How to improve airline food

I have a real problem with call centres.

And I don’t suffer the people who work in call centres gladly. And even though I know it is not the fault of those answering the phones, too often these people get the sharp end of my tongue. If you are one of these people, I am sorry.

Last week is a case in point.

I had to phone a call centre to sort out my insurance. An innocuous request but once again the illogicality of a call centre process left me fuming. And even though the customer service rep I was dealing with could see the sense in my position she was unable to do anything for me as she had ‘to follow orders’- a defence rejected by the Nuremburg courts! No matter. Nothing was going to budge her and so I was left back where I started, annoyed, enraged and frustrated.

It was not her fault, nor the fault of her colleagues. They did not get up in the morning and come into work to deliver bad customer service. Instead I blame the senior management of the place. These are the ones that dictated and built the process but they rarely get the chance to view their handiwork.

But how do you get these people closer to the customers who pay their wages and away from the financial reports, strategy papers and the other bumf that absorbs senior management time?

If you want to improve the food served on airlines, serve it up in the boardroom for the Board’s lunch. And, in recent work I’ve been doing to help businesses across the region think about their customer journey and the experience their brand delivers to its customers, I have collected 5 ideas that other businesses have implemented with their senior executives.

Simulation…In one very large business senior executives take a weekly turn to simulate the complete customer experience by going through a transaction or business process as a customer. Through this they are asked to log their thoughts, feelings and emotions, positive and negative This really does help the executives walk in the shoes of the customer.

Executive Complaints…get your top team to investigate and answer one complaint a week from start to finish. They are not allowed to dictate the task to secretaries, PAs or some other flunky. It is down to them and this gives them the opportunity to uncover the cause of the complaint and any defects in the processes, the journey, and the experience.

Speed Dating…the executive get to team meet a group of customers and each executive has 10 minutes with each customer on different topics. After their time is up they move onto the next customer. I think it is important in this context that the team work off the customer’s agenda as well as their own.

Hanging on the telephone… the senior management team to randomly phone customers on a  regular basis (even those who have provided low customer satisfaction scores) to ask them what they think of the experience or how it could be improved.

 ‘Meet the Manager’/ ‘Tweet the Manager’…sessions which allow  to contact or meet directly with the management of the business on a regular basis. It might be scary but it does show great commitment to your customers and your people.  

These ideas take time and courage, commodities which can both be in short supply, but the willingness of the management team to adopt ideas like these show real and genuine commitment to improving the customer experience and to walking in the footsteps of your customers.

 

Prisoner 46664

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of visiting the ‘Birmingham Made Me Design EXPO’,  a celebration of Birmingham’s great design heritage and of Birmingham as the home of some of this country’s great brands-Jaguar, Triumph, Land Rover, Aga, JCB and even Marmite. It’s well worth a visit. You would be amazed to learn just how much good stuff has come out of Birmingham.

In my job I spend a lot of my time trying to design and develop brands. I don’t do the creative work on brands but instead it is my job to come up with the underlying definition of the brand. I try to define what it is going to stand for; the promise it is going to make and to try to keep, to its customers; and how it should present itself to its market. Someday it is my hope that the brands I am working on will feature in an exhibition of great brands.

And when we are sitting around with the brand owner trying to come up with the right sense of words to describe the brand, you can bet that no matter the brand, company, category, product, or service, the most common list of attributes everyone wants to be associated with goes something like this: honesty, accessibility, innovation, invention, forward thinking, collaborative, friendly, and easy to work with, trustworthy, leader, fun. Recognise the exercise?  Now who wouldn't want to be all those things? Anyone want to be the opposite?

But when every other brand has the same words on their list this is not conducive to the development of a distinctive brand.

Let us look at it another way.

If I was to ask you to describe someone like Nelson Mandela I am pretty sure I would get words like courageous, altruistic, heroic, peaceful, wise, thoughtful, giving, caring, loving, fearless and so and so on.

