Pope Idol

I was struck at the weekend when reading an article about the effect the new Pope is having on

the Roman Catholic Church. According to reports there has been a surge in attendances and confessions since his appointment, reversing years of decline. In the UK, in the 8 months since his appointment, for example, the church has seen attendance rises by almost 20% as new and lapsed members find their way to their local church.

And he has done this by being true to his brand, by living its values and by being seen to do so.

For a brand which ought to be built on humility, for many years it can be argued that this is a brand which has lost its way. Pope Francis has put a stop to this with brand defining ‘legends’ such as travelling by bus instead of a chauffeur driven car; carrying his own suitcase; living in a humble flat rather than in the grandiose Papal apartments in the Vatican; washing the feet of female prisoners; even taking a ‘selfie’  which went viral. This truly is a Pope with the common touch, a brand that recognises the importance of the authentic gesture.

Many businesses and brands can learn much from the Pope’s example.

Research has long shown that 65% of communication is done non verbally. In other words it’s not what we say that matters but what we do. This has important implications for all of us in business and in brand management.

Too often business leaders will proclaim their values to the business along with their Mission Statement and in too many businesses it is expected that the mere act of proclamation will lead to the values being lived and shared by all the business.

But it is not what it is said that it is important but what is communicated through the eyes and until and unless our people see the values being lived and demonstrated by their leaders, both remote and close at hand, why should they bother. This is why it is important for leaders to build stories and legends, just as the Pope has done, that will cross organisational boundaries, that will take root within the organisation and that will demonstrate that the values truly are being lived and being demonstrated.

And what is true for our people is also true for our brands. It is not what our brand says when it speaks to customers through a 30 second TV spot or its Facebook page or its press releases that matter but how it delivers on its promise day in, day out across all its touchpoints.

Despite the hype around hares and bears, brands at the end of the day are not judged on what they say but what they do, just like the Pope. John Lewis is not a great brand because it does great ads. It is a great brand because its leadership and its people have a ruthless focus on earning and keeping the trust of its customers across every channel and  through every interaction.

And if the Pope gets this simple truth surely some of the finest business brains around should get this too. There is no excuse for any business to have anything but a great brand. It is not about investing in advertising but in the people that work there, the manufacturing processes, the support infrastructure. It takes ruthlessness. It is about having real insight into what the customer values, the emotional and rational need the brand fulfils. And more importantly a critical understanding that non-verbal factors are a far more important means of communicating than the verbal ones.

This is what Pope Francis gets. This is a great case study in modern brand management.

And this might be the first time you will read this but marketers really can learn from the apostolic successor of St Peter.

Shop till you drop-from funnels to fishbones

Is the High St dead?

It has recently been reported that vacancy rates in the High St are at an all time high with a significant number of these vacant lots being described as ‘long term sick with little or no prospect of reoccupation as shops’.

It’s really easy to be gloomy and to blame politicians, the state of the economy, out of town shopping, the internet and a host of other factors for this situation. The reality is that consumer behaviour has changed and it is not going to change back no matter what the politicians and planners do or how the economy recovers.

So shops RIP?

No. And here’s one reason why.

A few weeks back a friend of mine bought some tiles online to be collected from his local DIY store. When he went to collect the assistant advised him that he had checked all the tiles to make sure they all had the same batch number; asked if he had the right grouting; advised him on the right tools to buy; and provided some advice on how to do a good job.

Brilliant.

And lest anyone thinks that this thinking is only relevant to the traditional retailer, think again. Such thinking also applies to anyone who sells stuff. And that must be just about every business in the land.

But for High St retail to survive it must learn to think differently about what it does and how it does it.

The traditional way of thinking about the role of the shop has been as a stage in the Sales Funnel, the place where consumers came to buy. And as a customer journey this was seen as a total linear process. The internet and in particular mobile connectivity has changed all that and with it new retail business models, think click and collect, have emerged and will continue to emerge. As someone said ‘if you are in bricks and mortar you must be in digital too…or you are dead’.

