The Challenge

Rambles and Riff Raff about all this and that

Making companies personal - the unknown

Published by Esteban Glas on April 25th, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Business, Marketing

Once again Mark was a source of inspiration for this and my previous post on this subject. About a month ago, he had a post with the title: Corporations are people too.

Although in his post Mark states:

As individuals, we tend to see these large organizations as a collective entity. We expect that all interactions we have with various staff members are documented in a system that all others have access to, and that if they really wanted to, whomever we speak with could either resolve our trouble or surely must know who can.

This is right, but I’ll go a little bit deeper and in the opposite direction.

As individuals, we see large organization’s employees as acting accordingly with the general policies of the companies they belong to. If you call a help desk (I never get tired of this example!) and the individual that handles your call lacks the abilities and tools to solve your issue you’ll most likely say “XYZ company sucks big time!! I called them and they couldn’t give me the solution I was after”.

In other words, and expressed without examples: one on one interactions between corporation members and outsiders represent the visible face of a company towards the outside world.

Everything is marketing, everything is commerce, everything is conversation. This is becoming a mantra. I’m not quite sure a lot of people in customer interaction positions realize the power that is given to them. In a world where anyone can post their unhappiness for everybody else to see, customers have the power (or as Uwe said: “consumers decided to become customers again”).
Many of such positions are regarded by far too many corporations as a “unavoidable annoyance”, treating their employees (and their processes) as such. This sort of narrow minded view does not contemplate the reach such approaches have, and they only find out the harm this causes after it is far too late: when the public image has been affected by it.

For instance, many companies have moved call centers overseas to cut costs, yet how can the frustration many users experience (and how they talk about it) be measured? Once again it can be measured -somehow- after it is too late, when sales start to decline and public perception takes a deep dive. (pointless disclosure: I have nothing against moving things from one place to the other, as long as the service levels are sustained, regrettably this is hardly ever the case).

Companies are no longer large monolithic entities, beyond all good or evil, which can stump the users needs at will, they have become more fragile, they have to listen harder, they have to react faster and more efficiently. Customers will settle with no less than the best, and they shouldn’t have to do otherwise.

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My personal negative experience happened with my Mobile phone company. After it was bought by a larger, Spanish multinational conglomerate the user experience has been… (finding polite words to express myself) less than satisfactory. As a matter of fact out the three or four times I’ve called in the past two years not once have they provided the solutions I needed. (There are many reasons why I stick with probably the worst communications conglomerate in the history of mankind… but the frustration is growing larger, in the sense that from being my ISP, fixed phone, long distance, and cell phone provider now I only keep the cell phone service… and I’m afraid I’m not going to keep that for too long).

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