Great words and accurate in their description of Nelson Mandela but the same set of words could be accurately applied to many other people, including me on a good day.

But if I was to ask what Mandela stood for, your answer might be something like ‘freedom’. And that applies to very few people and most certainly not me.

That is the difference between a true brand stance and an easy list of attributes.

I like to think that great brands, like the ones on display in The Mailbox, realty understand their stance in the world and their reason to exist and pursue that mission with all their might consistently over time and across every customer touchpoint.

These brands recognise that they are not just a collection of attributes that could describe anyone but have a purpose, a stance, a value and pure mission in the world. Just like Nelson Mandela.

Great brands are never remembered for their attributes but for what gets done with these attributes. Don’t chase and measure yourself against a long list of attributes, many of which are just the price of entry for everyone else in your marketplace.

 But instead always work hard to stay on mission and always execute against your stance and not against attributes. Measure the market's understanding of your reason to be — who you are and why you do what you do.

It therefore follows that it is not so much what you make and what you sell but why you do that matters and how you do it.

Just like all the brands on display at Birmingham’s DesignEXPO. Just like Nelson Mandela.

Letting the train take the strain

Last week I had to visit London and it was in the unlikely setting of the train station that I found inspiration for this week’s words of wit and wisdom.

For it was at the train station that I met a truly inspiring man and for those of us involved in the business of marketing and the marketing of business the example he sets should one we should all aspire to follow.

This is his story.

While waiting to travel  I came across the Marketing Director for the line – there he was meeting, greeting and talking with the passengers, his customers. As someone in the same line of business, I was curious why he was out and about at this ungodly hour. His reply interested me.

‘We have just introduced a few changes and I was interested in hearing what my customers thought about it. And I wanted to support the staff’.

Now compare this attitude with my recent experience with the call centre of a major and very well known business, an experience far from smooth and efficient. And 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 customers a species important enough to speak with.

Too often marketing teams and senior executives learn their customer feedback through the prism of a market research report or a presentation of customer complaints. Rarely do they meet customers and get feedback raw and emotional, nor experience what customers are experiencing.

I recently read an interview with the American general who led the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan who said that ‘you cannot build understanding or engagement through a bullet proof windscreen’.

And what applies on the battlefield can also be applied by marketers who too often seek to build understanding through their own bullet proof windscreen. Only we call it market research.

One major financial services company I know regularly asks its executive team to walk in the footsteps of its customers through a series of real transactions and also record and log their observations, feelings and emotions. In this way those who are mandating the process to be followed come face to face with the reality of their decisions and their instructions at the moment of truth for their customers. This business is learning a lot from my American general.

All of us in the business of marketing can learn from this and get out from behind our bullet proof windscreens to talk with customers and to regularly shop the customer shop.

And this will send a very powerful signal to your customers and to your front line staff, the kind of an organisation you want to be. And you will be amazed at what you will learn and uncover.

In the meantime I will continue to let my favourite train take the strain.

You're fired

''The Apprentice'' and the art and science of building a world class brand

Lord Sugar is back.

And with him comes the usual group of self-preening, tub thumping, back stabbing, backside covering, sycophantic, ego centric Apprentice wannabees.

But while watching the first episodes of this real life soap it struck me that the principles that underlie the development of the cast list for this real life soap can also be used to help build stronger brands.

In essence a brand is a promise delivered. In other words no matter the category in which your brand is competing, the brand must deliver the promise it makes to its target customers day in, day out, and across all its touchpoints.  A tough ask in any business.

But how exactly do you define the promise of your brand and what it’s going to stand for in the first place so that it’s distinctive from the competition, relevant to your business and its ability to deliver, and which meets the emotional and rational needs of your customers?

Too often this chase to find, pin down and articulate the very essence of a brand becomes a game of Scrabble as brand specialists leaf through dictionaries and thesauruses to find word nuances to define brand benefits, values and personality. One such expert has described this process as one which produces ‘a pile of disconnected words that looks like nothing less than an explosion in a bombed thesaurus factory.’ It is no wonder that many brands end up looking and acting like crazy mixed up kids.

