Getting shirty

I have a problem with call centres and one by one I’m determined to improve the way these centres deliver a better customer experience.

A few weeks back I bought some shirts online. For reasons with which I won’t bore you these shirts failed to be delivered, obliging me to deal with their call centre. As call centres go it wasn’t too bad, I have seen and experienced a lot worse, but one thing did irritate me.

In the period between my original order, which had got lost, and my subsequent re-ordering, the price had gone up and by quite a bit. Naturally as a careful Scot I queried this and pointed out that I did not think it right to be charged at the new higher price when it was not my fault that the order hadn’t been processed.

This was a great opportunity for my shirt maker to really wow me. And they really blew it. Or at least they didn’t make the best of the opportunity they had.

My request for my order to be processed at the cheaper price was not surprisingly above the pay grade of the person I was dealing with and after consulting with a supervisor came back and told me that they would agree to sell the shirts to me at the lower price. Although pleased at the outcome I was rather miffed by the tone which made it sound as if they were doing me a great big favour. I did resist the temptation to point out that it was me doing them the favour by agreeing to buy their product in the first place.

I remember once being told, and it may be apocryphal, that at Marks & Spencer if you asked for a size that wasn’t on the shelf, the assistant even though she knew everything was out on the floor, would go away and pretend to look, thereby giving the impression that they had made every effort to meet your needs.

Consider this too.

Imagine your 11am flight to London is cancelled and you need to be in town tomorrow morning. There’s an evening flight that’s open. Where most call centres might simply say “I can put you on a flight leaving at 9pm tonight'' other call centres might say “well I know I can put you on the 9pm flight tonight, but let me see what I can do to get you on the 7am flight in the morning”. A less desirable option creates a mental anchor, making the best alternative seem more acceptable. Which approach do you think has the greater impact on loyalty and customer buying habits?

These are the moments of truth for anyone dealing with customers, the point where the rubber hits the road, and when it is vital to get it right. This is when a good customer service person can make life easy for the customer and in so doing build loyalty the right customer buying behaviour. It’s not the big things that make the difference in the customer experience but the little things. Marks & Spencer seem to understand that. My online shirt shop didn’t.

I know it’s not rocket science but surely if our call centres get the small things right life becomes more bearable for us all.

But what do you think?

Hanging on the telephone

Over the recent Christmas break I heard on the radio an interview with a senior marketing person from Manchester Airport saying that in a drive to make their brand feel more authentic they would be changing the hold music at their call centre to the music of the Smiths, Stone Roses and other Manchester bands.

Brilliant.

Here was a brand which was actively seeking to take its brand into all the nooks and crannies of its brand experience. I only hope it’s doing the big things as well but if it is looking at the minutiae I am sure it will be.

Now obviously no one wants to be listening to hold music when calling a call centre but sometimes it is unavoidable even though I’m sure that as great marketing people you will be making every effort to minimise this! But it does make sense that the choice of music to be played should be totally reflective of your brand, its positioning and its personality.

Too often however we choose, if indeed we do consciously choose, some piece of classical music or worse still some random muzak, no doubt on basis that it is cheap and royalty free. But is classical music really what we want if we are trying to portray our brand as modern and progressive and in touch? Is muzak the right tone for a business that is trying to be distinctive?

At the very least it would be great if brands were to play the music from their advertising, if they are doing any. Given the efforts that agencies make to find the right music, as I know only too well, you can be assured that this will be on brand. I haven’t checked what music John Lewis are playing but if they are not playing the music from the ad that brought a lump to all our throats over Christmas they are most definitely missing a trick.

And by the by I think that an interesting and toe tapping piece of music can have the positive side effect of making the time our customers are waiting feel less long!

The real point I’m trying to make here is that great brands define what they are, what they stand for, who they are and how they behave. The brand is used to inform every decision that is made throughout the business. It defines the customer experience from start to finish and influences, especially in service businesses, how it expects its people to deliver. This, I think Manchester Airport, gets and understands given its obsession with the detail.

I think it might be time to check out what music our customers are listening to. And what other detail of the customer and employee experience should we be taking a close look at?

O what a lovely war!

Welcome to the Marketing Comic where I will try on a regular basis to share with you my thoughts and experience. And I hope you will join in and share with me nuggets and insight and feedback on my thoughts.

Now it is not often that you will find something helpful and useful coming out of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is even rarer for there to be lessons for marketing emerging from these conflicts. But as you will soon learn I can find enlightenment in unusual places and I have found a very important nugget of marketing learning from these brutal wars.

Over the recent break I read an interview with General David Petraus, the American general who was the main man in Iraq and in Afghanistan and who is now the Head of the CIA. In his interview he said,

‘You cannot build awareness or engagement through a bullet proof windscreen’.

Now you may be struggling to see the immediate relevance of this to marketing so let me explain.

As senior marketers we will often build awareness or engagement through a bulletproof windscreen. Only we call it market research. Do we do enough to get out from behind our bullet proof windscreen to find out what is going on, to discover what our customers think about us, to experience what they are experiencing? Could we do more? Or are we content to let the shag pile grow beneath our feet and rely on intelligence from our research reports? And lean on the columns of excel worksheets from our front line staff for understanding and insight?

A few months back I was on one of my regular missions on behalf of us all to improve and upgrade the quality of customer service that some large faceless organisation was offering me and the rest of its customers. Getting nowhere with the customer service team I asked to speak to their Head of Customer Service to be told ‘I am sorry but he does not speak to customers’. Are you as amazed and as dumfounded at that statement as I was? This is an organisation where I was assured that ‘your call is very important to us’ and ‘customer service is our number one priority’. Yeah, right. But it is also an organisation where its senior management do not think it important enough to speak with customers. Guys, listen to General Petraus.

Since this experience I now make a point of asking to speak with the Customer Service Director or the Marketing Director if and when I have an issue that is irresolvable by the front line staff. It is a good game to play and you should try it. It is saddening to see how few organisations will allow you to speak to those supposedly leading the charge to make their organisation customer-centric

Now I don’t want to hold myself up some sort of paragon of marketing virtue, assuming of course that you can juxtaposition ‘marketing’ and ‘virtue’, but I did always try to get out from behind my bullet proof windscreen and would encourage my team to do the same. I was always happy to speak with customers if they phoned. And indeed was always keen to contact a sample of customers whose business we had lost to find out why we were not at least as good as the competition.

I would always ensure that my team and myself had shopped the customer shop and experienced the customer experience. As they say (no idea who ‘they’ is in this instance) ‘if you want to improve airline food, serve it up in the airline’s board room’.

So if you work in marketing or have a responsibility for customers in your organisation, so that means all of you, I want you now to commit to build awareness and engagement without a bullet proof windscreen. I would love you to personally commit and to encourage your team to commit, to the Petraus Marketing Doctrine:
· To speak with customers if they ask to speak with you
· To speak with a sample of new, existing or ex customers every month to find out how they feel about your business and how it could be made better
· To regularly shop the customer shop

By doing this you will be sending out a very powerful signal to your customers and equally importantly to your front line staff, exactly what kind of an organisation you want to be. And you will be amazed at what you will learn and uncover.

So do it now. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Not when you have a space in your diary. Do it now and get on with it. And maybe some good will have come out of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.