Old School Hip-Hop and Customer Engagement

I picked up my first celebrity Twitter followers this week.  Let me elaborate.  Eric B and Rakim are old school US hip hop artists.  Their 1987, album, Paid in Full, pretty much launched hip-hop’s modern era.  These days, Eric and Rakim are big on personal empowerment, Islam, phat beats and making money.  I’m a UK management consultant who’s big on strategy, service design, innovation and  … well … um, making money.

These guys started following me on Twitter after reading my post on why employees should be entrepreneurs.  My self-esteem went up several notches because of my new and notable Twitter following.  The iTunes store ran up a couple more purchases of Paid in Full (the Deluxe Edition) and I got busy posting stuff about the rappers on my Facebook page.

In short, I’m now thinking that Eric B and Rakim are better than Eminem, Elvis, Grandmaster Flash, the Beatles and potentially Jesus.

Eric B and Rakim are a big deal in hip-hop circles; you could say that they’re a brand.  Which made me think that the point of brand and engagement isn’t what customers think about our brand.  The point is what our brands think about our customers.

Customer respect

A few years ago I did some marketing strategy for a big UK insurer.  It had products for pretty much every socio-demographic and it called it’s poorest customer segment “bottom-feeders”.  Lumping customers into categories with disrespectful names is not good humanity.  There are three reasons why it’s also not good business.

1. Internal language shapes employees’ attitude and attitudes inevitably leak out to customers.  Contemptuous language is a great platform for lousy customer service.
2. Contempt blocks empathy. Customer empathy is the best tool known to man for coming up with new product and service ideas.
3. Marketing is (at least) two-way these days.  If you’re reading this on social media, you know this already.  The days when a consumer brand could run in broadcast-mode only are long gone.

It’s interesting that companies think so much about how to build fans and followers and so little about following the people who buy their products and services.   There are lots of brands that I like.   I’d love them even more if they gave me back a little bit of social media love.

Related posts:

1. Customer service or customer servicide?
2. Bad customer service is dead
3. Three resources for B2B strategic marketing using social media

Every year I launch a start-up venture.  They often fail.  In fact, here are a couple of my favourite failures:

ArtPension would have given people a tax-efficient “cheque book” for buying things they love like fine art, wine and classic cars in their pension fund. It was great timing.  People had fallen out of love with equities generally and pensions specifically following a series of market crashes and mis-selling scandals.  I was launch-ready with regulatory approval, an operational platform and a marketing plan.  Then the UK government changed the regulations, making the business impossible.

365 Memory sold the cheapest digital memory anywhere in the UK.  We were the price leader for three reasons. Firstly, we had great supplier relationships in Taiwan.  Secondly we were ferociously tax efficient.  Being Jersey-based, the business didn’t need to charge VAT. Thirdly, we had very little money tied up in stock because of our drop-ship, factory direct model. Unfortunately we died because of failed Jersey-based logistics and dispersed management.

Failure goals and the “Dyson myth”

There’s a toxic myth about entrepreneurship.  You could call it the “Dyson mythology”.  It goes like this.

James Dyson, the inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, gambled everything he had on his business.   In five years, he produced 5,126 failed prototypes, mortgaged everything and was on the verge of bankruptcy.  Salvation came with a chance contact from a small Japanese company.   The resulting  vacuum cleaner went on to sell more than £2 billion worldwide.

James Dyson is a hero.  He fought hard, broke the rules, never gave up, risked everything and succeeded hugely.   History is shaped by people like that.  But the great are the enemy of the good.  The problem is that people like James Dyson make it seem like all-or-nothing risk is what entrepreneurship is all about.

Learning to dream again… safely

I have a personal goal to lose 20% of what I earn every year until I fail to succeed at losing it.  Having a failure goal, takes away the fear of not succeeding.

Research on entrepreneurship says that on average one in ten start-ups succeeds.  So giving up on first failure isn’t a great way to do it.  Oddly, that’s often the mistake that corporate innovators make too.

That specific 20% is important too.  It means that I don’t bet the farm and can walk away from failures with my home, happiness and marriage intact.

Why every employee should be a spare-time entrepreneur

There are three reasons why every employee should be a spare-time entrepreneur.  What’s more, enlightened companies should encourage it.  Here’s why:

1. Learning to dream

Doing a start-up reminds you how to dream, imagine, create and invent.  There is no company in the world that doesn’t value those qualities.  But too often, process-centric corporate cultures don’t make it feel that way.  Quite simply, being an entrepreneur makes you a better employee.

2. Better than an MBA

Start-ups teach you priceless lessons about how to get things done and about how to manage risk, plan and deliver.  They give you the ultimate personal responsibility.

3. Better than a pension

Many people in employment are racing their first coronary to a subsistence retirement and a newspaper round at 80 years old.  The risk-return arithmetic on start-ups is a lot better than on pensions ; so long as you don’t bet everything on a single throw.

