Archive for the ‘CRM’ Category

The Full English that never was…

Posted: 09/02/2012 in Business, Communication, CRM, Engagement
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The following tale is a story about customer service.  Or more pertinently, the importance of listening to your customer.  The tale itself is not extraordinary. What makes is stand out for me, and why I am moved to blog about it is the final result.  The conclusion to the tale is pure genius.  However, the genius is provided not by the company concerned, but by my fellow breakfasting companion.  Read it.  I think you will agree.

The scene

Every 6 months or so I meet with an old friend who I first got to know whilst working together nearly 20 years ago (scary thought that!) His name is Peter Marin. We always meet for breakfast and we alternate between the cheap and cheerful corner cafe outside of Marylebone station and the Landmark hotel.  The cafe experience costs just shy of £10 for two, all in.  The Landmark, by contrast, a wallet popping £58 for 2.  However, it’s a nice treat.

When we met on Tuesday it was a Landmark day and after the usual pleasantries, the conversation turned to a poor experience Peter had recently had at he hands of his local Costa Coffee. In short, we agreed, that listening is a dying art in the context of customer service.  Little did we know that our breakfast at this rather fine hostilery would turn out to be such a classic example of what we had been talking about.  In short, we made our breakfast order and what transpired over the next 30 minutes was nothing short of comedy. My only regret was that I didn’t take photographic evidence of this farce as it would have made fantastic twitter fodder.

At this point, I shall let Peter take up the story.  After leaving the hotel and going our separate ways, Peter sent and email to the hotel, outlining our ordeal. Here is the email:

To: webfeedback@thelandmark.co.uk

Subject: I had breakfast in Fawlty Towers today.

Luckily it was with a very good friend of mine, whom I have known for years and who has a splendid sense of humour.

Of course I do not mean the real Fawlty Towers as that was pure fiction, though John Cleese did base each story on a real experience. I refer, of course to your hotel, The Landmark.

Now to put this into perspective, I have broken my fast at everywhere from a roadside food vendor in Bombay through to the George V in Paris so I am neither snobby nor untutored in the realms of a jolly expensive breakfast.

Today I wanted a cheese, ham and onion omelette with two sausages. Not difficult but the staff member who took my order did look at me as if I had ordered a new born baby on toast!

Gareth, being a traditionalist, wanted nothing more difficult than a “full English” with two poached eggs, with a latte to wash it all down.

I got my order, all present and correct, he got three poached eggs perched on top of miniature muffins. When he pointed out the error, another baby on toast look was offered along with the solution, we’ll bring the rest shortly!

On the basis that I had mine, and being very agreeable, Gareth fell hook line and sinker for the old “the rest will be here shortly ploy”.

What actually happened was that about five minutes later (roughly the time it takes for poached eggs to go cold), two sausages appeared.

Five minutes after the sausages, two slices of cold ham, and a slice of cold beef appeared.

A further ten minutes later, four rashers of bacon appeared, and when we tried to refuse these on the basis that it’s tough to eat bacon with just the spoon they’d left us with, the staff member pleaded with us to keep it saying “you might want it later”.

The purpose of this email is NOT to have the staff member disciplined, maybe a bit better trained, nor to elicit a refund of any sort but to point out that we have been to your hotel for breakfast of many occasions and it has never been like this. I detest shoddy service anywhere anytime and I have to say this went beyond shoddy, past really very bad indeed and straight into farcical.

In these tough economic times, you really ought to do better and if you want to find out how, nip next door to the cafe on the corner, there for less than ten quid for two, you’ll get a brilliant breakfast with superb service.

Peter

A little over 24 hours later, Peter received the following response.  Note the interesting way ‘James’ addresses Peter as Mr Peter Martin.  This can be explained by the fact that the email was actually sent by a lady by the name of Agnieszka Lorek, so it appears that either James didn’t even scribe the following missive or at best, he dictated it.  Given the cost of this little gathering, I would have expected something a little more, shall we say, personal?:

Dear Mr Peter Martin,

Your email has been passed on to me in the capacity of Winter Garden Restaurant Manager.

