Tag Archives: Comcast

Jun 03

Ex post facto customer service

Posted on by

Complaint Ask the average public relations executive if she understands customer service and employs it as part of an integrated communications solutions set and you'll receive a resounding, 'Absolutely!'

She'll proudly point to her complete mastery of social media, cite endless examples of how she's used blogs and tweets to better serve a client's customer and be equally quick to point with pride at how she 'solved' a customer's complaint by 'taking the offending conversation offline' and figuring out a solution.

I'd call that ex post facto customer service.

What the average public relations executive DOESN'T realize is that, when it comes to customer service, we're actually part of the problem and not the solution. Why? There's a number of reasons. The macro ones are best enumerated in a superb Harvard Business Review piece authored by Bruce Upbin.

The more mundane reason we PR practitioners don't get customer service is rather obvious (if consistently overlooked or ignored). We eagerly partner with marketing communications to push out campaigns touting the corporation's faster, better, easier-to-use, more cost effective, safer, sleeker, sexier, more stylish, more reliable product or service without EVER involving the very same organization's customer care people in the messaging creation. Nor, do we EVER put ourselves in a client's customer's shoes and experience the brand from the purchaser's POV before crafting copy or pitches. Experiencing the brand is critical because it's no longer enough to hold traditional, and sometimes staid, focus groups to "understand the customer." Focus groups are not the equivalent of truly immersing MARCOMM in the customer experience and are simply not enough when making the linkage between brand promise and customer experience. As a result, we're fully culpable for reinforcing a brand promise that's inside-out in its creation, inconsistent at times and, in some cases, the EXACT opposite of what the customer or prospect experiences.

The end result is an angry, confused customer, lost sales and a damaged image and reputation. Want some examples? Look no further than Comcast, Toyota, Goldman Sachs, or just about any airline, insurance or telecommunications company. Their marketing campaigns extol such virtues as superior service, consistent results, employee pride and low-cost, dependable service. But, we all know the exact opposite to be true.

And, yet we PR types beam with pride and do a big chest bump whenever an editor, analyst or prospective client asks who owns social media nowadays. Why, we do. PR SHOULD own it we say, because we understand the conversation better than those evil one-way, talk at you advertising or digital types.

But, what we don't know (or don't care to know) is that most corporation's organizational structures are broken. They separate marketing communications from customer care and, indeed, treat the latter as the office ghetto. Intelligence coming into customer care from actual customers could be used to make the product or service better or find out what customers are thinking in real time. But there are often no channels internally for those in marketing, customer care and product development to exchange information and hear from customers regularly and robustly.

So nobody in the company has a stake in the whole customer experience, except the customers, who often end up knowing a company better than its employees. Customers have to talk to and deal with different parts of the company that never speak to each other. Office ghettos and silos foster a culture where people only focus on their part of the business and damn the rest. Ghettos and silos stiffle creativity, innovation and the ability to care about the customer. As a result, there are fundamental gaps between what an organization promises and what we, the customers, actually experience. And, if we PR types were REALLY smart and strategic, we'd figure out ways bridge those gaps.

I'm not suggesting my firm is REALLY smart or strategic, but guess what? Thanks to a superb strategic partnership, we're putting the pieces in place to begin closing the aforementioned gap and better align what a brand promises and a customer experiences. And, when we've perfected it dear Virginia, I believe it will usher in a new era in which PR people really do GET customer service.

Until then, I've got to run. Comcast just disrupted my on-demand service for the 30,000th time. And, I need to raise holy hell. But, they'll keep on telling me they're just Comcastic on every single TV commercial.

Feb 25

You aren’t what you say you are (unless the customer agrees)

Posted on by

Shout out to Emily Yellin for suggesting this idea.

image from farm4.static.flickr.com It’s interesting to think about brands that have touted their strengths or points of differentiation in taglines only to have the customer experience turn out to be the polar opposite. Consider just a few examples:

  • BP’s ‘Beyond petroleum.’ There’s no need to recount how many journalists, pundits and comedians lambasted the initials and tagline in the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill.
  • Merrill Lynch’s ‘thundering herd’ of financial advisors were a breed apart. They sure were, especially after the firm experienced a massive meltdown as the real estate bubble burst and the markets collapsed. Today, what’s left of the thundering herd is corralled inside parent company, BOA. 
  • Toyota’s ‘Moving forward’ which, after a series of highly-publicized accidents caused by acceleration pedal problems, became a nasty, daily reminder of the automaker’s crisis.
  • And then there’s the perpetual bad boy of branding: Comcast. Thanks to its horrific customer service, Comcast’s ‘Comcastic’  boast may be the gold standard for never living up to a brand promise.  

There’s an amazingly simple way to avoid these disconnects: put yourself in customer’s shoes before ever attempting to frame marketing messages. 