In the blood?

Some people say that being an entrepreneur is in the blood.  Possibly, I fall into that category since I set up my first (successful) organization when I was 19.  But actually, I think it’s more likely to be a question of choice.

So this week, I’m really excited to have set up a new company…more on that soon.

Related posts:

1. Old-school hip-hop and a pretty strange lesson in customer engagement
2. After Eureka: 7 questions to test innovation for big and unreasonable profit potential
3. Five ways that customer service fails… and what to do about it

The new job for life

“When I first started freelancing in 2003, I didn’t see it as a career choice. I’d spent 10 years heading up a healthcare charity, followed by a wonderful job specialising in strategy and marketing for a life assurance company.

“Since then, I’ve come to the view that every widely held notion about job security is wrong. Many people think an employed job is secure and freelancing is insecure. I think the opposite is true. Freelancing is the new job for life. A freelancer can build and develop multiple opportunities in parallel in a way an employee cannot.

Clever rabbits have lots of holes to run down

I specialise in innovation, strategic marketing and customer services, mainly in the financial, government and charity sectors, but make it a rule to always have three or four possibilities bubbling away. A client (and friend) of mine once described it as ‘a clever rabbit always has lots of holes to run down.’ I like that.

Generosity

“An important mindset is to be generous. We all need a bit of luck and help – no one can have too big a favour bank. For me, I’m always scrupulous about helping people I know – sharing intellectual capital, helping with leads or  review something. You’ll develop the most amazing network.

“Recently, I’ve put a lot of development into my website and social network.  These give freelancers the most incredible opportunity to build strong brands – both for our network and people outside our network. I cross publish a lot of what I write on strategic marketing and innovation and the content gets picked up in the most unexpected of places.

As freelancers we make our own security.”

Related posts:

1. How service teams can inspire product innovation
2. Three resources for B2B strategic marketing using social media
3. After Eureka: 7 questions to test innovation for big and unreasonable profit potential

My iPad arrived two days ago turning me into a four-year old boy on Xmas eve. Yesterday, a queue of cooing colleagues snaked around my desk. Everyone wants one.

So two days into ownership, this is what I think it means.

1. It WON’T replace laptops … Not yet anyway.

iPad is a device for consuming media, not for creating it.  It’s hideous to type on.  But lovely to browse with.

It’s much nicer to swipe and tap with your finger than to point and click with a mouse.  So whether tablets get physical keyboards or laptops get natural user interfaces, this will change device design.

2. It’s ALREADY the device I want to use for casual surfing.

How did I ever manage without something that’s always on, weighs nothing and doesn’t burn my thighs?  Enough said.

3. It WILL change the way I consume newspapers and magazines.

WIRED magazine on iPad is highly readable and wow-inducing.  It pushes the boundary of what’s magazine and what’s interactive media and for the first time ever I would RATHER have a magazine in electronic than print format.

Talking of formats, I’d much rather read the Financial Times on my little iPad than wrestle with a print broadsheet on the train.

Coincidently, my WIRED magazine subscription got delivered on the same day as my iPad.  I still haven’t opened the paper version.

4. It MIGHT change the way I buy books.

Integrated search, in-line dictionaries and the ability to carry half the British Library in my hand are nice.

But I wrestle with this.  You see, my Mother was a teacher.  My maternal grandfather was a Cambridge academic.  I’m co-author of a book (here … thank you for asking).  Books are in my blood; almost religiously.  I love the novelty and utility of eBooks.  But they don’t take me back to when I was six years old and my Mum read poems to me.  There’s almost something sacrilegious about them.

Maybe that’s just generational change-resistance.

5. It WILL make me pay more for media.

Hello iPad.  Goodbye free content?

I know several entrepreneurs whose attempts to charge for online content succeeded about as well as King Canute’s wave management.  iPad apps might possible turn the tide against free content because the experience is so good.

Pricing models for iPad media content are a little Darwinian right now.  They range from The Times £9.99 per month subscription to Men’s Health’s $2.99  per issue to Wired’s free content.  Which pricing model proves the fittest for the iPad environment remains to be seen.  But I personally think it will be disruptive of the free content model.

In summary

Is the iPad useful?  Definitely.  Is it compelling?  Hmm … kind of.  Is it a disruptive innovation?  Possibly.  Is it the end of the laptop?  No.

Now, repeat after me:

I must not blog about Apple.  I must not blog about Apple. I must not blog about Apple …

Related posts:

1. How to time product launches perfectly
2. What the home entertainment industry that never was can teach us about Google and Facebook
3. How to have disruptive ideas

So here are three good places to start:

Related posts:

1. Aesthetics, statistics and strategic marketing plans
2. Old-school hip-hop and a pretty strange lesson in customer engagement
3. Bad customer service is dead

Mrs. K and I went shopping this morning and found a wallet on the floor.  It belonged to…well let’s just call her “Mrs. Smith” for the sake of the story.  Mrs. Smith’s purse was stuffed with pretty much every kind of plastic card you can imagine except for anything with a personal address or phone number on it.