Consumers now will come into the shop armed with all the latest knowledge, will look at the products, will go back online to read reviews, compare prices and hopefully buy. This journey looks less like a Purchase Funnel, more like a Purchase Fishbone. And must be understood.

Consequently whereas in the past the bricks on the High St were the place the shopper went to buy. But going forward the store will be the brand and product showcase that drives revenues across all channels, less a profit centre and more an essential brand overhead that helps build meaningful product and brand saliency.

In this world the store is a destination that will augment the brand experience and will be focussed less on driving sales and more on engaging the customer through dramatic customer experiences and in-store theatrification.

And in this environment the role of the sales assistant is vital. As customers become increasingly well informed they expect more from the service they receive in store. They expect their store assistants to be empowered, informed and able to match the high level of knowledge of the consumer but also add to it and provide additional value. After all, if automation can take care of the purely transactional or navigational aspects of service, then investing in a human had better offer something more for their money and give customers a compelling reason to venture into a bricks-and-mortar store.

And if you want to see the future take a peek inside a Nike store, an Apple store or Selfridges. These stores direction sign the future and for any local High St to survive as a retail centre every butcher, baker and candlestick maker needs to examine these trends and think how these might be applied closer to home.

The connected, always on consumer is here to stay as are out of town shopping centres. And as we can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube, everyone with an interest in the High St needs to embrace these changes and think long and hard how to respond.

So what do you think about the future of retail? Do you think it’s on its last legs? Where have you seen examples of great retailing that fills you with optimism for the future of the High St.

How was it for you?

They say if you can’t measure, you can’t manage. I beg to differ.

Last week I received a text from my bank asking me to score by SMS my latest interaction with their call centre. Simple enough.

And, given everything else they’ve got on their plates,  you might find it refreshing news that banks were at last taking customer satisfaction seriously and tracking the service performance of their channels. It is unusual for a business in any category to track performance and customer satisfaction to this degree.

Hopefully they will not use the information provided by its customers to roast those of its service staff who failed to get a good score. I do hope they remember my belief that no one gets up in the morning to give bad service. Instead bad service is the result of poorly designed processes, poor systems and training. It is the infrastructure that leads to bad service not the people.

Is  this level of tracking really a good thing. And I take issue with the axiom that you need to measure to manage.

For in my case while the interaction I had on the phone was pleasant, efficient and helpful, my experience of the journey was awful. And I would hypothesise that it is perfectly possible to have a whole series of perfectly good individual interactions but still get an appalling experience.

And this is where I think my bank went wrong.

Having just done extensive research into how businesses develop their customer journeys to deliver a great customer experience, businesses, like my bank, which emphasise measuring and maximising satisfaction at touchpoint level are getting a distorted picture suggesting that customers might be happier than they actually are. For these businesses are failing to understand that customers view the experience as a whole and not by the organisational silos that must combine seamlessly to deliver the integrated service required through the journey and across the experience.

My bank lacked this understanding.

Instead if businesses truly feel that measurement is required to manage and to track its service performance, it is surely better that they take a more holistic and joined up view of the service they provide.

Firstly view the journey and experience as a whole. To address this we would encourage businesses to understand better their journeys as a whole, not just a single touchpoint or channel of communication.

Secondly, instead of dissipating their resources across a broad front of touchpoints and journeys, identify those that really matter to customers and those with most impact on business performance. And apply the measurement tools there.

And lastly and more importantly, measure satisfaction with the entire journey, the holistic experience. In my case it would have been considerably better and more accurate not to check out my level of happiness with my call centre call but my satisfaction with my bank’s ability to transfer an account.

This is checking satisfaction at customer level not channel level. And truly demonstrates an ability to walk in the customer’ shoes.

A business that seeks to measure and manage complete customer journeys will not only do its best at touchpoint level but will also gain a better understanding of the root causes of areas of dissatisfaction in the journey; and will discover more effective ways to collaborate and to break down organisational silos.  

And that is good news for the customer.

How do you measure and manage customer satisfaction? Any good tips to share and pass on?

The answer's Facebook. What's the question?

