Customer care? That offer is over!

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Wanted: CEOs from India

: Oh, wasn’t it all the rage? Customer care. Customer care seminars. Customer Care training. But, somehow it’s lost its glitter, it’s all a bit 20th century, 1990s. We have better, more modern, fish to fry. Anyway, it didn’t work, but what didn’t work, and what was it supposed to do anyway? Let me repeat the simple truth that I am sure you will find elsewhere in this book.

Finding and keeping customers is the only activity that generates revenue. every other activity involves you in cost.

Let us now have a look at the second word, CARE. What does that mean? Do you have savings? Do you take care of them? What does that mean? It means you put them in a place where they can not be nicked, and then you steadily try to add to them. Surely this must be the only definition of customer care. You lock your existing customers in with such levels of service that your competitors despair of ever stealing them away from you. Meanwhile, Sales, Marketing and, for that matter, everyone else, are quietly adding more customers, or that is the theory.

Let’s imagine that you are the owner of a chain of motorway services, and inexplicably you wake up one morning, and you decide you need marketing.

All the blue chip companies I ever work with tell me that they ‘have marketing’, but they always express it in the tone of voice that makes ‘having marketing’ sound like some kind of medical complaint, like piles or boils. Anyway, you wake up to find that without the correct ointment you have the dreaded affliction that is marketing.

People who offer marketing often have names like Gervaise or Tarquin, and they gambol and caper around their west London offices with sheer excitement at the prospect of ‘marketing’ your motorway restaurants.

‘What you need,’ pipes up Tarquin excitedly ‘what you neeeeeed is a promotion.’

‘Oh yes, a promotion!’ choruses Gervaise.

Tarquin continues. ‘What we’ll’ave is an autumn promotion, and the logo will be shaped like an autumn leaf to suggest to the customer that the prices are falling like autumn leaves.’

‘Yes,’ cries Gervaise, ‘and every home in the country will receive an autumn leaf shaped voucher, and as long as the customer purchases one full-priced adult meal, they will receive a further adult meal entirely free.’

This is called a B.O.G.O.F. by the way—Buy one, get one free! But what exactly are these marketing people trying to achieve? Why did you hire them, and what was it you wanted them to do? When will you know if they have done it? Obviously you must set them objectives. To measure those objectives it would be good to have benchmarks and key performance indicators. Oh yeah? Down that route lies ruin, as Government has so cheerfully proved with its health and education policies. How, I will hope to prove to you a little later, but for now let’s ask Tarquin and Gervaise what bang they are going to give us for our bucks.

They chorus in unison ‘Footfall! Increased footfall.’

To translate for those of us who don’t speak fluent marketing jargon, this means bums on seats, people coming through the door for the first time. What they don’t do is increase profit, or increase sales (they are giving the food away, for Heaven’s sake). No, they are simply increasing the number of people who give us a try. Is that what you wanted? So the answer is yes, you want lots more potential customers. The hard-faced salesmen of yore used to call them leads or prospects, and those we sold to or signed up would become conversions. The fewer that escaped, the better the conversion rate. A simple idea that has got lost in the mists of time and the obfuscation of new-think.

Consider this, have you ever eaten at a motorway service restaurant? Would you seriously want to go back? you would try to avoid eating there again, even if your life depended on it. Gervaise and Tarquin Marketing may have increased footfall, more customers pouring through the door finding out just how bad we are. our offering is crap and we are spending good money to help people find that out, spending half of our turnover to piss off the population twice as fast as we used to. Perhaps someone should have explained to the 27-stone kid, with the badge that reads ‘I’m Kevin, I’m here to help’, and a little red boiler suit so tight it is flossing his bottom, exactly what promises the marketing company are making to our customers, and what we are trying to do. It is no good spending a fortune shovelling customers through the door if Kevin is shovelling them straight back out of it again.

A jolly interlude

On visiting a major hotel, I noticed that the particularly vacant and preoccupied object behind the bar was wearing one of those badges. ‘I’m carol, and it’s everywhere I’ll give customer care.’ She was diligently examining something that she had fished out of her left ear, gently rolling it between thumb and forefinger, before looking at it more closely. Finally becoming aware of me looking at her, she returned a challenging, gorgon state. Trying to put her at her ease, I explained that I was simply taking a professional interest in her badge. ‘Oh this,’ she said, turning the badge towards her while still retaining a grip on her little treasure, ‘that offer’s finished! We bin taken over. That customer care thing was put on by the other lot, and they don’t own us no more.’

I used to get mobs of pitchfork-and blazing-brand-wielding marketing people beating a path to my castle gates by suggesting that the whole marketing thing basically sucks, but that may not be true. After all, you can even get a degree in it, by jiminee. Lets examine then what marketing does, and doesn’t do.

I suppose at its simplest our enterprise is driven by our customer’s inclination to buy the things that we offer. To make things that people want to buy, and to make them buy those things, we need to understand why people buy.

Everyone buys because they expect something.

It’s the customers’ expectation of a problem solved, a certain level of performance, travel experience, or flavour—the list of what we expect could go on for ever, but test this for yourself. Whether you intend to buy a book of matches or a jet plane, pause before handing over the money and think about what you expect to happen.

I am not the first person to notice this, and loopy management consultants wasted no time in complicating this simple idea into a difficult and mostly barmy theory—one which, I must admit, I subscribed to for a while. When doing customer care consultancy, it was felt necessary to be able to define the difference between good service and bad service. I would look piercingly at my victims and say ‘Do you ever give bad service?’

The penitent would nod sadly, the defiant would shake their heads violently, and the wearily undecided would shrug. Now the coupe de grass. ‘How do you know when you are giving bad service?’

No reply, just the odd shuffle or embarrassed cough broke the silence. Then in my oiliest of oily voices: ‘It is when we fall below our customers expectations. Good service exceeds customer expectations, bad service falls below customer expectations.’ A gasp of recognition of this truth followed by rapturous applause. Every guru was spouting this and soon mission statements started to include ‘to exceed our customers’ expectations’.

—Reprinted with permission from Wiley India

Book: Brand Vision: Writing On The Wall

Author: Geoff Burch