I hate . . . from The Moaning Cow

. . . call centres

I’ve worked in marketing for twenty years. I’ve even read marketing books and written marketing articles, spoken at conferences and so on. It’s not really very intellectual, it’s not even that creative. It’s all about common sense, which is odd because the trouble with common sense, is it’s not that common. To save you the time and effort of studying this topic in detail, I will reveal the secret that each and every marketing guru will tell you, though generally they differ on how many words it takes to get to the point: Marketing is about putting the customer first, in every way.
That’s it – it’s simple. It’s not just about brand awareness or market share. It’s about putting the customer at the centre of every single decision you make. Work out how the customer comes into contact with you, what they want, how they want it, when they want it and even how they want to pay – then you organise your whole company around these needs and wants, backwards from that point. Really smart Chief Executives intuitively know this. They imbue the ethos in their receptionists, cleaners, sales staff and managers. It runs through the service you receive, the way you’re spoken to, the quality of the end product and the handling of complaints.
There are too few organisations that really understand this at the highest level, and too many examples of getting it wrong. Take the late lamented British motorbike industry. They kept their heads down, and worked out the best way of designing and producing motorbikes, using the equipment, skills and technology they had in the factory at the time. The only problem was, they forgot to look up and ask the British public what they wanted. Unfortunately for them Kawasaki had – ironic how British kamikaze tactics failed to beat a Japanese company in the war for sales.

Some restaurants produce orgasmic food. They employ the best chefs, they spend thousands on doing the place up, pay celebrities to eat there and spend a fortune on the laundry bill. But eating finely shaved sun-dried roe of grey mullet with raw fennel and extra, extra virgin olive oil is just not enough. All the money goes on the glitz and the service is an after thought. Restaurants don’t seem to work out what a customer wants the minute they walk through the door. You phone seven times until someone answers to take your booking for next Thursday. When you arrive you wait 15 minutes before being asked what you would like to drink. You can’t have a starter from one menu and a main course from another. There’s no toilet roll in the Ladies and your table is beautiful but you can’t lean on it or it’ll fall over. And obviously when you ask what the soup of the day is, the waitress doesn’t know – did she think you wouldn’t ask?

But call centres, not restaurants, are the ones that take the amoretti biscuit. I hate them with a vengeance. They go against everything I've ever been taught about putting the customer first. The whole set up is for their convenience not ours. Who on earth dreamed up the concept of talking to an automated robot voice, where you have to stop listening to look at your phone to find the ‘star’ button, and when you get it back to your earhole you missed the last instruction?

Who thought it would be a laugh to give you six choices, as if it’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Don’t they know that you have to get to the end of the six questions before you can work out which one is the right number for you, and then when you do, you’ve forgotten whether it was number 2 or number 3? When you finally plump for a number without resorting to asking the audience, you get another four choices, and finally you speak to an actual person called Wayne or Dipti, neither of whom can get your details up in front of them because the computers are down. But the best marketing tactic to assure us we’re valued customers was initiated by the financial services industry. When you’ve been listening to three minutes of Vivaldi repeated twenty times, it’s a reassuring touch to be told intermittently “your call is very important to us”. That’s bankers for you.