Thursday, March 22, 2007

Can sales people let a good marketing campaign down?

Like many people I prepare for the worst when telephoning a company for information. Jobs are so deskilled and compartmentalized there is little chance of getting a complete answer at the first attempt. Then my heart sinks further when I realize I have reached a menu. How many levels will there be? What data will I need to key in? Will there be a relevant option? How long will this take? And how much will it cost? Then increasingly with off shore call centres – will I understand what they say? So it is with considerable trepidation I call BT to progress an order. I had decided to take up their offer to upgrade my broadband account and had returned the order form in the envelope provided in the expectation of order confirmation within a week. Three weeks had now elapsed and no news. Oddly for a telecoms business there was no phone number on the letter, or address, or e-mail – just the web site. That did not yield a number either but it did offer an online option to check order progress. Unfortunately it failed to recognize my information. So after fifteen minutes to reach a dead end I used the sales number on the telephone bill and proceeded through the multi-level menu, entered my phone number and eventually got a ringing tone that somehow died leaving me hanging. I repeated the process and this time got to speak to someone, gave my telephone number, customer number, home address and mother’s maiden name. They concluded I did not exist and offered to transfer me to some other part of the BT empire. After repeating the same information to a succession of people, queuing, listening to Vivaldi, being told how busy they were, it appeared the phone was registered in my wife’s maiden name, even though the bill reflected her married name, slightly misspelled, but near enough to recognize, and this was undoubtably the problem. I was put through to a supervisor to get the name on the account changed and was congratulated on my marriage. I thanked her and pointed out this was in fact a few years ago and could we make the account Mr & Mrs? No that was a step too far, so I settled with it in my wife’s name, possibly correctly spelled. When I got to person number 5 I actually explained I was progressing an order taking up their offer to upgrade my broadband. So far there had been no trace of receipt of this order, but this very helpful lady decided that I was in fact with BT Yahoo, not BT broadband – by the way customers don’t care about internal organization - and offered to set up the phone call and introduce me to the right person. Nearly there then. But hold on, person number 6 opened the conversation by asking if he could help me with anything. I explained the nature of my enquiry which seemed not to strike a chord at all. You already have broadband he volunteered after asking how much I was paying – is there anything else I can help you with. So is there an upgrade deal or not I asked? Apparently not. End of call after 32 minutes – another dead end. Not a great customer experience.

Next morning I have an e-mail sent at 5 am and addressed to my wife, wrong spelling of course, to thank me for my order and confirm delivery date of the equipment.

Monday, March 12, 2007

Short attention span screen generation poised to enter work place?

According to an article from World Business, “Susan Greenfield, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Oxford, argues that the culture of the screen, where everything is visual and available at once, is shaping a different kind of reasoning. "The screen culture is not conducive to taking time to think," she says. "The result is iconic thinking, quick fixes and short attention spans." Whether culture is the word to describe the possibly disturbing trend of some of the youth of Britain engaged in hours of nocturnal X-Box gaming, is open to debate. And if this is truly shaping a different type of brain as is also suggested is similarly a matter of conjecture, but what I found truly worrying was the suggestion that a generation bent on quick fixes and short attention spans are not only entering the work place but could next become managers. Arguably less qualified than their parents - despite degrees from some minor English town or village that now enjoys university status - and steeped in texting in a language reminiscent of the long redundant telex machine, how will we engage them in a conventional business approach? A different report noted how the impending retirement of the post war baby boomer generation was going to create a significant knowledge gap for many organizations. Will the newly named screen generation be their replacements? If so it is likely they will require knowledge in easily digestible packages. Whichever outcome, documenting, databasing searchable information seems to be something businesses should prioritise to ensure knowledge is retained in an organization, available to all that need it and accessible. Yet another report criticized the difficulty of pulling all the information together and finding it in a timely way. It is something long advocated by Technical Marketing Ltd, the building of a knowledge resource using web database techniques to acquire, store and provide accessibility to vital information. Enlightened companies are working on this recognizing the importance of securing the investment that has been made in acquiring the knowledge in the first place.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Are blogs relevant to b-2-b?

A great deal is being written about blogs. Company CEOs and politicians are said to write them. Individuals record their mundane daily activities, journalists break news using them, but very few of them ever get read! There is a lot written about the idea of blogs and the rapid growth in the number of blogs in existence – but is this just another idea with more puff than real value? A recent survey published by eMarketer quoting an American Advertising Federation report rated various new media for effectiveness putting blogs at a mere 13% just ahead of RSS with 8%. Leading the list was search at 49% followed by online video 34%, Social networking 30%, podcasts 21%, video games 20% and mobiles 15%. A veritable raft of new media communication opportunities and a lot of food for thought. Will there be winners and losers? Will they all develop to oust traditional media? Who knows? Back to blogs. According to Technorati the 50 millionth was tracked back in July 2006, the blogosphere is doubling every 6 and a half months, 175,000 new blogs are added each day, there are 1.6 million postings a day …. so not something to be ignored then. Except this nagging concern about effectiveness – well I guess if nobody reads most of them this is not surprising. Another part of the eMarketer article concluded that awareness of blogs really depended on links from other blogs – 63% and 22.9% by recommendation. Only 19.6% were via search engines so optimising content is going to be less effective than getting some well known bloggers to link to your blog. More about word of mouth marketing than conventional promotion. So where does this leave blogs in the technical marketing plan? Perhaps we are the frontier of a new communication media revolution …. Perhaps.

Small is beautiful ... or is it?

A piece of market research arrived this week from accelerator offering an introduction that they were ‘aiming to find out what’s really going on at the front line of small business’. In an earlier blog – September 18th 2006 – I noted that in terms of numbers 99.3% of all British businesses were officially classed as small, that is they employ 49 or less people according to government statistics. Of course the mere act of taking on employees immediately changes the nature of a small business – you are now managing people and dealing with a whole raft of employment legislation – and it is easy to forget you actually need to service clients and customers to make money that creates wealth. May be that is why nearly two thirds do not have employees. Of those that do the second biggest perceived threat is actually recruiting and keeping good staff. Not surprisingly 71% thought the UK government did not do enough to foster small businesses and business people. So no surprise there. Despite this 72% thought the UK a better place than Europe to start a business but significantly only 34% and 42% respectively thought the UK better than North America and Asia. Autonomy rated at 38% was the top reason for preferring to work in a small business. We are left with the question of whether there are two emerging business communities – the relatively few global giants and the mass of small businesses. Our experience suggests big businesses talk about marketing expenditure within an often somewhat arbitrary budget, whereas small businesses focus on generating more business profitably. What the statistics suggest is that marketing one small business to other small businesses is a factor that cannot be ignored and business to business technical marketing will need to provide efficient means to do this successfully.