I am saddened to hear of the service that you and your colleague received this morning as this is certainly not the level we continually strive for here at The Landmark London and for this I apologise sincerely.

You were in deed served by one of our trainees who has only recently started with us however this is simply no excuse. After speaking with the trainee this afternoon about the incident, it is clear there was a misunderstanding coupled with poor listening skills on our side was to blame for the scenario.

Further training has already taken place to ensure mistakes like this do not re-occur.

Thank you for taking the time to write and give me your feedback as it is through feedback such as yours we are able to improve.

In order to restore your faith in The Landmark London and indeed the Winter Garden I would like to invite you for a complimentary breakfast for two in the future.

Please contact me personally in order to do so and I will arrange a table for you.

Once again I apologise for your recent experience and I look forward to seeing you in the future.

Kind regards,

James Brown

Restaurant Manager – The Winter Garden

Here we go – the old blame the trainee trick.  Notwithstanding that, and once you get past the rather odd grammar, my initial thought was “Result! Job done.”.  So I then scrolled up to see Peters response, fully expecting it to be a list of dates for the two of us to return and claim our complimentary nosh.  Which is when I read this:

Thank you so much for your reply.

I’d prefer it it you would offer the complimentary breakfast to the trainee who served us, as often, seeing service from the perspective of the recipient is the best way to learn.

Thanks again and we will now be sure to be back and enjoy breakfast once more.

Peter

Genius. Ace in the hole. Trumped. What a corking response.  Perhaps every member of the waiting staff should have a complimentary breakfast as part of their induction and ongoing development. As Peter correctly identifies here, seeing service from the customer perspective is the best way to learn.  Seems a shame that so many businesses fail to do appreciate and demonstrate this.

SiftGroups membership community event…

Posted: 30/01/2012 in Communication, Community, CRM, Engagement, sentiment, Social Media, Technology, Twitter
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One of my highlights just before the Christmas break was to attend the SiftGroups Membership Community Huddle, along with representatives from my client the CIPD.  It was a short half day get together for participants in their recent survey amongst membership communities which resulted in an excellent report benchmarking online communities for professional membership bodies.  Despite it’s focus on membership bodes, the report has some excellent content and insights that are relevant to those in other commercial sectors and I would definitely recommend downloading and reading a copy if you are in anyway interested or involved in online communities.  The session was also very good with short bursts of insight from the report followed by frequent break-out groups to discuss the implications and share experiences.  Hats off to Sift and a big thank you from me for the invite and for letting me reproduce some of the highlights from the report and seminar here.

My thoughts and observations are below and some of the key findings from the report are also outlined further down the page.

Justification – Probably the first thing that struck me from the feedback from the community managers themselves is the work they were having to do internally, especially with senior management, to prove the value of having and investing in a ‘community’.  As someone who is working with a membership organisations on putting community at the hear of member engagement, I fully appreciate why but feel that this just shouldn’t be the case.  In a previous post I commented that if membership bodies were being created today, they would be communities with a purpose.  In other words, ‘community’ and the principles thereof would be central to what they do, no question.

Plateauing activity – Many are seeing a plateauing of membership or activity.  There was a feeling that this might be due to the age of the community and that over a longer period – say 2 to 3 years – it becomes more difficult to sustain. However I’m not so sure about this.  Unless you are in a shrinking overall market – your ‘community’ isn’t plateauing or shrinking.  When you consider that many of these communities were started before the thrust of social media it’s perhaps more likely that the activity or ‘conversation is taking place elsewhere.

Social Integration – One of the most telling charts from the report is this one in my opinion.  The problems many membership bodies face in terms of proving ROI and the benefits of community are not surprising when you look at this chart. The overall lack of integration with the social channels mentioned below is a big missed opportunity and indeed, I would argue that communities absolutely have to have tight social integration in order to see the community activity bear wider fruit.  Many of these organisations provide events and other membership benefits which would not only benefit from the marketing ‘amplification’ that tighter  integration with social channels provide, but could also be shaped and scoped better with input from community members.

