Dead stupid

Should anyone think that Cicero has turned over a new leaf and is now thinking differently after my previous tale of humility and compassion, be assured that this week normal service will be resumed. 

Today he will uncover and target yet another example of crass stupidity in his quest to improve customer service one business at a time.

It is a thankless task but a job that has to be done otherwise we condemn the next customer to appalling, unthinking, unintelligent and de-humanised customer service.

Long suffering readers will know that the most widely quoted causes of inaction by businesses and their people here usually involve health and safety or data protection or following due process. In other words more emphasis is given to satisfying the needs of the health and safety gauleiters, of the business prevention compliance unit, or of the boss, rather than doing the right thing for the customer and applying some common sense.

This recent example from Cicero’s immense back catalogue of customer service howlers will illustrate this nicely.

Imagine, if you will, a telephone call between Cicero and the customer service unit of a well- established and highly-known insurance company.

Insurance Company: Good morning, can I take your policy number, please

Cicero: would it not be better if you treated me as a person not a number and asked for my name first

 

Insurance Company: I appreciate what you are saying but my computer says I must ask for policy number first

Cicero: Why?

Insurance Company: It is company policy. I guess it is in case you are not who you are

Cicero: And how does asking for my policy number verify that?

At this point there is much to-ing and fro-ing between Cicero and Insurance Company in a failed attempt to argue the logic of this case.

We now cut to the crux of the debate.

Cicero: Now we have established my bona fides, I would like to claim on an insurance policy taken out by my grandmother.

Insurance Company: We need your grandmother’s permission before we can discuss this. Do you have this?

Cicero: No. She is dead. That is why I am claiming on the policy.

Insurance Company: We still need her permission. Is there no way you can get her written authorisation?

Cicero: Are you seriously saying that I need the written authorisation from a dead person before I can make a claim? No, I have just checked it’s not April 1^st.

Insurance Company: Yes, it is data protection.

Cicero: Perhaps you might be able to give me a few pointers as to how I can get written authority from someone who is dead and even if she were still alive it is very unlikely that she would be given she would now be 138 at next birthday.

Insurance Company: Yes I can see that but to conform to my procedures and with Data Protection I cannot proceed unless we have written authority.

You really couldn’t make it up, could you?

After a few more moments of such badinage with the irrestible logic of Cicero continuing to bang up against the immovable dumbness of the clerk, the conversation was taken over by one whose pay grade entitled him to a few more brain cells. This resolved the conversation to Cicero’s satisfaction with a promise to review processes, to send away the hapless clerk for re-education and a cheque to charity to compensate for Cicero’s inconvenience that he had to deal with such abject stupidity.

Maybe if the business and its people had been a bit more obsessed with the customer and less in thrall to its own processes, to its business prevention compliance police, to a culture of disempowerment and fear, such stupidity could be averted. 

A lesson for many businesses.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.

The woman on the Clapham omnibus

Greetings.

In case you were wondering, Cicero’s local Via remains dug up and unsutured. This is now getting silly. In the time since this Via was re-dug up Japanese Navvies would have re-built at least a couple of nuclear power stations. And given that yet again no Navvies, Japanese or otherwise, have been seen making an attempt to repair the Via, Cicero can only conclude that this job is being dragged out for as long as our taxes will permit. Hopefully, though doubtfully, the Apparatchik who negotiated this deal did so on a fixed price and not time basis. At least that way we have not given the Navvies a blank cheque. Really cannot understand why progress so snail like.

Cicero as you know is a man of the people and likes to share the everyday experiences of the Vulgate. While on a particularly jerky and bone jarring bus journey recently, with bodies being flung backwards and forwards and from side to side, the woman sitting next to Cicero turned to him and said ‘all bus drivers should travel as a passenger from time to time’.

And it’s not just bus drivers who need to take time out and look at the customer experience from the customer’s viewpoint. How many times do we really think about how customers consume and engage with our brand?

