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?

Hanging on the telephone

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

Brilliant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O what a lovely war!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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