It would seem that nowadays the must have for any business today is a Twitter account, a Facebook page, some interesting stuff to do with OCR codes or even an app.

 It is all eerily reminiscent of the early days of the internet in the fag end days of the dot com bubble when every business would jump and down and demand a website even though at that time few could explain what they actually wanted a website for. It was as if the why didn’t matter, it was just enough to have one to show to the world that it was hip and modern and down there with kids. 

And the same is happening today with social media. Does anyone ever ask why?

I know that we now live in a mobile, always on, age. And I also know that billions of people now access the internet, Facebook reaches more than 1 billion people and that in a few years’ time smartphones and Tablets will ensure that the reach of both is even greater, assuming that the technology has not been superseded before then.

But the global reach of these technologies, platforms and devices is no excuse to abandon the principles of effective marketing strategy.

I read recently that P&G’s man in charge of brands recently urged marketers to look beyond the pipes and plumbing of digital and social media, the new communication eco-system, and instead continue to build brands ‘…with campaigns that matter, that make people think, feel and laugh…we have the chance to do all of those things now in a way that is so much more exciting than we did before’.

In other words return to basics. And focus less on the means and more on the objective and the result.

But it sometimes seems that when it comes to all things digital, social media and technology, businesses get seduced by all this stuff and abandon the rigour previously shown when developing their communication plans. It feels like businesses should be on these platforms just because they are there. But unless the rigour is applied and the graft work done, it will not be a case of ‘build it and they will come’.

Instead I am going to suggest we get back to basics and before deciding that the answer is Facebook no matter the question, we stop and ask ourselves:

·        -  Who are we trying to reach?

·        - What are we trying to achieve?

·         - How do they buy?

·         - What do we want to say?

·         - How will we engage them?

·         - Which channels will we use, where and when?

And then and only then, when we know have gone back to putting the consumer at the heart of our thinking and not the channel, will we know whether Facebook is the right answer.

So before rushing headlong into the exciting new world of glitzy technology and with it media channels, I invite you to pause, reflect and consider. Think of this new world like dancing down the local disco or club, dependent on your generation. There few of us would rush headlong onto the dance floor. Instead we would mingle around the edges, eyeing up what was going on, who was dancing, listening to the music. And then when we were ready, when we felt up to speed with the dancers and the music, and only then, would we take our first tentative steps onto the dance floor and away we would go. The parallels are uncanny.

So what strategy have you adopted or are you adopting? A headlong rush into this new world or a more careful, considered entry conforming fully to the rigorous principles of a proper communications planning exercise? And how did that work out?

I know which would be my approach.

Talent show

I have a young friend currently trying to enter the marketing profession. She has applied for

countless graduate entry roles in various businesses and agencies around the country and she is unimpressed with the poor communication, the lack of respect shown when it comes to timescales and deadlines, and the complete absence of feedback, even from some of the biggest brands in the world.

And it is more than likely that these failures are systemic to the recruitment process not just the treatment meted out to the most junior of applicants.

When you listen to her tale any professional marketer would be appalled if their brand, a brand whose reputation they will have carefully nurtured and be dedicated to protecting, treated customers and prospects in a similar way. Yet it seems ok to treat prospective talent in such a brand damaging way. And if it treats potential recruits like this, just how does it treat colleagues? And does the way it treats its people align with the customer experience it is seeking to deliver? And more fundamentally should those charged with responsibility for the brand, usually in marketing, take more responsibility for the employee experience?

We all know that happy colleagues mean happy customers but I recently read that we don’t want just want happy customers and colleagues, we want engaged customers and colleagues. This means colleagues are more willing to build an emotional bond, will give more effort to build and deliver a great customer experience, will consent to giving more of themselves to your brand and to your customers. And this can only be good for the customer.

Ideally the customer experience and the employee experience ought to be perfectly aligned. But how aligned are they? And do we think that the colleague journey from recruitment through to resignation and beyond has been designed to deliver a great and fully aligned colleague experience? The results from the experience of my friend would suggest that in many cases they might not be.