Conversation vs broadcast – It appears that the emphasis of community and social interaction was still mainly around broadcasting/messaging rather than relationship building.  The chart below shows the level of activity in the community by each function – note the positioning of customer and member services.

KPI’s - My observation was also that the KPI’s in use for the communities are very transactional in nature and have a heritage in web 1.0 – visits, page impressions, time on site etc. I was surprised also to see that of the KPI’s the respondents would like to use, none mentioned sentiment or influence based measurements.  It would seem that as yet, many vendors are not offering these kind of measures or insights within their analytics which needs to change.

Functionality – This was perhaps one of the most striking charts in the report although one could argue that if your community is not at the heart of your strategy and you are failing to support/justify or engage with it, you will fail to see the benefit of any of the core functionality.  One point to note: whilst blogs are in there, most of the organisations I spoke to at the event have what I call a ‘managed’ blog, in that blogging is done by a ‘select few’ of chosen contributors.  I don’t recall any that provided an open platform for members to create their own blog for open readership.  This is another missed opportunity for engagement.  Not only can the most interesting and inspirational blog posts come from the most unlikely of sources (Indeed, some ‘experts’ produce awful posts!) but the comment stream that results creates valuable and sharable content itself – sometimes way better than the original post.

Conclusions
  • Community activity is actually increasing, just not on your site!
  • The growth of the social channels (which are really just hitting mainstream) has huge implications for the technology vendors.  The community is no longer “in the community” (Probably never was) and as such, future development needs to look at how to be more like the ‘glue’ that binds together all the ‘other’ places we are having our conversations and being active, including offline.
  • We need to ditch the notion of ‘our site’ and driving people back to our website.  I listen to marketers talk about social media and’ engaging their audience’ which is good. But then they often fall into the trap of making the goal to use social to ‘drive people back to our site’. Wrong – in the future, you are going to have to be where they are, on there terms.
  • Those organisations – not just membership bodies – that have a compelling community and social engagement opportunity but are failing to exploit it are looking a marketing gift horse in the mouth.  As mentioned in a previous post, the power of “conversational SEO” could not only save them significant amounts of marketing budget, it can also drive up revenues in a much more simple and practical way than ‘content manipulation’ could ever do.
Other Key highlights

There are many more excellent observations and insights from the report, but the key ones that stood out for me are:

  • 55% of our respondents have no budget set aside to support community management internally and enhance the technical platform
  • 85% do not see the community contributing any financial benefit and 89% have no way of measuring contribution to ROI even if they were asked. Although 53% recognised significant benefits, they could not, and are not required to, link to the organisation’s ROI
  • 44% of respondents did not recruit advocates and seed content, 22% did no pre launch activity at all, 73% did no pre launch marketing promotion and 93% did not have a launch event
  • Surprisingly, of the tools provided to the community, only the discussion forum was seen by 25% of the respondents as very useful; groups being the next highest at 18%. Of those tools that respondents would like to have, 46% want mobile apps and 36% a Q&A forum
  • Although most are using twitter, LinkedIn (Groups) and Facebook, few integrate these activities with the online community
  • Nearly 37% of respondents have not integrated their community with the main site, which limits the opportunities to generate influence and support Return
  • Only 15% make their community space open to the public
  • Of 41% of organisations with an onsite community only 8% are equally proactive in social media spaces
  • 48% consider their community activities have plateaued, are decreasing or in one case have ceased to exist
  • 35% think the community influences strategy, 33% influences content strategy and 20% influences lobbying
  • 43% do not report community activity to anyone internally at all, and in 19% of cases, reporting is only to senior management

The next big thing…

Posted: 23/01/2012 in Business, CRM, Employer Brand, Engagement, Job Boards, sentiment, Technology
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Working with startups has made me reflect a lot on the similarities between now and the former dot com boom period of the late 90′s.  In doing so I’m driven to speculate what the next big thing is and when the next significant shift will happen.  Lets look at the timeline.  Check out my crappographic™  below:

1995 – 2000 – So the internet made it out of the university/geekdom and into the wider world of work around the mid 90′s.  (I make no apologies for date generalisations so smarty pants date pedants look away now!).  Even though companies like ebay were already up and running they, and the other companies that became household names, didn’t really get on the radar until the late 90′s/early 00′s when the dot com bubble really grew, some 5 years later.