This is the point at which our brand becomes real for our customers and yet few marketing resources get devoted to this aspect of brand management. No doubt because ownership and accountability of the customer journey across many touchpoints is fragmented and scattered across the organisational hierarchy. And so Marketing Head Honchos prefer to stay out of this particular fray.

Somebody smarter than Cicero once pointed out that if everyone is responsible for customer service, no one is accountable. And so in Cicero’s book Marketing Head Honchos cannot duck this responsibility and accountability. They must roll up their sleeves and get dirt under their finger nails. Their brand needs them.

But when it comes to customer journeys which drive the customer experience, where does one start?

There are many customer journeys but most if not all can be mapped onto the following core generic processes:
• Pre-buying research
• Buy and on-boarding
• Post purchase service and maintenance
• Repeat buying
• Ending the relationship

Within each of these generic processes the customer will go through a series of journeys. Think of it like a London Tube Map with each core process represented by a start station and end station with a series of activities or stations along the way.

And at each stage of the customer journey, ask yourself these 7 questions:
• What do we want the customer to do now?
• What does the customer want to do?
• Is there any reason we can’t allow the customer to do this?
• What would make it easy for the customer to get through this stage?
• How can we explain this better to customer?
• What do we want customer to do next?
• Where is it painful for the customer?

Now in the ideal world we would have bucket loads of research to help us determine what the consumer wants from each stage of this process. You might be lucky and have this but more often than not, you won’t. But don’t despair. You are a consumer. You have common sense. Apply it and put yourself in the skin of the customer to determine how it could be improved. At end of day it is about ensuring you are easy to do business with. It’s simple.

It really is about time we saw our business from the customer’s viewpoint. The woman on the juddering and shuddering Clapham omnibus had it so right.

Is it only me.......but I don’t know you from Adam.

Last week I was wandering down the High St of one of our major cities, without a care in the world and for once totally minding my own business, and I was chugged. Not once, not twice but five times in the space of 20 minutes by representatives from three different charitable organisations.
Now for those of you unfamiliar with the term, chugging is when you are set upon by unnaturally friendly and hyper enthusiastic young people who take you hostage with their smiling bonhomie in manic conversation until you have handed over your bank details.

I find it galling and annoying that it is not possible to walk through our shopping thoroughfares these days without being set upon by assorted chuggers, Big Issue vendors and those with a slurred accent and wide staring eyes looking for 20p for a cup of coffee or help with their train fare though where you can get a cup of coffee or a train ticket in these inflationary times for 20p is beyond me. Believe me, our High Streets are rapidly becoming an assault course of outstretched hands to be negotiated.

My usual trick with Chuggers demanding charitable donations with menaces is to engage them in conversation about the aims and objectives of their cause and since most of them are students no doubt working on some kind of commission deal, like used car or double glazing salesmen, rather than being motivated by the cause or issue for which they are seeking to raise money, it is not too long before I have shown up their lack of knowledge about their cause and they decide to target some other hapless victim.
Like the junk mail that pours through our letter boxes or the spam mail offering to grow my body parts to unnaturally large proportions, this kind of approach to marketing and selling must work or they wouldn’t do it, though for the life of me I fail to understand how donation raising with menaces does provide a sustainable income stream but then there are people born every minute.

Now it might only be me but given that I don’t know my Chugger from Adam, or Eve, and given that these Chuggers believe that attacking me with an Eve works on my vanity and ego, I am more likely to get an Eve, why does anyone think that I am going to hand over my bank details to a complete stranger, even though she might look pretty.

Let me assure you that no matter how attractive, obsequiously friendly or enthusiastically manic, my Chugger might be, there is absolutely no way short of water boarding in the High Street, and there is no evidence that this has been tried yet, that my bank details will be prised away from me to support the provision of blind guide dogs to feed starving children in Somalia. I think that was the cause for which I was being chugged.

And finally Cicero will not now be around until September. He is off on a well deserved break and to stock up his reservoir of absurdities and knowledge. Be well and stay good.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.