Creekmore Consulting

Yeah, you. Corporate America. [Maybe corporate everywhere...but my recent experiences are homegrown, so no blame-passing today.]

Your amazingly successful efforts in data collection, standardization, segmentation and automation have removed the human element from your interactions with your customers — remember them? The people who make an emotional, human decision to spend their cash with you and not your competitor.

We’ve all complained about automated phone systems — everything from “press 1 for sales” to advanced voice-recognition — but everyone still uses them. Somewhere along the line, they became cheaper [and therefore "better"] than human operators. They easily hold all the options in their automated brains, and “always” direct calls to the “right department.” I got one yesterday that gave me a dizzying amount of options. I wanted sales. I wanted to make a purchase. And I couldn’t figure out what number to press. I had called the 800-number promoted on the company’s website that said, Call here to make a faster purchase.

People, I’m a marketer. If your marketer customers can’t figure this out, you’re making it too hard.

On each of my four [4!!!] phone calls with the same company, trying to make the same simple purchase, I had to give out my account number and my PIN number. This was not a financial or health care institution. I had no secret data with them, and my purchase certainly wasn’t private in any way. But they refused to make the sale until I’d given them all this identifying information, so that their records would reflect all my purchases together.

Let me stop here to point out a company that does this right. I’ve bought from Lands’ End for more than 20 years. When I call them, which I still do occasionally despite using their website primarily for more than 10 years, they do ask for my catalog number, but if I don’t have my customer number, no one freaks out. They will still sell me stuff.

But what made me angriest about the whole thing yesterday was that the phone rep never, ever went off script. Everything she [I talked to 2 women and 1 man on the 4 calls, and this was one of the women] said started with something like, “In order to serve you better….”

No. It does NOT serve me better to have to tell you all the information I just told the LAST representative I spoke with. It does NOT serve me better to have to wade through more than 20 minutes of data confirmation and gathering on your part in order to buy one product. I understand that as marketers, we want all the data. We want to make sure the customer orders the right product, because they’ll blame us if they order the wrong product. But placing the burden of information-gathering on your customers does not serve them better. At the very least, let’s all write better, more honest scripts, shall we?

The whole scenario made me angrier than I care to admit, but the part that really ticked me off was that the customer service rep kept telling me it was my fault. I was the party in the wrong for being upset at having to repeat all of my data. At having to give them ANY data beyond the truly essential: product, shipping address and credit card number. I was wrong to think that was all I needed for a purchase, and I shouldn’t be so mad about it.

Well, what I’m really mad about is that apparently, someone in corporate America decided it was a good idea to evaluate customer service reps on how well they read scripts, instead of on how well they serve customers.

This woman couldn’t fix that. Bless her heart.

But maybe you can.

I’ve been light around here this week, primarily because my dad had to have his prostate removed yesterday. The surgery went well, and the surgeon expects my dad to get a cancer-free report from the lab results next week — here’s hoping!

At Creekmore Consulting, we do quite a bit of work in the health care field, and some of our clients spend a lot of their time thinking about the patient experience. Statistically, it’s something people my age — late 30s — are less likely to have to think about, but it’s been on my mind a lot in the last year for personal reasons as well as professional, since I gave birth to my 1yo daughter last April, to my 11yo’s recent visit to the ER for stitches and now with my dad’s very recent diagnosis and hospitalization.

Any business can give you a great customer experience, from the hardware store to your cell phone provider to the dry cleaner. But we put up with a lot of shoddy service from many of our daily interactions, don’t we? Exceptional customer service is the rarity.

I’m wondering, though, about industries like health care. When every interaction with your customer is potentially intensely personal, how much more important does the customer experience become? What are the downsides of screwing up — not with a medical decision, but with some service aspect of the relationship? Is it worse for the long-term customer relationship if a hospital doesn’t treat its patients and their families with service and caring, than if a restaurant staff is rude to you?