This is where we can learn from programmes like ‘The Apprentice’. Indeed any work of ensemble characters like ‘The Only Way is Essex’, ‘Downton Abbey’ or even X Factor abides by these principles.

Authors and scriptwriters work on the premise that there are small number of identifiable characters that appear regularly in myths, fairytales, literature and film that resonate powerfully with us across all ages and all cultures. And so we will regularly find characters like heroes and super heroes, magicians, jokers, outlaws and mavericks in our fairy tales, books and even TV soaps.

If this approach works for story tellers why can it not work for brand story tellers to help define what their brand is and what it can become? At the end of the day a brand is a story that people want to be part of, with a character with values with whom its audience wants to be associated.

Now although the experts aren’t fully agreed on whether there are 12, 16, 20 or even more of these basic character types, properly known as Archetypes, the following list of 12 seems to cover the most basic character types

	CAREGIVER	REGULAR GUY	HERO	INNOCENT
Helps people to...	Care for others	Connect with others	Triumph	Always do the right thing
	CREATOR	LOVER	OUTLAW	EXPLORER
Helps people to...	Create something new	Find and give love	Break the rules	Maintain independence
	RULER	JESTER	MAGICIAN	SAGE
Helps people to...	Become the best	Have a good time	Make dreams come true	Find the truth

It is early days and the characters not yet fully formed and they may all be trying to stake out aggressive Hero and Ruler personalities but look more closely and we see different shades of personality starting to show.Already Michael Copp, Essex’s loveable rogue, was clearly positioned as  the series Ordinary Guy; Jenna Whittingham who claims to be ‘protective of others’ is the Caregiver;  while Bilyana Apostolova, who was booted out of the programme in the first week, was a dead ringer as an Explorer. It will be interesting to see in the coming weeks how the charcters develop and the Archetypes emerge.

But let’s look at this in brand terms.  Harley Davidson is clearly an Outlaw brand, Landrover is obviously positioned as an Explorer,  Disney could only be a Magician brand and Domestos, a brand which kills all known germs dead, a Hero to mums everywhere.

By assessing as part of the brand development process who the brand is or could be, we can get a clear direction for the development of the brand personality, values, benefits and essence. It gives us a definable persona and character for the brand determining how it should look, act and feel to the consumer in a far more consistent way than using a dictionary and thesaurus might. And allows us to create stories for our brands populated with real, diverse and well drawn characters, just like the producers of ‘The Apprentice’.

Persil have over recent years used this thinking brilliantly to drive a differentiated positioning in the laundry market. Classically washing powders, and look at Ariel adverts to see this, portray themselves as Caregiver brands usually with the mum using the brand to take care of her family’s whites and colours. Persil shifted the category with its ‘dirt is good ‘campaign adopting an Explorer brand positioning and encouraging families to play in the mud. A very different approach.

Strong well –defined and firmly-grounded brands develop and deliver their promise in much the same way as the characters on ‘The Apprentice’ do. They rely less on an ability to play Scrabble well and more on a deeper understanding of characterisation. And while this approach doesn’t always guarantee a happy ending, it should lead to a cracking good story.

How well can you tell the story of your brand?

A question of degree

I have been in serious recruitment mode in recent weeks.  And it has been very interesting, and to some degree a tad depressing, reading through the wide variety of CVs that I have been sent.

And I have also over the past few months been out and about speaking at various universities, business schools and colleges, meeting some of this country’s brightest talent.

And there is a trend appearing.

It is noticeable that many more of these young people are either spending or have spent their university years, studying for a business or marketing degree, no doubt among other pursuits. This did get me wondering whether having a business or marketing degree is important for marketing success.

I must declare an interest here.  I do not have a marketing or business degree but a degree in history. I will let others determine whether or not I am a marketing success. I do have MBA though only acquired when I  knew what my lecturers were talking about!

But I am often asked is a history degree relevant to a marketing career and do you need a business or marketing degree to get on in marketing?

