You Have Huge Amounts of Data…so Why are you Starved of Knowledge?
Despite spending hours on the 'phone or online your customers are just not
connecting with you, resulting in angry customers hanging up and going elsewhere.
We are becoming more and more divided
by technology. Your customers' dread interactive voice-response, the on-hold
music that doubles the annoyance of queuing, the codes are all barriers to
effective communication.
The rage among your customers has reached an intensity, which is now
causing great damage to your relationship with your customers. We are now
dehumanising our customer relationships even more than conventional
advertising ever did, the very objective of which
was to do the exact opposite! Your customers appear to be invisible to
you except as computer generated stereotypes, while your organisation is
viewed as remote and unreachable causing stress and suspicion rather than
customer satisfaction.
According to a recent study by database software specialist Data Vantage.
Fully eighty nine percent of service providers are failing to deliver the
seamless service your customers want. Causing damage to your brands,
customers to defect, thus putting more pressure on sales. It would
appear that most customer information in to days service organisations,
expensively acquired, is wasted, and what does get through to Management is
contaminated, diluted or otherwise unusable. All this results in huge
amounts of waste. Companies are drowning in data however, they are, oddly
enough, starved of knowledge! All resulting from a
misunderstanding of that little word "Communication"! It would appear,
understandably I hasten to add, that one of the main reasons this frustration
and anger occurs, is when one of your customers calls your 'phone centre to
complain about a bill. and then they receive a threatening reminder through the
post a week later! In reality you and your customers are being divided
by technology, your relationship, conducted through computers has become so
depersonalised as to be dangerous to the very well being of your brands and
business. And sad to say any new channel of communication simply
increases management's' opportunity to repeat mistakes. For example if you
send an email, your call centre will not have seen it!
As we said earlier, all resulting from a complete misunderstanding of
that word "communication". So let us examine that word ˜communication'
a little more closely. The dictionary definition of communications is as follows:
Communication. n. 1. transmitting 2. A giving or exchange of information, etc.
by talk, writing b) the information so given 3. A means of communicating
4. The science of transmitting information. The interesting fact is the
expression 'the exchange of information' . Communication is not a one-way
flow of information. Talking at or to someone does not imply successful
communication. This only occurs when the receiver actually receives the
message, which the sender intended to send. Message rejection,
misinterpretation and misunderstanding are the opposite of effective
communication. However most marketing communication today depends on a
single-step communications model. A message sender, the message receiver.
This basic model assumes that the sender is active, whilst the receiver is
inactive or passive and the message is comprehended properly. In this case if
the message is creatively prepared and sent through the right medium and, if it
cuts through all the other noise, and then if it is decoded correctly the message
has done its job! In closing please allow me to stress that we are, despite
appearances, creating more problems than we realise, all this new technology
is doing is alienating your customers more than ever before. With all the other
problems, clutter, meaningless noise, mistrust, it is now vital that we rethink
our position on all commercial communication. The fact is that you, the Clients,
can literally halve your colossal marketing budgets and, armed with a true
interpretation and understanding of the word "communication" and be far more
cost effectiveâ¦on all counts!