And in a recent example when dealing with a business that claims it puts the customer at the heart of all it does, it was clear that its staff were so concerned with making sure that they do things right even to the point when this was not always in the interests of the customer. The management culture encouraged compliance with the rules and processes rather than doing what was right.

Having just completed research into identifying the principles being adopted by businesses to map out their customer journeys to deliver a great customer experience, we did not find one business doing this for colleagues.

There is surely a great opportunity for businesses to build a truly experiential brand by applying the principles of customer journey analysis and design and by learning to walk in the shoes of those who work in the business through

-          The recruitment process

-          The on-boarding process

-          The on-going management and servicing process

-          The leaving process.

And through these journeys asking and considering

-          How well does the employee experience match the desired customer experience ?
How well are these fulfilling colleagues’ rational and emotional needs?

-          Where are the service breakdowns?

-          How well are these experiences aligned with the brand promise? 

-          How can the communication and delivery eco-systems address and fix any problems and issues?

-          What are the critically important parts of these journeys?

As the economy recovers the market to acquire and retain talent will become increasingly competitive. To be successful in this market place businesses could learn much from the principles of customer engagement and the thinking used to develop a great customer experience and apply this to building a great colleague experience.

And of course building a great colleague experience is surely critical in building a great customer experience.

So if you work in marketing today, invite your HR colleagues for a coffee and start to discuss how together you can build a truly effective colleague experience.

Who's in charge?

Last week after an especially gruelling, frustrating, painful and ultimately unsatisfying customer experience from a bank, I found myself in a discussion about the experience with the director responsible for managing the people delivering this appallingly bad customer experience.

I was determined to help the bank understand the problems it had in its operations; to get them to walk in the customer’s shoes to see life from their perspective, a skill they clearly had not learnt; and to help them address its issues so that no future customer should be condemned to such an experience.

I asked the question:

‘Who is accountable for the customer experience here?’

The answer:

‘We are all accountable and responsible for the customer experience’.

Now I understood the problem.

For the reality is that if everyone is accountable and responsible no one is. Blame can too easily be shifted and transferred and avoided.

And in developing great customer experiences and customer journeys, it is a principle of our work that someone must be in charge. It doesn’t matter who it is but there must be a go to person in the business who is accountable and responsible. Businesses need a CXO or a Chief Experience Offer sitting in the C-Suite. The customer experience, just like the P&L and the balance sheet is too important a function to be left as everyone’s responsibility.

Now at this point the person in charge of marketing may well say that as the executive closest to the customer the CXO role should be incorporated within the CMO job description. And that is a very valid argument but in truth it doesn’t really matter who is accountable or whether a new role is created in the C-Suite but someone must be accountable. There must be a go-to person whenever the customer experience is broken who can muster the necessary resources and cross functional teams to work together to find a fix. Anything else is unacceptable.

And if this person can make the following component parts of the customer experience truly amazing for their business, they will have done a really brilliant job.

·         Channel experience: Do all the channels work together seamlessly and integrated? Or do the channels operate in silos with their own rules and procedures? Do the channels engage the senses and deliver an emotional experience when it matters? Does it promote advocacy and sharing?

·         Product experience: Does the product experience live up to expectations? Does it solve the problem? Does it do what it says on the tin? Does it make customers happy, productive and hopeful when they're using it, or does it make them frustrated, angry, agitated and depressed?

·         Buying experience: What is it like to go through the sales process and buy the product? Was it easy to figure out whether the product was the right fit? Was the pricing straight-forward? Was it easy to do business with us?

·         Service experience: What is it like to need help and support?  Do people dread having to call in and get help? Are we easy to deal with? Do our people show empathy and understanding and a genuine desire to help and take responsibility for resolution? Or do you feel like they just want to get rid of the enquiry as quickly as possible?

·          Exit Experience: What is it like to leave the company, return the product, or cancel the subscription and no longer be a customer?

And don’t forget this key enabler of a great customer experience for this will say a lot about your business.