2000 – 2005 – In this period, (the mini economic dip aside) we moved into a period of consolidation where all the ‘me too’ products and those with unsustainable business models melted away.  In fact, the hyperventilating around the technology subsided and we all got on with business as usual, but supercharged by the internet.  As we reached the end of this period, another wave of new plays were emerging – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter to name a few.

2005 – 2010 ish – Here again, the aforementioned ‘social’ plays took 5+ years to reach market maturity to the point of being embedded in our general awareness/usage. Despite the economic downturn, many of these offerings are growing rapidly and drawing huge valuations.  We have seen a general ‘social’ boom, with the start up scene as hot as ever and many many me too products or micro variants on a theme.

2010 ish – 2015 – Despite this social boom, consolidation and hype tail off is inevitable.  We shall see key players grow to take market share, many me too’s fizzle out and a general reduction in the dialogue around the tech.  We will, again, get back to business as usual, only this time  supercharged by the social layer.

So what is to come in the next 5 to 10 years as the tech settles down and social becomes woven into the fabric of everyday lives?   Despite it feeling like a very social web right now, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet in my view.  The outcomes of the social web in terms of product innovation, enterprise adoption, creative development, hardware innovation, bandwidth increasing etc are all still to come.  Just like the period following the ‘bedding down’ of the internet.  See ‘Internet Maturity’ and ‘Social Maturity’ on the crappographic™.

When I look back at my crappographic™, it occurs to me that in terms of identifying the next best thing, it would seem logical to keep a keen eye out around 2014 ish, for a crop of new businesses, a new form of start up which again, won’t reach maturity until 5 or so years after that c 2018 – 2020.

And what will they be? Maybe i’ll know it when I see it. Maybe it will pass me by. Who knows. Answers on a postcard please. For what its worth though, here’s a couple of thought:

Big Data – Currently a hot topic, big data is big! Its also expensive to access and largely in the domain of the corporate classes. But I think that will change.  There’s an old saying about luxury goods that “everything filters down to the working classes”, and the same principle can be applied to a number of things including advancements in technology. Look at CRM. Once a purely enterprise domain, with a fitting number of zero’s attached if you wanted to be granted access.  Now, CRM is available to Bob and his corner shop, for $9.99 a month or even free in some cases. And better still, it comes with ‘integration’ with Bob’s other tools right out of the box! All nice and seamless without a consultant in sight! Big data, and the sentiment that it carries, has huge potential to change the way we currently do things.

If some hedge funds are already abandoning their traditional forms of ‘research’ on which they base their investment decisions, in favour of twitter sentiment, its not hard to imagine that this trend could spread. As I mentioned in a previous post, twitter sentiment is like having the worlds biggest focus group at your finger tips, only better. Think what implications hat has for the market research industry. I suspect that sentiment driven ‘big’ data will filter down to the consumer sometime soon.  Its not hard to imagine a consumer moving away from ‘comparison’ type websites in favour of using ‘sentiment based apps’ instead, to inform themselves on what to buy, where to go, what to do etc. Big data access for the consumer gives us the opporunitity to not just find the cheapest car insurance for example, but the BEST car insurance deal, taking into account every aspect including cost, terms, payout history, customer service and the rich ‘conversation’ that goes on our there on platforms like chatter and user/customer communities. Pretty powerful stuff when you think about it.

