its packaging? This wins my personal award for “making Jordan kind of interested in a product he wouldn’t otherwise give a crap about.” Thanks to this design I seriously started thinking that maybe this product was some kind of revolutionary thing, until I realized the object I was thinking about was a vacuum cleaner.

Promotional Design and Advertising: Planet Propaganda

The posters of Planet Propaganda, collectively, win this one. This is a massive category and it’s kind of ridiculous to choose one, especially since I just complained about ‘honorifics’ in another article, but hey, I’m not actually handing out awards here, just picking my favourites.

Typographic Design: Sculpture Today

This ‘Paper Alphabet for Sculpture Today’ is fantastic. Typography done with paper that looks beautiful. Plus the “C” looks like my cherished Commodore 64 logo.

Book Design: Underachiever’s Manifesto

While there are a ton of quality choices here, the Underachiever’s Manifesto gets my vote. It was a tossup between this and a few others (All the Sad Young Literary Men I really like), but the “mistake is the whole point” simplicity of the cover won me over.

Logo design is crazy, as it’s extremely simplified work that gets crammed into finely-honed, pored-over design. If there’s any area of design where a company’s CEO is going to want to cast his judgement, it’s going to be here, and the pitfalls inherent in wanting something trendy or flashy, or listening to insane amounts of buzzwords from branding experts more versed in talk than in actual design runs extremely high

So the winners of the WOLDA awards tend towards simplicity, which is great. This year, the winner is the One Degree logo from Rupert Murdoch’s initiative. It’s a simple logo with a clearly-defined concept behind it, which sorta makes it one of the best in the world for 2008. Good logo design can be notoriously hard to judge, so sometimes you have to give these a bit of time. It’s hard to know what kind of logo will be instantly memorable, even if you’re a pro at it.

I really love this one, since it highlights the foreignness of something without resorting to silly cliche. It’s great and entirely typographical, and uses just a series of accents with a slightly foreign sounding name to get it all across. Foreign hats work like accents on your head.

This winner of the “Best of Europe” is perfect. I don’t think you could ask for a better wine logo. It’s not false-prestigious, even though the name could have easily made it so. It’s just simple, clean, and beautiful.

This “Best of Belgium” logo, for a handbag company, is also fantastic. It covers the idea using what seems to be only typography at the beginning, until you realize it’s also the product itself. Great work.

La Main Gauche from France is great, even though I don’t know exactly what it is (ah, I’ve since discovered it’s an events agency), but since it means ‘the left hand’ and since a ‘good left’ involves a punching bag, I’ll accept the connection. It’s not the best one here, but it’s memorable.

This one, for the British company Education International, works extremely well too–using lines and ultra-basic basic shapes to cover the fact that it involves reading and education and well, little else. Modernist design personified. Go-post-soviet design! (it was done in Romania.)

Switzerland Alps and Arts is an example of what I like to think of as classic logo design–no puns, no tricks, no obsessive study about what the meaning of it is and all the rest, instead it’s just some alps and some lines and a simple, straightforward logo that you’d get 50 years ago from a quality agency.

And if that’s not enough and you still need more quality logo design resources, check out this invaluable site.

For some strange reason I’m really feeling the alternative-universe design stuff recently, and designers are happy to fufill my every need. Check these out: Antrepo Design gives us some more alternative movie posters, except these ones are ultra-modern, based solely in typography, and list all the brand placement inside some big name films.

There’s nothing wrong with brand placement anyway–a film is a film, and I don’t take these posters as criticism; they’re just a creative way to express a statistic. The fact that a few of the films with the longest list of brand placements are actually quite good (Iron Man, The Bourne Ultimatium), should dispel whatever argument might be brewing in your head at the moment.

I don’t care if people are hopping in nice shiny cars–if you’re going to play a rich character and Lamborghini wants to sponsor you, that’s great–it’s the kind of car I’d expect your character to be driving anyway. No problem! Phones and computers and other things are obvious too: we use these things, so why not movie characters? They just happen to use nicer, cooler versions of them, which work as advertising.

Where brand placement does go crazy, though, is when it temporarily hijacks the film and makes it feel like a commercial. I’m talking about when the actual dialogue of the film suddenly runs off the rails for a second, and characters start talking about the brands themselves. I can think of only one giant example off the top of my head, and it’s from 2006′s Casino Royale. Check out the last 15 seconds of this clip:

“Rolex?” she says.
“Omega,” he replies.
“Beautiful.”

Aye. Subtle. Although I guess one notable film from my childhood was actually far worse, with the entire film being a gigantic advertisement for Nintendo. This scene is pretty cringe-worthy these days, especially considering what a terrible product the Power Glove actually was. I suppose “I love the Power Glove” is a bit more direct than Eva Green’s “beautiful” line.

What a commercial, though: I saw The Wizard twice, putting my anticipation for Super Mario Bros. 3 absolutely through the roof afterwards, and it didn’t abate until I had it in my hands.

One wonderful new book gaining strong traction in the world of design and advertising is Rob Walker’s Buying In. The weekly columnist for the New York Times Sunday Magazine stands and delivers a book-length meditation on the 21st-century consumer, along with a perfect antidote to any under-researched column or study that tells you marketing “as we know it” is dead, or that the modern consumer is so over-informed and intelligent that all old strategies or ideas have jumped (or must be thrown) out the window.

Advertising is changing in fundamental ways–this, no one denies–but some rules of the game still remain, and Walker is here to chart the way all the various agents (producers and consumers alike) have adapted.

Besides the immediate appeal to anyone involved in advertising or design, the book has a transcendent draw that comes from its central examination of brand attachment. Walker coined the term “murketing”, to describe a 21st century mix of murky and marketing that he describes as being a two-part system, one which is made up of the “increasingly sophisticated tactics of marketers who blur the line between branding channels and everyday life” and the consciously “widespread consumer embrace of branded, commercial culture.”

Read the introduction to the book here and tell me you’re not hooked by his anecdotal reference to Chuck Taylor’s All-Stars: he says the book “was inspired by the disconnect between what the experts say [about consumer behaviour] and how we really behave,” and the first example comes from his very own experiences. Perfect for me, as I only started wearing All-Stars a year and a half ago, and since then I’ve already bought 3 pairs. Why? Lots of reasons, surely, almost all of them connecting to self/group identification, and (almost) all to be found in this book.

One of the most fascinating parts of Walker’s theory, the pieces of which you can put together through all the entries on his murketing blog or his “Consumed” columns (all available online), is the “Desire Code”, his examination of how we come to desire what we eventually buy, or how logo/brand/product desire is created.

His idea rides on a “fundamental tension of modern life,” one that extends far past marketing and consumerism but is essential to his understanding of it: the tension between the individual and the group. Hardly a new concept, but that’s the point–the game hasn’t changed so much to be unrecognizable, rather all its participants are (apparently) a little more self-aware. A fine sampling:

When I was in grade school, we watched a lot of films. Perhaps they were a relatively easy way to quiet the children down for a while. But remembering this period as an adult, I’m struck by the realization that those films all had one of two themes.

One was: Deep down, each of us is different, unique, and special.

The other was: Deep down, we are all just the same.

For years I shared this observation, for laughs, before it finally occurred to me that this was no joke. In fact, it articulated what is more or less the fundamental tension of modern life.

We all want to feel like individuals.

We all want to feel like a part of something bigger than ourselves.

And resolving that tension is what the Desire Code is all about.

Summer is here, and from anecdotal evidence in various popular magazines, I’ve heard it’s the “reading” season, although reading on the beach does nothing but hurt my eyes. If you, however, can keep yours relatively unsquinted, Walker’s book is an essential purchase.