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?