Ian Wylie, a Forrester analyst, tracks customer service and blogged about a rare, best practice in Fast Company. In the text, Wylie profiled David McQuillen of Credit Suisse, who continually places himself and his C-suite bosses in the shoes of the customer (note: McQuillen has moved on since the 2007 blog was written and is now with OCBC Bank in Singapore). For example, he’s made the top brass visit local branch banks, stand in line, exchange foreign currency and ask customers questions. He’ll then take them back to the office, have them surf the company’s web site and attempt to check interest rates and fill out application forms. He brought a meeting of the bank’s 200 top managers to a complete standstill when he pulled out a speaker phone and dialed the customer service line. McQuillen said he saw ‘…fear in their faces, because they didn’t know what the experience was going to be.’ McQuillen said the bank has five million customer interactions a month and questioned how many, if any, managers had any clue about the quality of those interactions. 

McQuillen is one of the few visionaries in an emerging field that recognizes inside-out marketing no longer works. Time Magazine may have declared you and me (the consumer) as ‘person of the year’ a while back, but the vast majority of marketers don’t get it (we recently surveyed 75 CMOs and found that 75 percent had never experienced their brand as a customer). For the most part, marketers still craft campaigns that tout their best-in-class product or service without ever experiencing said product or service from the customer’s point of view.  

We’re digging deep into this yawning gap and are slipping into the shoes of CFOs, moms and other ‘consumers’ to experience a brand online, on the phone and in person. We’re also determining exactly where a purchase consideration is being made. 

We’re not nearly as street smart as McQuillen who, in an attempt to make his bank do more to help customers with disabilities use its branches, offices, web site and call centers, made each member of his team spend a day in wheelchair. They also wore weighted suits to re-create what it’s like to be 70-years-old and had them eat lunch in the dark, courtesy of local Zurich restaurant called the Blind Cow (where all the waiting staff are visually impaired). What a superb way to understand the customer before making the necessary tweaks to better connect with them! McQuillen’s even gone on the speaking circuit to explain what it was like to be wheelchair-bound for a day. 

I’m no McQuillen, but it’s pretty easy to see what he’s seen: You aren’t what you say you are unless the customer agrees. So, paraphrasing the Hippocratic Oath, ‘marketer, heal thyself.’”

Dec 23

The four things in life one can count on

Posted on by

There are four things in life one can count on:Comcastic_1ebd1

1.) Death
2.) Taxes
3.) Horrific service from NJ Transit (which is experiencing daylong, system-wide delays as we speak)
4.) Quarterly service disruptions from Comcast

The latter is a particular source of ongoing misery. For some reason, Comcast yanks the plug on my on-demand service every two months or so. And, every two months or so, I find myself stuck in their customer service voice mail hell (which, had it existed in Dante's time, would have been included in his 'Inferno').

On the other hand, Comcast has built a world-class social media response network designed to counteract its abysmal service side. So, here's a pre-holiday plea from a blogger in need. Comcast Social Media Guy: can you get involved and helped me get my on-demand service back ASAP? If you do, I promise to write a favorable follow-up blog as a kind of virtual stocking stuffer for you.

Oct 28

Not delivering on the brand promise

Posted on by

I never cease to be amazed how many organizations still don't 'get' the concept of a brand promise. They don't understand they need to deliver the brand experience they promise in their tagline, positioning and marketing messages.

October 28 - comcast Comcast is a great example of a brand that doesn't deliver on its promise. The huge cable systems operator has been running its 'Comcastic' campaign for years. But, as any Comcast subscriber will tell you, the service (and, in particular, the customer service) is anything but fantastic. It's positively dreadful. A better, more realistic brand promise from Comcast might be: 'ComPoor' or 'ComAwful." A brand shouldn't raise consumers expectations by promising one experience and then delivering another.

New Jersey Transit is my personal bête noir. The local transit system heralds itself as 'the way to go.' Now, anyone who routinely rides NJT's trains will tell you it is anything BUT the way to go. It's a necessary evil that one has to take because alternative solutions are either cost or location prohibitive. NJT trains are habitually late, staffed by rude or indifferent conductors and feature restrooms that are definitely NOT the way (or place) to go.

I originally suggested the powers that be at NJT supplant 'The way to go' with 'Just train bad.' I think they may not have understood my purposeful double entendre and ignored it. So, instead, I'm suggesting NJT adopt a shorter, more direct brand promise that perfectly manages expectations and can be delivered every single day. I'm calling it: 'expect less.'

I love 'expect less.' It works in every conceivable way. In fact, I've actually adopted 'expect less' as my personal, tongue-in-cheek brand promise for my upcoming year as chairman of the College of Charleston advisory board. 

Speaking of the CofC, Tom Martin, executive-in-residence at the College of Charleston (and one of the all-time great Peppercom clients, btw) recently created a classic brand promise slide you should check out.

Download Brand and Reputation

It lists what brands say about themselves and what we, as consumers, really think about them. It's worth a gander.