Closer to home in HR and resourcing, I think the power of big data and sentiment analysis has huge implications for organisations. The ‘conversation’ about an organisation is already being tapped into from a customer perspective, but internally it is being ignored. Capturing and pulling together this sentiment can create a powerful  picture about a business – inside and out – that can have a significant impact on both the brand and the employer value proposition.  Given that employees are having these conversations on platforms and technology that the organisation doesn’t own or control, its only a matter of time before this is harnessed.

Mobile – Being an early adopter of most things, I thought I was abreast of all things mobile.  That was until I was lucky enough to be invited to the Freshthinking event run by Jobsite UK  in october last year.  The two speakers were Tomi Ahonen and Tony Fish. I was particularly blown away by Tomi’s grasp of the global mobile scene and some of the data he was sharing was staggering – see Tomi’s presentation here and Tony’s here.  It made me realise that a lot of smart things are happening in other continents in terms of mobile which have yet to hit these shores in any meaningful way.  Tomi is careful to classify mobile separately from smartphones but to me, it’s all converging. We are moving more and more into a ‘mobile economy’ – away from the fixed place of work or place to purchase.  Devices are now beginning to deliver, on a mass consumer scale, what has only been dreamed of before. Big thanks to @felixwetzel and @mervyndinnen at @jobsite for the invite.  If you are lucky enough to get a similar invite for a future freshthinkers event, then consider yourself extremely lucky!

Media - For the first time in 10 years my digital music collection is sorted. According to tuneup, its 97% clean including all album art, dates, song title and artist names etc.  Even better, all my old crappy low bit rate files have been replaced by high quality, rights free files. All this was made possible by iTunes match which cost me the princely sum of £20.  It was easy, painless and a once and done deal.  Now I have seamless access to all my music, on any of my devices. With high quality video and images becoming more accessible, editable and manageable I think there is more to come in this area.  Exactly what I don’t know, but some form of seamless, cross media collaboration, creation, access and management seems likely to me.  Also, the self publishing dynamic that continues to grow is another area.  Despite recent moves from Apple with iBooks Author, self publishing is still a pretty clumsy and inaccessible activity but something that has huge potential. As a final note on this, I was out with friends yesterday and their 13 year old daughter informed me that facebook was ‘yesterday’! When I asked her how she connects and shares media with friends as a lot of people do on facebook, she said “we just share it through BBM” (Blackberry Messenger).

Food for thought.  Whatsay you readers?! What should we be looking out for in 2014?

It’s all about the conversation…

Posted: 12/01/2012 in Communication, Community, CRM, Employer Brand, Engagement, sentiment, Social Media, Startups, Technology, Twitter
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Yesterday I came across a post entitled “5 things about Social Media you need to stop saying in 2012.” via a tweet by @socialhonesty by a guy called Edward Bass  An interesting post and I don’t have a big issue with some of his points (Ed would love to see email usurped by social comms so he must be one of the good guys!) But I’m sorry Ed, gotta take issue with these first two - that we should stop saying “it’s all about the conversation” and “It’s not about the technology”.

It’s all about the conversation.

Of course it is!  It’s just that a lot of organisations, marketers and ‘digital/social experts’ haven’t realised that it’s about PEER TO PEER conversation.  This is not the era of the website! Social isn’t marketing.  Social isn’t something started by marketers.  Social has been a long time in the making, driven by our underlying need as humans to be so.  One look at the bulletin board and chat room scene of the 90′s will show you that.  IThe geek in all of us has taken a long time to come out and for it to become a mainstream activity; for it to be ‘socially’ acceptable (haha!)

The empty, conversation-less places referred to by the Ed in his post are classic examples of environments/initiatives created by brand marketers in an effort to ‘engage socially’ around a brand. #fail.

Many marketers are still looking at social as yet another way to drive traffic back to ‘their site’ or ‘their place’.  But it’s not.  The rules are changing – it’s no longer about me coming to your place.  its about you coming to my place.  And the implication there is that usually, I only have friends round to my place!  And no matter how you try and wrap it up, I can see a marketing/sales message at a 1000 yards and frankly there is no place for it in my social, and very personal, world thanks!  At least not on your terms.  If it’s going to be there, and work, its going to be on my terms.