Now I can’t speak here for others, though I suspect I am not alone, but I can share with you what I look for when hiring marketing talent.

Firstly I think people should go to university to study something  they are going to enjoy exploring. It should be an end itself not a means to an end unless you want to be a doctor, a lawyer or something with a high vocational content. So if marketing or business is what floats your boat and is something your truly passionate about, then go ahead and spend 3 or 4 years lost in books studying these topics.

But that is necessarily what is going to get you ahead in the world of marketing.

A wise man once said to me to hire for attitude and train for aptitude. And he is so right.

When recruiting I look for people who obsess about the customer and who are passionate about wanting to the do the right thing for the consumer.  Marketing shouldn’t just be a job where you turn up at 9 and go home at 5 but an all consuming vocation and dedication to make life better for the customer and the consumer. We are all customers and we should all be looking to learn from our own consumer experiences and from the consumption of other people’s marketing. Unless the person in front of me can demonstrate this passion and commitment  it is unlikely we will get the chance to work together.

Secondly I want people who come imbued with a restless curiosity, who see their workplace and the world around them as a university where they can go explore,  making connections of disparate thinking to create and form new ideas and innovative thinking. People who seek out and optimise opportunities that expose themselves to new insights, new perspectives and new connections are people who will constantly be asking ‘why not’ and constantly looking to find new and different ways to add value to themselves, their customers, and their brand.

Steve Jobs used to say that ‘a good techie is a good techie but one with other interests really moves the needle’. You can say the same about great marketers and what is good enough for Mr Jobs, who would synthesise learnings  from humanities, calligraphy, theology and liberal arts,  is more than good enough for me.

Learning and development opportunities are all around us, every day. I want to work with people who see and understand this; who read widely; who are interested in meeting with and talking to new people; who seize opportunities to learn new things; people who are happy to go exploring.

And lastly I want people who can think with rigour. And just about any subject taught at university can train the mind to do that though clearly I think historians do it best of all!

Problem solving in business is like writing an essay or answering an exam question. We start with identifying the problem, the challenge or the exam question; we research the issue and isolate the facts (and from time to time the figures); whenever possible we challenge the facts and the range of arguments to destruction; and we build a case and construct our argument leading to a conclusion or a recommendation that addresses the original exam question. This is what I mean by a rigorous and well trained mind.

Marketers cannot just rely on intuition and creativity to be successful. Businesses just don’t work that way and the importance of constructing a rigorous, well engineered and carefully constructed argument cannot be under-estimated.

That is what I first learnt studying history. The facts I deal with today in the businesses and for the customers  I am privileged to serve may be very different but the skills of building my case in writing essays about some obscure Anglo Saxon tribal chieftain or the politics of the French enlightenment are what underpin my ability to be a marketer, great or otherwise.

And so for me passion, an enquiring mind and rigorous analysis are what help make great marketers not marketing degrees or MBAs.

Do you agree? What do you look for when recruiting marketing talent? Share your thoughts and ideas. It is never too old for anyone to learn.

And remember, innovation is nothing but undiscovered plagiarism.

Home sweet home

In recent months I have finally paid off my mortgage and for the first time in 25 or so years I own outright every single brick, roof tile and breeze block. It is a great feeling knowing that you are no longer out at work to feed that particular monkey. And if you are not yet there I hope that it will not be too long before you too are in this position.

And I hope that when you get there your mortgage lender understands the principles of a great customer experience better than mine did.

It was not that they made life especially hard when it came to obtaining and completing the necessary paperwork. Indeed for a large business they were actually quite efficient. And I am sure that they did everything they were supposed to do right.

But the customer journey they had designed no doubt to be as efficient as possible, really failed to grasp the significance and emotionality of what was to me a major life event. And this is where those who designed this particular experience went wrong.

Would it have hurt them to enclose with the paperwork  a nice letter acknowledging the significance of this event; thanking me for being privileged to be part of this journey with me;  and wishing me all the best in the next stage of my journey through life?

