Destroying customer care by the weakest link

In late June I wrote about my trials and tribulations dealing with BT and its lessons for improving customer care.

Here is how the story concluded.

The story so far – my BT broadband connection suddenly dropped to the speed of an arthritic snail – the nightmare of communicating with BT’s technical help desk was something that should be outlawed under the UN’s charter on torture – lots of lessons on how not to provide “customer care”.

New week, new dawn.

I will skip out all of the detail and get straight to the point. I had two visits from BT staff, both of whom would get 5 star marks as brand ambassadors. They were technically good, understood my problem and went the extra mile to sort out the problem. Who could ask for more? Result is I now have a faster broadband connection than before the troubles started.

The moral of this saga is this. A company can only maintain its brand reputation by ensuring the whole of its customer facing service is excellent. Most parts of BT’s customer care infrastructure is first rate but its reputation risks being destroyed by a manifestly weak, but significantly large, part of its support service.

I really hope somebody from BT reads this posting, for the sake of its two, and no doubt thousands of other, top class employees who sorted out my problem. Dick Stroud

The media touchpoints of Brits

The IPA (Institute of Parishioners in Advertising) has published its TouchPoints survey that describes in a week in the life of a “representative sample" of the GB adult population during late 2007/2008.

It’s worth a quick look, although it doesn’t contain any great insights. What did strike me was the way the reporting of the results was polarised by age, rather than income, education, geography, social class or any other metric.

Because it is so easy to search an Adobe document I couldn’t resist seeing the number of references to the two age groups that are used to distinguish ‘young’ and ‘old’ - the 65+ get 13 references the youngesters nearly three times as many (37). I know it is not a competition but it does say something about the advertising industry's mindset.

I think the report says more about the way the advertising industry perceives the market than it does about the market itself. Dick Stroud

Moody (Angry?) Britain

A recently posted an item about research conducted by McCann Erickson’s Pulse division that gave a fascinating insight into how us Brits feel about life. I also did my usual rant about wishing companies would put their research on the Web.

A couple of days back I get an e-mail from one of the report’s authors giving me a link to a site that has just been launched to support the research. It's a good site and has some interesting and disturbing content - do go and have a look.

I was fascinated to understand what the research told us about the 50-plus. Back like flash I get this response.

The quantitative survey revealed some interesting results amongst the older age groups. Those aged 55+ were most likely to describe the current mood of Britain as ‘apathetic’ and ‘angry’ (seemingly contradictory?).

Their mood wasn’t particularly more pessimistic than the rest of the nation but we did find the nation as pretty discontent as a whole (in both the quantitative research and focus groups). Key issues making the over 55s angry were immigration/race relations and the war in Iraq.

Anger regarding the cost of living was in line with the UK average (actually lower than average amongst over 65s), whilst house prices were, unsurprisingly, less of an issue than amongst younger generations.

The area where the older generation stands out, however, is the level of ire directed at Gordon Brown : 47% of over 65s said that Gordon Brown is making them angry about Britain, compared to just 31% of the total population.

Since older people have a much higher propensity to vote this is bad, bad news for Gordo.

This will only mean something to Brits, but the section of the site that looks at the regional differences about what would make Britain a better place are fascinating. I could write a commentary about each of these.

Many thanks to Dean at McCann Erickson for publishing the research and his subsequent insights about the 50-plus. Dick Stroud

China picks up bad habits from Western companies

A fact – in the next decade China will have one of the world’s the fastest ageing populations. An observation – the average age of China’s Communist Party’s top honchos is at least 75 years old.

With these two points in mind, I had to laugh when I read this snippet from the China Daily in an article about the recruitment of senior managers for its elite State enterprises.

Applicants must have at least a bachelor's degree and candidates applying for general manager roles must be under 50, the SASAC said. Only the "exceptionally competent" over-50s will be considered for these positions but even they must be under 53.

Well at least the Chinese are upfront about "employment death" at 50-plus unlike their Western counterparts. Dick Stroud

Toyota is fretting about becoming Honda

In the UK, Honda has the reputation for being an oldies car – guess what car I drive!

It sounds like Toyota is worried that it might be heading in the same direction, according to this article in Newsweek that suggests the carmaker is desperately seeking Gen-Xers. Having just read the horrendous financial results from US car manufacturers I would have thought they would be happy with anybody with a checkbook and a positive account balance!

Toyota has retired Sly and the Family Stone from its ads for the Camry and replaced them with a modified version of Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy" - nothing like thinking outside the box! The company has also established a youth-marketing staff made up entirely of people in the prized 24-to-35 age group. In the UK these would be considered geriatric marketers. All of this is intended to lower the average age of Toyota buyers by a decade, to 35.

The article suggests that Levi and Nike are also struggling to attract a younger audience and shake off an outdated image because:” It's a hard sell for boomer brands to persuade today's kids to drive the cars and walk in the same shoes that Mom and Dad did.”- "The days of boomers setting pop-culture trends are over," says the editor of Trends Journal. "Boomers are over the hill." Madison Avenue is now training its sights on the boomers' babies.

Maybe I have been missing something but this is re-writing of history. The reality is that advertising land has been obsessed with the Boomer’s kids and grandchildren for ages – to the exclusion of their parents. Still it made a good story. Dick Stroud