The conversational economy is growing.  Our ever increasing connectedness is going to change the way we do things significantly and this will have huge implications for marketing and brands.  Nik Halstead, founder of media sift, creator of tweet.me.me and the man to talk to regarding big data, once said, when referring to the changing way we seek content (HT @James_mayes):

“We no longer search, we follow. I predict the death of SEO within 5 years.”

I believe he is onto something there.  We are moving to an era of “conversational SEO” – not quite as described here, but more around how natural, realtime conversations (not optimised by marketers) between people across community and social platforms can put the subject matter right at the top of a search, without any manipulation or optimisation at all.  I believe that the advertising/branding era we have lived with for decades is over.  At least in the way we understand it today.

So yes, it IS all about the conversation.  Just not your brand conversation.  Peer to peer – remember that.

It’s not about the technology.

Of course its not about the technology!  Never has been, never will be.  John Sumser summed up our current situation beautifully in a recent post when he said:

“We are in the Compuserve-Prodigy-AOL stage of social media evolution.  It’s after Netscape and before Google in equivalent internet time.”

Sadly, I’m old enough to remember that time and the same obsession with technology existed then.  But within a few years that had changed and we got to focussing more on what it enabled us to do than the tech itself.  Solutions are springing up everywhere, with lots and lots of ‘me too’ products along the way.  But in the coming 3-5 years these will consolidate, many will go bust or just fold into a competitor and what they deliver will become pedestrian.

In other words they will become part of what we do naturally in business and we won’t be obsessing about the technology.  Tesco Bank is a great example.  It’s a bank; the fact that it’s online is totally irrelevant.  Think back to the turn of the millennium – remember ‘e-crm’ or ‘e-recruitment’? (or worse, i-recruitment!)  Now its Social CRM, Social Recruitment, Social whatever.   But that will ebb back to being CRM and recruitment and so on just as it did once ‘e-crm’ started to sound silly.  Take it from me, “social” will eventually sound silly too.

So yes, when we say it’s not about the technology, it isn’t.  No, really.

I’ll leave you with this gem of a conversation I had over dinner a couple of months ago.  One of the guys there was the CEO of what appears to be a successful and quite sizeable ‘digital agency’.  Innevitably, the conversation turned to social media and, of course, twitter.  Here’s a snippet:

Him: “No, I’m not on twitter.  I don’t think it’s really that useful or proven.  Anyway, it will be better when you can do more with it.

Me: “How so?  What do you mean?”

Him: “well, you know, when you can brand them.  Put Flash on them and stuff.  Make them creative. Thats when it will really take off.”

Me: ….?  You mean, like, embed Flash and images in the tweet itself? Like Ads?

Him: Yes!

Me: *Snorts wine out through nose*

Change is a comin’. Sadly, a lot of the people in the driving seats don’t seem to appreciate that just yet…

Community: It’s not just for Christmas…

Posted: 13/12/2011 in Business, Community, CRM, Engagement, Social Media, Technology
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So lets imagine for a minute that you are a business that cares about it’s customers (and employees hopefully!) and you are thinking of running a large scale event for your customers to get feedback on how you are doing.  You might have already run a customer survey and want to bring a representative group together to dive deeper into the initial feedback.  If you are ambitious you might want to get around 100 customers there, representing all the services you offer, which means in terms of logistics, this will be no small undertaking.  To make such an event go smoothly, there are a number important things you will no doubt be considering:

  • Venue – you need quite a venue for 100 customers + reps from your company.  If you are getting direct feedback, you will probably need discrete break out rooms too
  • Location – the best and most central location for convenience of the customer base is important to ensure a good cross service line representation
  • Agenda and input – you might want to consider asking the customers ahead of time for their input so the day is relevant
  • Participation – from key members of staff in the discussions and to organise the event.  Clearly, with such an important gathering the executive team should be well represented, including the CEO.