I have spoken before about the need for marketing folk to experience the customer experience if they want to understand the frustrations, and hopefully the joys, that customers will endure and sometimes enjoy when doing business with your business.

But there is a lot more we can and should do if we want to develop and put in place mind blowingly great and truly differentiating customer experiences.

Now many people may think that it is only entertainment type businesses or those in say the leisure and hospitality industry who need to fuss about the customer experience. Wrong. In my opinion whatever the service or the product a customer is buying or receiving, that customer will have an experience of some sort and all service encounters in all businesses provide an opportunity for emotional engagement, however mundane the product or service might be. Repaying a mortgage is hardly a Disneyworld experience, is it?

So no matter your industry or sector, you should concern yourself with the customer experience and if you work in marketing, you ought to obsess about this whether you work in financial services or retail; automotive or FMCG; education or hospitality; and even, especially, the public sector.

I would like to suggest that anyone thinking about the customer experience should consider three broad principles. 

Move from operational service quality to customer perceived quality. Too many businesses emphasise and maybe over emphasise operational service quality. This needs to be balanced by the need to examine and think about how the service being delivered is perceived by the customer. Operational service quality, delivering the service to specification every time, is a great way to regularise the service experience cost efficiently but might not be so great for the customer. I am sure that in my case the operational service quality was high in that the service was delivered to specification with calls and letters being answered within set timescales and the like but the experience still left me with a hollow feeling. More should be done to understand the quality as perceived by me.

Look beyond the basics.  It goes without saying that anyone with a passion for improving the customer experience will identify the touch points that matter along the customer corridor and remove foul ups and snarls in this area. But we must do more. Delivering on these foundational experiences, the minimum standard customers expect in their everyday contact with a brand, does not define it or differentiate the brand. This is merely an essential building block, and if not present, will turn customers away. But instead we must look beyond the basics to deliver true delight and a unique brand experience. We must find and develop the differentiating experiences which have the potential to separate the brand from competitors and signature experiences which are essential to defining the brand uniquely and which only your brand can do and can become known for.

Map emotions not just behaviours. Too often we limit analysis of the customer journey to how our business behaves across and through the customer corridor and we compare this to how the customer wants us to behave to provide a detailed customer journey map through this corridor identifying improvement opportunities as we go.  Usually these maps will focus on things like reliability, responsiveness, accessibility and problem solving.  But how often do we plot out or obtain data on how the customer is feeling at each stage of the journey through the customer journey, how the customer wants to feel and even how we want the customer to feel? This might not come easy to businesses used to thinking rationally and making decisions based on hard facts and solid data but emotion mapping through the customer corridor is as essential as behavioural mapping. If my mortgage lender had thought harder about how they wanted me to feel or indeed was feeling, I am sure they would have developed and delivered a more emotional and a better experience

Great customer experiences don’t just happen. They are carefully designed and beautifully constructed. And I do wish more businesses would think more about this. After all they owe it to their customers.

How do you go about building a great customer experience in your business? What factors do you consider?

All thoughts welcome.

Drilled to bits

I think I now know where CRM is going wrong.

A week or so back I was wandering aimlessly around my local Homebase as men have a tendency to do. Loitering by a stand for Black and Decker drills, and for no apparent reason, I remembered a long forgotten marketing lesson I was once taught-Black and Decker don’t sell drills...they sell holes.

And I think that is where those who deal in, advise on or practice CRM are going wrong.

Now if at this point you have no idea what CRM is-it stands for Customer Relationship Management and is the art and science of getting the right proposition to the right customer through the right channel at the right time.

In passing I should also point out that in many sectors the consumer does not want or seek a relationship and certainly does not want to be managed. So even the term is wrong for a start and at the very least we ought to be talking about Customer Engagement. However that is a whole other story.