·         Employee Experience: What's it like being recruited by the company? Working for the company? Being let go from the company? If you have a terrible employee experience, you will not attract the kinds of people that will make the customer experience amazing. It just doesn't work.

So the first step to designing and building an amazing customer experience is a simple one-make someone accountable for it.

What do you think? Any lessons from your experience on how you are going about improving the experience for your customers?

Prisoner 46664

I do brands.

In my job I spend a lot of my time trying to design and develop brands. I don’t do the creative work but try to help businesses develop the underlying definition of their 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. 

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.

Great brands really get their role 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.

And don’t chase and measure themselves against a long list of attributes, many of which are just the price of entry for everyone else in their marketplace.

But instead always work hard to stay on mission and always execute against their stance and not against their attributes. 

And measure they the market's understanding of their reason to be — who they are and why they do what they 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.

So in one word what do you want your brand stand for?

Light bulb moment

Does your business do market research? Does it find it helpful and useful?

David Ogilvy, the guru of Mad Men everywhere, once opined that ‘the trouble with market research is that consumers don't think how they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say’.

You may also have come across a phenomenon known as the Hawthorne Effect. This has absolutely nothing do with market research per se but does provide some insight into how people think and behave.

And note the key word here-‘people’. Too often in marketing  we use words like ‘customer’ or ‘consumer’ which hides the reality that we are serving people, with all their biases, prejudices and irrationalities.

In essence the Hawthorn Effect is derived from a series of psychological experiments from the 1920s at the Hawthorn Works, a light bulb factory, to determine if changes to the heating, lighting and other environmental factors made workers more or less productive. It found that workers' productivity seemed to improve when any changes were made and slumped when the study was concluded. This suggested that the productivity gain occurred because the workers knew they were being monitored and it was this factor which biased the results rather than the changes themselves.

And maybe this is why David O said what he said. Maybe all market research is influenced in the same way. Maybe people in a drive to be helpful provide answers and explanations to the market researchers that a) they think they want to hear and/or b) which are rational when in reality they act irrationally.

Having sat behind the mirror in numerous focus groups and listened to more research presentations than are strictly necessary, it is clear few research programmes show a real understanding of how people’s brains work.

Maybe we need fewer market researchers speaking with and listening to people, and more psychologists.

For as people we are far more intuitive, emotional and impulsive when we pass judgement and make decisions than we like to admit. Impulsivity is by far a more common human trait than calculation. We are Systems 1 people. And academic studies in cognitive psychology tell us that people take the ‘Systems 1’, automatic, route 90% of the time and then we often engage our ‘Systems 2’, considered, brain to post-rationalise our instinctive decision.

Traditional market research studies have a tendency to uncover our System 2 response. Not our System 1 response. And this is why market research findings can often be meaningless, useless and highly misleading unless we can find a way to disentangle these responses to get to the truth, if there is indeed a truth.

And why do people not engage their brains when making decisions? Why are we more instinctive than we will admit? Because if we relied on System 2 thinking all the time we would never make a decision.

The world is a complex place and because we are constantly bombarded with too much information and stimuli we find short cuts. And this why we do we what we do.

These short cuts and rule of thumb strategies shorten decision making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about what we should do next.

Instead we take the default option and do what we have always done or is the least troublesome thing to do. We do what flatters and massages our ego. We do what everyone else is doing. We do the first thing that comes into our head.

Research rarely uncovers that sort of thing. And yet as marketers we commission research project after project to convince ourselves we are meeting a customer need; or to show our bosses that we have listened to customers; or to protect our backsides. What a waste.

Instead of listening to what people say we should find ways to observe what they do and apply a knowledge and understanding of psychology to test and determine reasons why. Far more insightful.

Or alternatively find a way to explore consumer reaction just as they flip from System 1 to System 2 thinking, as they transition from the unconscious to the conscious.

So how much money do you waste on market research? Found out anything useful?

I'm a bad loser

Once again we have had a great summer of British sporting success-Andy Murray wins Wimbledon, the first Scottish British to win there while playing in long trousers; Justin Rose wins the US Open (golf); the British Lions, albeit with a lot of Welsh help, win the series against Australia; Chris Froome wins the Tour de France, the second Brit (well nearly!) in succession; and England have retained the Ashes. And there will no doubt be more success to come.