But we thought that’s not a problem.  Mrs. Smith is a Barclays Bank customer and we can just phone her telephone banking hotline and then Barclays can pass our phone number to Mrs. Smith and she can come and collect her purse.  Simple; after all, what bank wouldn’t want to help a valued customer stressing out about her lost payment cards and personal data.

Or so we thought.

After the IVR labyrinth, we got a “human”.  Let’s not name names, but imagine that he’s called Edwin.

“Hello Edwin, we’d like to advise you that we’ve found a purse belonging to one of your valued customers.”

“Yes madam…”

“Yes.  It doesn’t have any of her personal contact details, so we phoned you.”

“Just drop the card into a local Barclay’s branch.”

“Great idea, but it’s a whole large purse full of lots of personal things and we know that she’ll be worried about having lost it.  Please can you contact your customer to tell them the purse has been found and pass on our contact details.”

“One moment please … I’m sorry madam, we don’t do that.”

“But what about your valued customer wasting her whole Sunday trying to find her purse?  Then spending Monday cancelling all her cards.  When you could just phone her now.”

“I’m sorry madam.  It’s company policy.  I suggest you hand it in at your local police station.

Causes of call centre customer service failure

How does a call centre end up being so utterly rubbish?  Here are a few thoughts:

1. Employee micro-management expunging any sense of personal initiative or responsibility.
2. Compliance culture ditto.
3. Management of outsourced call-centres through strictly detailed service level agreements.  If management by target worked, the shops would be full of great products from North Korea.  They aren’t and it doesn’t.
4. Badly scoped outsourcing arrangements and strict silos between inbound and outbound teams.
5. Outsourced call-centres are often run as projects.  The essence of good project management is to deliver exactly what’s expected. The essence of good service management is to deliver above expectations.  These are two opposite management “values”.

Over Sunday lunch, we imagined Mrs. Smith cancelling the rest of her day in a futile search for her purse.  While Edwin clocked up another exemplary day of customer service by handling our call in less than 60 seconds.

We’ve left the text of this blog post in Mrs. Smith’s purse so that she can discuss the meaning of customer service with her bank.

Related posts:

1. New utility customer service challenges
2. Five ways that customer service fails… and what to do about it
3. Contact evasion and how to avoid it

Can any company with bad customer service survive in a world of ubiquitous social media?

Here’s a small round-up of the many ways in which my local train company, First Capital Connect, is committing customer servicide.

• Twitter feed of real-time feed of passenger angst.
• Search YouTube for First Capital Connect and results are full of documentary evidence of lousy customer service.  The most witty reflection is below:

• Online government petition to end First Capital Connect’s franchise here.
• First Capital Connect official Facebook page (364 members).
• I hate First Capital Connect Facebook page (2,548 members).
• FirstCrapitalConnect parody site (Page 1 on Google for ‘First Capital Connect’).

Can’t help but think that as a shareholder, I’d be worried.  I can’t help but think that this weight of authentic, peer condemnation neutralises any investment that FCC could make in its brand.  Putting it another way, your customer service is your brand.

Related posts:

1. Bad customer service is dead
2. Old-school hip-hop and a pretty strange lesson in customer engagement
3. New utility customer service challenges

• If it was a country, Facebook would be the third largest in the world.
• 50% of UK mobile internet traffic is Facebook.  Imagine what that means for customer service word of mouth.
• 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 brands are user generated content.
• 200 million blogs exist and 34% of bloggers post opinions on products and services.
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations.  14% trust advertising.

Bad customer service begins to sound like customer servicide doesn’t it?

There’s a great video here, which explores the social media revolution:

Related posts:

1. Customer service or customer servicide?
2. Banking customer service. The old oxymoron
3. New utility customer service challenges

If you need to go to a health clinic, it’s useful to know how long you need to wait.  By giving customers this information, clinics can cut costs by smoothing out service demand peaks.

1. Check the clinic map  (here, or click on the map image).
2. Click a red circle to see a live webcam of the queue at the clinic.
3. Click a yellow triangle to see average and peak queue data.

Related posts:

1. Government innovation and participatory budgets
2. How service teams can inspire product innovation
3. New utility customer service challenges

But I thought this was such a great presentation about why “online” continues to be a disruptive technology.

It encompasses beautifully why putting “eLipstick” on the pig of a fragmented legacy organisation doesn’t meet customers’ service and experience expectations.

Related posts:

1. Contact evasion and how to avoid it
2. Five ways that customer service fails… and what to do about it
3. Banking customer service. The old oxymoron