More importantly, for as long as I have worked in marketing, and that is a very long time, marketers have peddled the idea of CRM to our businesses based on the futile premise of one-one marketing. Consequently the history of CRM over the past 20 or so years is littered with significant investment failures in CRM systems and programmes with only a few notable and well known cases getting this investment working properly: Tesco and its Clubcard being the best and most quoted case study in this space.

But like the man who wants a perfect hole and not a drill, businesses don’t want CRM but want and need more responsive marketing which generates a higher and increasing return on marketing investment.

But for too long many of us in the profession have talked about CRM almost as if it were an end itself. We have confused the art and science of the discipline with technology and computer systems. We have over obsessed on data and analytics. And we have positioned it as a standalone panacea to business ills.

Instead the data and the analytics, the technology and the systems should be seen as part of a process which results in more responsive marketing. A process which fuses meaningful customer insight with inspired creative to deliver personalised and relevant communications which are engaging and responsive.  In other words we should see the outputs from our CRM programme as the intelligence that powers the creative look and feel and delivers it where it will be most effective.  I call this intelligent marketing.

In this world CRM is not an end in itself nor a discrete and standalone discipline but is and must be seen as part of a greater whole. And this is how it ought to position and market itself. I would love it if I never saw or heard the CRM acronym again but instead we talked about intelligent marketing.

Marketers should strike CRM from their vocabulary and focus instead on intelligent marketing; stop talking about the process and start to deliver the benefits; in other words it is about holes, not drills.

CRM RIP.

And to think that this all started because I was looking at drills in Homebase.

But what do you think? All comments welcome.

Have I got news for you?

What is the point of PR?

Now the answer to many of you might be really obvious but I
only ask having met in the course of my professional duties a
 wide variety of young PR professionals over the last few weeks. All nice people but all intent on chasing headlines and coverage to the exclusion of just about everything else and all rightly proud of the creativity demonstrated through the PR campaigns they had planned and executed to deliver these banner headlines.

But surely good PR is more than just coming up with crazier and crazier stunts to chase the headlines and to get your brand or news as close as possible to the front of the newspaper?

And yet if you look at the standard measure of PR success, the Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) measure, maybe the role of PR is just about coverage.

On this basis Hitler’s PR agency and those charged with looking after PR for the Costa cruise ships have done a mighty fine job over the years and recent weeks.

To check I wasn’t going mad I had a look at the Chartered Institute of PR’s definition of PR and this re-assured me and confirmed that I wasn’t losing my senses. To the professional PR body,  public relations  ‘ is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you ....Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics’.

I can buy that.

Sadly I think a lot of PR professionals bewitched by the need to generate banner high headlines for their brand are losing sight of this definition. And the ubiquitous use of AVE as a measure of PR efficiency to prove the ROI of PR is contributing massively to the PR profession and many agencies failing to understand that there is more to PR than just coverage.

In other words while AVE is great for measuring PR efficiency, though there are other and arguably better measures out there to do that job, it does do a lousy job at measuring effectiveness and how good our PR programmes are at helping build and drive reputation.

And of course if we all start to see PR as an element in building and maintaining brand reputation there is every likelihood that brands and all in the marketing profession charged with helping to manage this reputation across all channels of communication will develop a joined up and more integrated approach to communications.

It is therefore time for the profession and agencies to move away from AVE and the headline grabbing mindset and to initiate a better informed measurement structure to drive the right behaviours.

I have four key measures which ought to be used in a balanced way to measure ongoing efficiency AND effectiveness and which should help move us away from grabbing headlines to the detriment of all else:

·         Favourability-categorised by positive/neutral negative and measured as a Net Favourability Score (NFS). This can be combined with impacts to show Net Favourability Impact Score calculated by (positive mentions x impacts-negative mentions x impacts). This would be my key measure of effectiveness

·         Key message penetration-percentage of coverage containing key messages

·         Amplification-number of times your message is passed on, an especially useful measure for PR coverage in social media.

·         AVE,  or even better cost per 1000 impacts-the prime measure of efficiency and should only be used  if effectiveness measured.