Following on from last year’s Olympics our sporting triumphs are beginning to spoil us. Just as well because we all hate losing. No matter how much the British are admired for their long track record of plucky failure, there is no doubt about it all of us are bad losers. Indeed you could say we hate losing more than we like winning.

We might say that we all hate a bad loser but the way our brain works means we are most definitely not a good loser.

Consider this simple experiment-half a class of students were given a mug and the other half a large bar of chocolate. The costs of each were the same and beforehand the students were as likely to choose one as the other. Yet when offered the opportunity to switch from a mug to the chocolate bar and vice versa, only one in ten switched.

There are plenty more experiments like this providing a large body of evidence that people, and that means you and me, really are loss averse and will put more effort in avoiding a loss than they will to realise a gain.

And this can be a source of great customer dissatisfaction too-people are more likely to get more grumpy and dissatisfied when they think something they are legitimately entitled to is taken away from them than they feel satisfied and pleased when they are given something. George Osborne knows a lot about this.

This means that brands have to think and take these feelings into account when thinking about and designing the customer experience and the customer journey.

Last week I was informed by a hotel loyalty membership programme that as I hadn’t used the service enough in the past 12 months, in other words I wasn’t making as much money for them as previously, that I would no longer be entitled to certain privileges and benefits. I was however assured that should I ‘restore my usage to the levels seen previously over the coming year my privileges would be restored’.

Remember I am a bad loser.

Immediately my opinion of this brand plummeted; I now wanted to use them less not more and move on; and I wanted to tell the world about how I was being treated.

A common mistake made by brands is that they think people behave and think rationally. In this instance they believed that I would think it sensible and rational that because I wasn’t using their services to the same extent as previously that I would accept that I wasn’t entitled to certain privileges and benefits. But that is not how I think. It is not how people think.

People also think and behave emotionally.

And that is why brands when thinking about the customer experience and the customer journey must think of it as far more than a rational process. It is an emotional journey too and this must be taken into account. It is therefore important that when designing the ideal customer experience brands must think about how the customer might be feeling and want to feel and must incorporate psychological thinking and learning from behavioural economics.

Perhaps if my hotel brand had considered these factors they would have done a far better job of explaining my changing status and in helping me come to terms with my loss.

Instead of just telling me that my privileges were being with withdrawn perhaps they might have allowed me to pay a fee to retain them; or let me know that they had changed their approach to benefits for someone like me; or that as I wasn’t using my privileges and benefits they would like my input on how they might better serve me going forward.

In other words don’t blame me for the loss; help me to come to terms with the loss; and help me to change the way I thought about the loss. That would be the emotional way to design the experience.

We all like a good loser. And we all hate to be seen as a bad one. But the reality is we are all bad losers. And given this we can and should design an experience that recognises this and which takes these feelings and emotions into account to demonstrate that we are not really losing.

Do you think about this when you design your customer experience?

Knickers in a twist

I am annoyed. Dismayed. And even embarrassed that my fellow marketing professionals either sanctioned such practise or failed to stop this.

And the cause of this ire?

A recent e-mail communication from a significant High St brand inviting me to join their special club.... for women's knickers.

Did it not occur to someone that I am a man? Did no one realise that I might not be all that interested in women's knickers? It is not as if I have ever bought women's knickers from which they could assess my propensity to buy more pairs.

Naturally I pointed this out to the brand only to be told that ' this was a blanket e-mail which they do regularly although we do understand where you are coming from'.

And there's the rub. This brand might do brilliant TV ads but they have much to learn about CRM and database marketing.

In days of yore, when I was a lad, to write to customers cost about 40p per pack. You therefore made damn sure that you were writing to the right customer about the right thing. Anything else was a waste of money

But in this day and age when it costs fractions of a penny to send e- mails there is no real cost in carpet bombing the database without a thought to relevance.

This is wrong and ought to be banned.

