I honestly believed that I would stick with PC based computing. After twenty years using PCs they’re more familiar than my wife and kids! Despite all the positive things friends have said about Macs, and even though I have owned an iPhone for the last couple of years, there were good reasons not to change. PCs have always worked well for me and, on the occasions when I have used Macs, I’ve always found them uncomfortably unfamiliar. If nothing else, we humans are creatures of habit: it takes quite a shove to push us out of our comfort zone and into unchartered territory. For me and PCs that shove was Dell. I enjoy observing my own consumer decision-making and, although I know that much of the action takes place outside of my conscious awareness, my work on the consumer unconscious mind gives me a dual perspective for my own consumer […]
Customer Service: Sometimes Firms Don’t Get It
Large companies spend a fortune on customer service: implementing it, training people, monitoring it and, yes, even researching it. And yet all too often when you deal with a company it seems apparent that they just don’t get it. Take Barclays – one of the largest financial services companies in the UK. Last week I was in the centre of Cambridge and, for reasons that weren’t immediately obvious, they had a team of blokes dressed as Grenadier Guards (the ones who wear the bearskin headgear) except with corporate blue tunics rather than red and giving out balloons rather than shooting at people. No doubt this was a bold marketing campaign to draw attention to what a lovely bank Barclays is. And it must be said that the people in uniform were great; joking with shoppers as they passed by. Unfortunately, the person I dealt with in their customer service department […]
Market Research: Perception Versus Reality
It’s often claimed in market research circles that perception is everything. I suspect this stems from the thought that, provided the customer perceives things as being good then that is what matters, be it customer service, product quality, your brand’s image. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a really stupid way of thinking about consumers. Let me explain… In one sense, perceptions are all that customers have to provide in market research. Life isn’t absolute when you’re living it. For example, I’ve been having some lower back ache (too much time spent writing in a bad chair) and have been treating it with a physiotherapist and lots of exercises. Unlocking my lower back has caused other parts of my back to react and the other night I turned over and stretched at night and managed to pull a muscle higher up my back. Now, at the moment, my […]
How to Avoid Upsetting Your Customers
Mostly I think customer service is a matter of common sense; but as we all know common sense can be a surprisingly rare commodity. One of the biggest problems I encounter with customer service people is the procedures they’re shackled to. Not only are those procedures infuriatingly short-sighted at times, they also tend to have the effect of causing the customer service agent to turn his or her brain off. A customer service encounter I experienced today didn’t run into trouble for any of these reasons though. The person at the (small) company was clearly bright, sensible and not tied to any procedures; it may very well have been her own company. But when I asked when I could expect delivery of a product I’d ordered four weeks ago that they’d told me would be delivered in about four week’s time I was told that, “We’re doing a collection from the manufacturer […]
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