IT SERVES US RIGHT

 It Serves Us Right

Two things on my agenda are productivity and customer service. Often the two are linked. The quicker a purchasing transaction happens the greater the productivity but speed carries a cost. And that’s the absence of taking time to cement a relationship. 

A friend of mine briefly worked at the call centre for a global brand of amongst other things baby products. She was berated for taking too long talking to customers and, when she thought necessary, cheering them up (“that’s not necessary.” She was told). The most successful people in that call centre (by their standards) were foreign with limited, transactional vocabulary. Productivity trumped building a meaningful brand relationship.

We’re building business models in which increasing short- term profit is more important than investing in building trusted brands with whom customers can have a conversation. So it serves us right.

Whilst Jack Welch, one-time, legendary CEO of General Electric, said technology would eventually replace the need for people to be involved in a purchasing transaction, he still fervently believed in consumer satisfaction. Figure that one!

Recently I bought my wife some cosmetics but the delivery address the “system” picked up was a previous one we’d lived at 7 years ago. Try as I might there was no mechanism to phone and say “I goofed, please put it right”. Try as I might there was nothing in the list of pre-selected issues that corresponded with “I’m an idiot. I chose the wrong address” option. And so cheerful emails thudded in saying “we’re delivering to…WRONG ADDRESS… in 48 hours.” I solved it eventually. But I’d wanted a human being saying cheerfully “Don’t worry. Could happen to anyone. There. All sorted.”  What actually  happened was a standoff between human frailty and faultless technology. Man versus Machine with man helplessly losing. 

Now this isn’t the futile lament of a senior about how much better things were before self-service and shopping online.  Because they weren’t. Despite the current “crisis” our world is better, richer in choice and cheaper than it was. We now have “Influencers” rather than “Brand Champions” – not an improvement in my view. But the one thing beginning to disappear is someone on the end of a phone who calmly helps you. 

Exception: NatWest have introduced a direct line for over-60s where you get through straightaway and the person who answers has time and the inclination to do whatever is required. 

More exceptions: Serious Readers. Victoria Health. Richer Sounds. And Waitrose who once turned me from a gibbering wreck to a normal human being in seconds. Everyone tells me Apple is the best in quantity and quality of Customer service. A friend said they’d sorted out a tricky issue regarding the validity of insurance on an Apple product bought in Germany pre-Brexit with aplomb. 

So, yes, great personal, customer service exists but I fear the finance people often see it as  an expense they’d like to eliminate. Its shaky existence reflects many businesses’ attitude to brand building and customers.

I recall a marketer at Heinz, that once-great company which marketing professionals adored, saying they thought of their consumers as two housewives having a cheerful conversation with each other over the garden fence. 

 It’s a romantic concept no doubt but you cannot build a brand that’s loved by technology alone.

Anyway I love romantic concepts but it takes two to tango and when I said “it serves us right” I was also thinking that the behaviour of many customers has deteriorated. We’ve got worse at saying thank you and smiling.

Try it. It’ll change the customer service that you get. 

OUR PRODUCTIVITY PROBLEM

Philip Hammond in his autumn statement last week lamented Britain’s poor productivity:

“The productivity gap is well known, but shocking nonetheless. It takes a German worker four days to produce what we make in five, which means, in turn, that too many British workers work longer hours for lower pay than their counterparts.” 

Is that really true? Are our Nissan and Jaguar plants really 25% less efficient than German car plants? I doubt it. The problem is that productivity’s a tenuous means of measuring performance. Apparently we lag all G7 countries apart from Japan for productivity and our performance rather than improving has stayed flat over the past decade. GDP per hour worked seems a loopy way of assessing things because when I was working fulltime I reckoned my contemporaries worked much harder than their French, American and German counterparts. It was only in heavily unionised businesses like the film industry that productivity was really held back.

On a personal level I’m very concerned about my wife’s productivity. She seems to be working harder and harder despite my reducing the housekeeping budget in view of the current economic uncertainty and a reduction of “narrow money”. In other words less GDP per hour worked. Her productivity gap is shocking and she refuses to accept my solution that by doing less we’ll improve our productivity. Indeed when I mention productivity now she gets quite shirty and hands me a tea towel.

So the solution to this “national problem” is for us to reduce the number of hours we work. In the UK the number of hours worked per head per annum has gone down by just 1.5% in the past 15 years (it’s down 6% in Germany). The Germans work 18% less than we do - yes a whopping 18% fewer hours.

The original definition of Parkinson’s Law was this:-
"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

So if follows if we worked less we’d produce about the same and our productivity would shoot up; as an economist might say - “sorted.”

Sathnam Sanhera wrote about the “gig economy” last week. This is where people do things other than just for money or proper money for the job done. Like speakers at conferences and virtually all writers. If an author were to apply a minimum hourly rate for their work no one would ever publish their work. Yet our world is full of wannabe writers. According to a report from the International Publishers Association UK publishers released 184,000 new and revised titles in 2013. That’s 2,875 titles per million inhabitants, and places the UK 1,000-plus titles ahead of second-placed Taiwan and Slovenia with the US publishing only 959 titles per million inhabitants.

So we work too much, we charge too little for our work and we spend too much time writing books.
We don’t actually have a real productivity problem at all. As my wife so aptly said it’s just another piece of claptrap.