But of course there is ought a cost. There is a cost to the brand and to its reputation. There is a cost of losing customers through opt outs and unsubscribes.  And of course there is the cost of unrealised lost business as a consequence.

Database marketing is not difficult-all anyone has to do is to get the right message to the right customer at the right time. Simples.

And to determine this all that is required is the information that the customer tells you about him or herself, acquired data, mixed with the data and insight derived from their behaviour and from the behaviour of similar people. Even more simples.

And of course the wit to use this understanding to direct the most appropriate message to the most appropriate people.

My pants people must have observed, or at least should have observed, that I don't buy women's pants; that the majority of men don’t buy women's pants on a regular basis; and that I am a man.

Conclusion-don’t e-mail me, and all other men who don’t buy pants on a regular basis, about women's lingerie.

I am guessing that your in-box is filled on a daily basis with irrelevant offers. It might even be the case that because it’s cheap to do your business might even be doing blanket e-mails with little thought to relevance and frequency. And the impact on the customer.

Are unsubscribes monitored? Are open and CTRs checked? What is the trend? How do they compare against industry norms? These should be known and form a crucial aspect of the campaign KPIs and its evaluation. It’s not just about sales. What else is happening?

Blanket e-mails are pants. No matter the content or the category.  And with the application of insight and intelligence, it is easily possible to make your marketing smarter.

Blankets are best kept on the bed. They have no role in marketing.

Is the customer always right?

In customer service there are only two rules. Rule 1-the customer is always right. Rule 2-if the customer is ever wrong, re-read rule 1.

So what are we to make of the recent story of the Sainsbury’s checkout assistant who recently refused to scan a customer’s groceries because the customer would not stop talking on their mobile phone?

Is this a breach of a Rule 2?

I must admit to being really torn on this one.

But philosophically we need to ask if we get the service we deserve. And this is as true for customers as it is for the businesses that serve them.

And if we agree with this philosophical point of view how do we change the rules of the game?

I am a terrible customer always looking to find ways to improve the service I get. I work on the principle that if I accept poor service I am condemning the next customer to shoddy and inadequate service. So I have a duty to let businesses know when and if they are getting wrong and how it might be improved.

More of us as consumers ought to do this and be less British, stoical and phlegmatic about this.  In short we need to complain more.

But businesses also need to demonstrate they value excellent customer service and that they truly want to deliver a brilliant customer experience that wows and surprises their customers. Too often too many businesses see service as a cost to be delivered as cost effectively as possible. Instead see it as an investment and show how much they really care about service.

This really concerns me.

Businesses have a great tendency to say one thing when it comes to service but do something else. And people will watch more than they listen. Consistency of message is of the utmost importance.

And so if customers get the service they deserve, businesses also deliver the service they deserve.

But to earn a reputation for brilliant customer service there are some simple things businesses can learn to do that will help them wow their colleagues and their customers and show a real passion for delivering a consistently awesome customer experience.

·         Show that you really value customer service and that those who deal with customers are the real value add to the business. All businesses should only contain two types of staff-those who serve customers and those who serve those who serve the customer. So why do we have a Head Office? This highlights the hierarchy. Why not name this Customer Support Centre?

·         Demonstrate real leadership. Get senior management to spend at least one day a month dealing with customers on the front line. No excuses, no ifs, no buts. A powerful signal to all in the business that customers and those who deal with customers are important.

·         Learn to walk in the customers’ shoes. How often does your business think about the customer experience when it is re-engineering its processes and systems from the outside in? Too often this is done from the inside out. Rare is the business which seriously thinks about who its customers might be, what they want and how they might be feeling when they touch the business. Rarer still is the business that takes such insights into account when re-designing its processes. Time to start.

At the end of the day it is about having a passion for service excellence and if the business has this passion this will be shared by its people. Simples.

And where does this leave me on the issue of the Sainsbury’s checkout assistant and the phone-glued-to-the-ear customer? 

Still confused. But maybe if businesses showed they really valued customer service and those who deliver it, maybe the customer might learn to appreciate them too. It’s worth a try.