A significant investment in time, energy and resources I think you will agree.  Now, consider doing that exercise every day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.  You wouldn’t?  Well think again.  If you are one of the growing number of businesses that are considering using online “community” for customer engagement then that’s exactly the commitment you will be making.  Technology might make some of the process easier, but the logistics and (more importantly) the responsibilities of engaging this way are no less onerous than they would be if you were holding the event on a face to face basis.  In fact, they can be more so.

With a face to face event, there is a subliminal understanding that the event will end.  Not so in a virtual customer community.  Also, participation from the executive team and other core employees is just as critical in my view in this emerging ‘online engagement’ environment.  I speak to many organisations about this trend and the number of CXO’s who assume that it will allow them to push customer interaction down to the lowest common denominator is quite shocking.

But it is not all bad news.  Engaging through community with your customers is a very powerful initiative which can deliver enormous benefits including significantly reduced support costs and increased levels feedback on how you are doing.  If you are open minded, are prepared to take feedback on the ‘virtual chin’ and enter into a true dialogue with your customer base, you will find that they can become a significant and valuable extension to your product and service development teams too.  Innovation from collaboration – it doesn’t come any better than that.

Onne further thing; don’t assume you can engage in this way with your customers and not do the same internally with your employees.  An open, socially interactive and collaborative based customer engagement strategy will fail without a similarly based employee engagement strategy too.

Remember: With great community comes great responsibility…

Employee Loyalty…

Posted: 01/09/2011 in CRM, Employer Brand, Engagement, ERM, Leadership, Talent
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Unfortunately I cant make #TRULondon today which is a big shame as Bill was kind enough to offer me a track this time round.  The good news is that social media means I can at least participate from afar.  However, commitments mean I cant jump on the twitter stream much today so I thought I would do so via a blog post – a virtual track if you like.  So here it is, my conversation starter for 10.

I spent quite a few years working in the CRM space, many of those talking customer loyalty and retention strategy with some of the biggest brands out there.  In all of the conversations we would have with their customers, there was one consistent and familiar story which often went something like this:

“How did you become a customer of Brand B? Well, I was obviously aware of them in the market place, and they had a good reputation but I had been using brand A for a number of years and was very happy.  However, over time it was clear that Brand B had done their homework.  They managed to target me very well, they seemed to know the gaps that were not being filled by Brand A, and their offers were very compelling.  After a while, I guess I was seduced by the targeted and personal nature of the marketing and they won me over.”

“What has been your experience since moving to Brand B?  Well, in the beginning, I guess all was well.  All of the expectations set were met, and for a while I was very happy.  But then I notices some subtle changes.  Small things at first – access to customer support seemed to take longer if you dialed the options for ‘existing customer’ than they did for ‘new customer’.  Then I noticed that the deals for new customers were better than what I was getting – a so called ‘loyal customer’.  I queried this and was given the brush off.   Over time, I began to get a sense that, now I had been ‘acquired’ I was somewhat less important than the next new customer in their line of sight.  I am beginning to regret moving away from Brand A and will definitely not be recommending Brand B to anyone.”

This thought was in some way inspired by the latest HR Happy Hour Europe show that I listened to last night, hosted by the most excellent @steveboese, @mervyndinnen and the Jobsite crew.  There was much talk about employer brand and talent acquisition and it struck me that as organisations, we might have become a little to obsessed with our need to ‘acquire’ new talent a little at the expense of the talent we already have.  The conversation resonated so highly with my experience on the customer side.  Indeed, you could re run the conversation above and instead supplant the ‘customer’ with ‘candidate’ and ‘employee’.

As I have said before, the lines between customer and employee/potential employee are blurring.   There are many lessons we can learn from other parts of the business about engagement – its not just an HR issue.  We now have to look at these issues in a much more holistic way if we are to avoid making mistakes like the one above across the employee group too.   I hear the word ‘Acquisition’ used in a ratio probably 10 times greater than I do the word ‘Retention’, yet, as we used to say, “Retention is where the profit is.”

What say you #TruLondon folk?