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Monday, Sep. 15, 2008

Hotel laundry cleans up on its guests

You know how it goes. You're on a business trip. Your laundry starts piling up. You stuff it in one of those hotel laundry bags and drop it in the hall outside your room. A day or two later, your clothing comes back cleaned and pressed.

The one thing you usually don't do is to check the price list on the laundry bag. You just want to get the jelly off your favorite shirt.

John Long, chairman of the World Games 2010 Foundation, was in Hong Kong recently to attend the equestrian competitions that were part of the Beijing Olympics.

He stuffed a couple of pairs of slacks, a couple shirts and a couple of this and that into a hotel cleaning bag. It came back nicely cleaned and pressed -- with a bill for "190 American dollars," Long told the foundation's board on Thursday.

These "outrageous prices" produced laundry sticker shock, he said, until the guests at the hotel discovered "a real Chinese laundry" was not far away.

Long began to see people lugging bundles of clothing down the street at all hours of the day and night.

Business got so good, the laundry had to hire more people.

There was one other glitch in what was otherwise "a great experience" in China, he said.

At the competition sites, "the American hot dog was taken to a new low." It was boiled. "It was horrible," Long said. "It was not any good."

Banking on scratch-offs

Fast food does it. So do lotteries. Now a bank is doing it, too.

You can walk into any branch of Fifth Third Bank and request an "Unlock Your Dreams" game piece and win instant prizes, like a $10 MasterCard Gift Card, or get your name into a drawing for $250,000 in cash.

You also could win something that would require you to be a customer, like a $50 deposit in a new savings account.

The bank is awarding $900,000 in prizes through Oct. 31 to attract new customers and get new business from old ones.

The goal is to get people into the bank so the staff can find out what they need, says Fifth Third spokesman Brant Welch.

"They can come in every day and get a new scratch-off," Welch says. "They can get their hat in the ring multiple times."

It still feels weird for a bank to be handing out scratch-offs.

The times, they are a-changing.

The three-way call

What does it mean when you call a business and hear a recording that says, "This call may be monitored for quality assurance."

Is Big Brother listening?

Not likely, but a computer might be, says Staci Tubbs, a regional vice president for Affiliated Computer Services, or ACS, which has 4,000 employees in Kentucky.

Companies hire ACS to answer calls from their customers. The calls are recorded, Tubbs says, but rarely replayed.

Some companies go further. They have ACS computers monitor the customer's comments for "key words" that allow each call to be grouped by topic with similar calls. The size of the group can alert the company to problems it might not detect otherwise.

A typical ACS operator handles 700 to 1,000 calls a month and there are about 1,000 operators. It would take a lot of people, including Big Brother, to monitor all those calls. A computer can do it before that guy can say "This call may be monitored for quality assurance."