Loyalty marketing needs to go back to basics. I had two short experiences this week that demonstrated the power of customer service –and the lack thereof. It revealed a big gap in marketing designed more to target, than to retain customers. First stop, New York Times Square. Picking up some touristy items from a sidewalk vendor, I was amazed at how much time the seller took to find out exactly what I was looking for. Notwithstanding NYC’s reputation for impatience (yes, those ever-swearing cab drivers) this was a polite, no-pressure interaction.

This is a guy who probably doesn’t need to think about repeat purchases, brand image and loyalty programs. The way he conducted his transaction made me feel this could easily have been an experience one has at Macy’s or Banana Republic that trains people to follow certain steps in ‘delighting’ the customer and all that. His ‘store’ may move several times a week. His brand may not be tied to the traditional things like logos and url’s, and yet, this one individual left an indellible mark on what good marketing is all about: customer relationships.

By comparison, I accompanied my lawyer friend to a T-Mobile store in New Jersey to report the loss of a cellphone, get a new SIM card and see what he could do in the interim. Before that, a call to customer service was terribly unhelpful, because of a simple thing like a personal identification number. The person at the other end of the line could NOT (or would not) tell him if there had been any outgoing calls from his phone nless he remembered his PIN. (He had never used it and forgotten what it was).

The alternative was to log into T-Mobile’s site, create a password and check the phone activity online. Sounds nice in theory, in this everything-ought-to-be-online world. But there was a tiny problem. Logging in would generate a password that would be sent back to the customer on his phone. Never mind that it was lost! We tried several work arounds but the basic fact was this: the customer service person was not empowered to circumvent the guidelines. The only recourse was to drive down to the mall and get help at the store.

So what do you do with ‘customer care’ when the second part of that word is taken off the equation? l am a loyal T-Mobile customer, and truly like their offering. But it makes me wonder, what use is all the expensive branding, stores, and advertising, if the people who work for the organization, who are front and center of that brand identity, cannot do what a street vendor does? My friend’s ‘loyalty’ is certainly up for grabs. And don’t even get me started about the discounted price of phones that existing customers don’t get in most companies…

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I love PowerPoint. I hate PowerPoint. Sometimes it’s a lot like the telphone –both effective communication tool and absolute nuisance. Actually phones aren’t so addictive/seductive to corporate communicators. There is no style guide for having a conversation on a phone! Hands up all those who groan when someone launches a PPT file at a meeting, using a few slides that say nothing?

Everything today seems to get funneled through a PPT presentation, as if there is no other story-telling, employee-inspiring method of running a meeting. But that’s not my only complaint. It’s the fact that people spend inordinate amounts of time trying to ‘craft’ the thing, style guide in hand, aiming at the coolness factor, while forgetting the main thing: the recipient. To use the phone analogy, it’s like having to sit down and write up ‘talking points,’ polish the vocabulary, adjust the volume, and plan on intonation every time you dial a number to talk to someone.

Templates are useful, but they ought to be in the service of the message, not the other way around. Fellow IABC-er Jerry Stevenson once observed that PowerPoint

"has become the virtual cave
painting of modern office communication. Anything that is remotely
visual, and a few things that aren’t, ends up being slapped into
PowerPoint and sent around via e-mail or posted to Web sites."

Unless someone’s been been living under a rock (meaning an eighties-style intranet) he/she probably knows and uses other modern tools of communicating internally and externally.  PPT is a left over from the C and C (command and control, confusing and cocky) era, but it doesn’t have to be. Let’s use PPT effectively, and with purpose, but let’s get out of the paleolithic era, shall we?

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I came across* a thought-provoking observation from Bob Metcalfe in 1981 He said:

"There are two kinds of people in the data processing world: (1) those
who draw a box with lines coming out of it; and (2) those who draw a
line with boxes coming off of it. The former are computer-centric, the
latter network-centric."

The box-with-lines crowd, we meet everyday. They see the world through PowerPoint templates and org charts, and fit everything into templates. They’re not comfortable with, er, linking outside the template! The line-with-boxes people understand the value of networks, interaction, and don’t care where the next idea comes from, whether it’s from the programmer, the receptionist, or gleaned off the dust jacket of a book on someone’s desk.

One of the ideas of Metcalfe’s Law, ("the community value of a network grows as the square of the number of its users increase") as you may know, anticipated and probably seeded the idea for Web 2.0 applications such as Flikr, LinkedIn, Digg, YouTube and more recently, WriteBoard, and NoteMesh.

I enjoy working with network-centric people. There’s hardly a day when someone from outside the org chart of my everyday work doesn’t ask, task, share, or collaborate. Without such inputs, marketers and communicators would be easily replaced by machines, or drones.

* The Metcalfe quote was in a very good article at MarketingProfs, by Roger von Oech.

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