It’s an interesting question to me. It’s awfully easy to stop patronizing a restaurant, isn’t it? But I stuck with the same pediatric practice for 10 years, despite many more incorrect bills than right ones, and a rude staff to boot, because I liked the doctor so much and I really trusted her. When you’re dealing with life and death issues, it just feels like the responsibility to provide exceptional service is higher, but I’m not sure how we measure the results of poor service coupled with excellent medical care.

While I have seen those two incongruent things go hand-in-hand before, I’m glad to report that my dad and our family were delighted with both the caring attention and the medical care he received at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. I do have to wonder if high-quality medical care also tends to reflect in the level of overall patient-centered attitude at a hospital. What do you think?

Even in today’s still-uncertain economic times, I would argue that most marketers’ biggest problem is getting the necessary share of time, not share of wallet. In my working life, the time clutter problem has gotten to be the biggest issue for people in the modern economy, across industries.

And nonetheless, we’ve got products and services to sell to businesses and consumers who are just like us — suffering from calendar and inbox overload.

You can cut through the clutter momentarily with a media sensation — the right ad, the right YouTube video — or with PR, good or bad, surrounding something that catches public interest. But if you’re not making your customer’s life better and simpler, you’re not going to win in the long run.

The other night I was at a board meeting for a nonprofit agency I serve. And as sometimes happens at those kind of events, we participated in an icebreaker — you know, a get-to-know-your-fellow-board-members-better activity. Each person drew a question to ask the person to her right. Someone earlier around the table got the inevitable, “Who’s your hero/who has influenced you the most?” question. At the time, I breathed a huge sigh of relief — I can never answer that question. It’s not that many people haven’t influenced me. I could start now and go all day naming the good role models I’ve had. But “hero”? That elevates it too far, in my mind. In our society, we see heroes debunked daily [or hourly, this summer], and I struggle to burden another person with the hero moniker. We’re all just doing the best we can, I hope.

But I received my copy of the Good Experience email newsletter today, and I may need to revise my answer to that question. Mark Hurst may come pretty close to being my hero, after all.

In 1997 Mark Hurst founded the firm Creative Good, which remains groundbreaking in evaluating and improving the customer experience. I was lucky enough to attend his Gel Conference several years ago, and it remains far and away the most inspiring, useful conference I’ve ever attended. I continue to use what I learned there — mostly about your mindset in approaching your customers’ experience, as opposed to the specific tools you’re using at this moment. If you’re communicating well with, and responding well to the needs of, your customers, you’ll be successful.

Today, Mark highlighted a post on his blog that reminds us to review the big questions. Are we doing what we love? Is it worthwhile? What’s our real goal?

These questions seem critical to me. It’s so easy to get absorbed in a. the rat race b. media-fueled speculation about anything c. self-induced stress — whatever the economic or political situation, but perhaps more now than ever. And Mark gently reminds us, we need to remember what we’re doing in the first place. Take a look, and take stock of your own experience.

I’m easy. In fact, I’m a flat-out sucker for the director of support making a comment on my blog and apologizing for my problem.

I’ve complained in the past couple of days about some problems I had with Ning, and today, Laura G. from Ning let me know that in one instance, I’d actually run into a bug that they’ve now fixed.

So I will just add this as my final though on Ning for a while: It may be frustrating, but they are paying attention. So, thanks, Laura G.

Twitter’s been around since early 2007. It really started breaking out in the tech community after its debut at South by Southwest 2007. In the last several months, it’s grown significantly. I think the many mainstream media outlets sticking their toes in the water are having a big impact here, much as more Web- and tech-focused folks wouldn’t want to admit it.

I’ve used Twitter more and more in recent months, for two reasons:

• It helps me stay in touch with trends and thought leaders in digital media.
• I have a number of real-world friends using Twitter regularly.

Companies exploring Twitter usage now can take advantage of both of these areas, but significantly for organizations, when you find your customers are using a service like Twitter, your presence becomes a requirement.

As communications and technology continue to change rapidly, it’s critical that we continue to assess how our target market likes to find and receive information. To do that, we have to always be open to new possibilities ourselves.