Time to stop doing dumb things!

For this week, and for one week only, Cicero is not going to speak but to rant. Forgive me but I need to get something serious off my chest.

But I want to rant in a constructive way as is Cicero’s wont. My rant is designed to make a point to those of us who want our businesses to succeed. And I am also hoping that the company which is the subject of my ire and splenetic rage may, if I am lucky, hear my angst and fury through their blog monitoring and alert services and address the problem so that some other sucker does not experience what I experienced.

I am so raging with customer dissatisfaction and splenetic rage that I am going to break the habit of a lifetime and name the subject of my ire. It is Abbey. And I want them to know that I will no longer be acquiring the Abbey habit.

To start with did want to say ole and si, si to their blandishments. What transpired was a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions that it inspired a play, ‘A Comedy of Errors’.

I will spare you all the details of my attempts to become an Abbey customer but one small episode should suffice to illustrate Abbey’s poor thinking and low levels of customer centricity.

According to my Iberian amigos I had not supplied with them with a crucial piece of information needed to open an account. This only occurred to them 4 weeks into the account opening process and after 4 weeks of my subtle blend of cajoling and pleading and chasing. Now in this day and age, and knowing how keen I was to help shore up Abbey’s balance sheet with my liquid funds, you would have thought they might try to get in touch with me soonest. We now have the technology to facilitate this.

But no.

They sent me a letter. And not just any letter but one sent to me by a class of mail which meant that it took 9 days to get to me. Hardly an organisation keen to help me as expeditiously as possible, keen to help me get up and running, keen to make it easy as possible for me to do business with them. And to cap it all the form they needed to send me was not even enclosed.

This was the last straw for me and I told them where they could put their account. And by a delicious irony the letter confirming that my account was now closed and the return of the cheque I sent them to open the account, was with me the next day. A business clearly more proficient at closing accounts than it is at opening them. Brilliant. Don’t you agree?

So what lessons can we draw from this.

Well there is the obvious lesson that if you want to open an account, don’t go to Abbey. But for me the key lesson for us all is to ensure that we are in same business as our customer. For me, as for you, opening a bank account is a means to an end. We open bank accounts to help us live our lives. For Abbey and its people thought they were in the business of processing application forms. This was an end in itself and procedures and processes must be followed at all costs even when these do not dovetail to deliver what the customer wants. Writing a customer service strategy is easy-do it quicker, do it more accurately and do it cheaper. QED.

Abbey’s people failed to look at their jobs from the customer’s point of view. They were not walking in the customer’s footsteps but expected the customer to follow in theirs. For any business this is the wrong way round. I hope Abbey has now learnt its lesson from Cicero. And for a fee, Cicero would be more than happy to help get their account opening processes as sharp and as crisp as their account closing processes. They do close accounts brilliantly..

I read recently that today’s customer service and satisfaction theories are urging businesses to forget trying to delight or even satisfy customers but instead are telling them to focus all their efforts on fixing things that put customers backs up or which even drive them away. In other words customer satisfaction is easy….just stop doing dumb things to customers.

Are you listening, Abbey?

Rant over. Is it just me?

This week I am going to spare the eco -and environ-mentalists and even the trolley dolly brigade, my questioning scepticism and ask if anyone can tell me what exactly is ‘a traffic investigation’?

I only ask because after the recent Bank Holiday and what seemed like carnage on the roads, there would be appear to be a growing trend for roads to be closed for hours and even days for at least one county length either side of the site of the accident for ‘accident investigation’.. What are they investigating that takes so long? What happens to the results of these investigations? Does anyone care about the log jam of traffic caused by these investigations? I get the impression that no one seems to be in a great hurry to conclude these investigations and to get the roads back to normal.

It occurs to me that in olden days the ambulance would turn up to cart away the injured; the fire brigade to douse the petrol with foam; and the police to breathalyse and to take statements. And all this would be done on the hard shoulder while traffic whizzed by. Roads would only be closed to sweep up debris and for as short a time as possible. But now we have these Traffic Officers in cars that look like police cars but aren’t really, and roads get closed for an age while investigations take place real time. I wonder if this is a coincidence. Or is this an example of Cicero’s’ Law which states that work expands to occupy the amount of people there are involved?

If anyone can help enlighten me please do let me know.

As always have a great week.

Sit felix. Et sit fortunatus.