If we as marketers, PR professional or the agencies supporting our marketing programmes agree that this is the way forward, PR may have a point after all.

And if we do this we won’t just have news for you but the right news for you.

How tight are your briefs?

This week I want you to consider how tight your briefs are.

We all know how lovely tight briefs are and for those of us in the marketing profession the tighter our briefs the better.

What is the most important document a marketer is ever going to write? The brief. And so good brief writing is an essential skill for anyone working in marketing and one I fear we as a profession are beginning to lack.

I hope I am not going to come over like your grandfather pointing out that it was so much better in my day but sometimes I do wonder if the rigour and quality of training in core marketing disciplines today is as good as it was in my day.

And when it comes to writing a tight brief there is always room for improvement. Even for oldies.

The brief is your instruction to your creative agencies. It encapsulates and crystallises your thinking, your insight and your business challenge to allow them to weave their creative magic. It also acts as your agreement with your agency and if their response bears little relationship to the brief you can ask them to start again. Without a brief in place, how are you going to judge the work when it comes back to you?

And, equally importantly, a good well written brief allows you as the marketer to ensure you have obtained the engagement of the business.

You would not spend millions of pounds on a new computer system or new premises without a detailed specification so why would you not want to do the same for your advertising or your communications? After all it is only your brand we are talking about.

In short the tighter our briefs, the better the end product and the final results will be.The GIGO principle of garbage in, garbage out also applies in marketing.

To help in the process of writing a great brief, here are my four simple rules:.

Put it in writing. Not only does this avoid any misunderstanding later but it also forces you as the client to consider deeply and thoroughly what you are asking for. The brief is not a form to be filled in at the last minute but a strategic document based on deep rigour and analysis. As someone far better than me once said:

‘Ultimately the point of communications is to get people to do things. Which people? What things? The basis of a great brief is right there. Everything else is detail’.

Make it inspiring. The job of the brief is tighten up thinking and to provide a simple insight that will enthuse and inspire the creative team to memorably dramatise and bring to life the brand response to the insight.

Set clear objectives Make sure your objectives are crystal clear with a clear and focused understanding of how the creative and the communications programme will be measured and evaluated. The more concrete the measure, the better. Contrary to popular belief marketers want to help solve business problems and it is a great frustration for all involved in the process when there is no clear and credible problem to solve.

Keep it brief. A great brief is not the longest or the most detailed. It’s the one whose clarity and focus creates the platform for a great strategic and creative leap, a blinding customer insight and an effective solution. Briefs are a summation and a crystallisation of your thinking. As Blaise Pascal put it in 1657

‘I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter’.

Clearly a man ahead of his time. But it is so true. Too much information and detail can fog and obscure the process. If you need more than two pages to produce a brief, you have missed the point.

And so there you have it. It’s official. Marketers prefer tight briefs to big briefs.

Love story

I was really interested to hear Warren Buckley, BT’s Customer Service Director, tell a recent event that ‘marketers need to embark on a love affair with their customer service counterparts or risk failing their brands’.

I couldn’t agree more. I may have had some issues in the past with BT and its customer service teams but on this occasion Mr Buckley, a man who does respond to customer e-mails, has got it spot on.

Mr Buckley’s comment was that by having a dialogue with the customer service teams, marketers could save a whole load of money on customer research. Yes they would but I think there is far far more to it than that.

It always amazes me that marketers don’t pay more attention to the brand experience being delivered day in, day out through their customer service teams. For too long this has been seen as the preserve of the customer service chief while marketers take the line of least resistance and focus on their brand wheels, their ads and the other visual symbols of their power but it is on the ground where their brand hits the road where they can make a real difference. This is where marketers need to start to fall in love.

Mr Buckley wants marketers to work with their colleagues to determine a consistent tone of voice for marketing campaigns and responses to customer queries. I would want marketers to go a lot further.

As you know it never ceases to amaze me how few marketers and customer service chiefs actually put their customer services teams to the test and actually experience the service through a customer's eyes. You will be amazed what you might find out. If you want to improve the quality of airline food, serve it in the Board Room, is my principle.

I did hear last week of one CEO who spent the weekend putting his customer service to the test and then spent Monday firing off a series of e-mails to his operations and customer service bosses with required fixes. Good on him. More of us need to do that to get our own direct and real impressions of the service our business delivers.

Speaking as a marketer, and a customer, here are my top 5 things that we need to be looking for in our customer service departments:

#1 Is the IVR system intuitive and easy to use? If we adopt a principle online that the customer should be within 2 clicks of the service they way, why not follow this principle on the phone and make it easy to get to speak to someone.

#2 How customer friendly is the tone of voice? It is always best to use personal and not impersonal pronouns, scrap jargon and three letter acronyms, use the active and not the passive case. And why don’t people sign letters and put a name to them instead of using the corporate squiggle?

#3 Why not take the name of the customer before asking for an account or an order number? I am a person not a number. Take the name and use it. It will make the call sound more personal.

#4 Why not scrap call duration targets? Targets forces call handlers to aim to hurry the call. Scrap the target and more calls will be resolved.

#5 Why tell customers that the Marketing Director or Customer Services Directors doesn’t speak to customers? If your job is to stop your business doing dumb things to customers, you should speak and listen to customers.

And one final thought, give the customer service people some empowerment to do the right thing for the customer instead of slavishly following a script or a process. In many instances I have no doubt that people do their job properly but fail to deliver a satisfying customer experience. This might help.

Obviously there is more to the love affair than this but hopefully this is a start.

Next week is Valentine’s Day, a perfect time for marketers to fall in love with customer service...and vice versa.

The centre of attention

Is your business customer centric?

Course it is. Your Chief Executive tells you it is and your marketing people will tell you that it is their role to make the business customer centric. How do I know this? Just a hunch and years of cynicism.

But have you ever stopped and thought what exactly it means to be customer centric. I only ask because I heard someone very senior in a very large business say this recently and I asked him what he meant and what he was doing. The panic on his face and the bluster in his voice revealed so much. So what exactly is customer centricity? And how do we know when we are customer centric?

When Columbus set out for America he did not know where he was going. When he got there he did not know where he was. And when he got back he did not know where he had been. Is the same true for customer centricity?

Anyway back to the meaning of customer centricity.

For some it’s about making products and services that customers want to buy based on meeting a real need. Sorry but that’s what marketing is all about. Surely customer centricity means more than that.

For some businesses, customer centricity is about leadership and culture where staff are motivated to go the extra mile for customers. So now we have two definitions.

For others it’s about data and they would argue that by gathering as much data as you can about and from your customers and then employing people with brains the size of planet to analyse this to the precision and depth of circumcising gnats, they can develop offers driven by this data. Others will re-design processes so that these fit around the customer rather than making the customer fit around their processes.

And as the Irish comedian said, come here, there’s more.

Yet another school will define customer centricity in terms of customisation and personalisation. Every customer is different so we need to organise products, services and communications to fit individual preferences and priorities.

So what is it? Is it about products or culture or process design or data or customisation? Now do you see the problem? Might I suggest you ask in your business and see how many definitions you get?

Now you could answer that maybe it’s the whole lot. And you might be right but no business could face in so many directions at once. Where is the priority? Where is the focus? And if there is no clarity around which everyone in your business can agree and if the same words are being used but to mean different things, well that is just a recipe for chaos.

Maybe there is no standard definition of customer centricity; maybe as a phrase it’s too glib. Maybe the flavour of customer centricity your business chooses is dependent on the business model, the market category, the strengths and capabilities of your business.

Maybe as someone far more eloquent than even I once so succinctly put it, it's time to ‘stop doing dumb things to our customers’. Maybe it is that simple. Maybe true customer centricity comes from a top to bottom focus on fixing things that drive customers away. I like that. It’s simple. It’s clear. It’s directive.

How do you define customer-centricty? And do you work in a customer centric business?

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?