Giraffe Bread and what it teaches us about service
By Nick Geoghegan, 26/01/2012
If you can’t read the letters, here’s a full size version of the photo
A great picture here of a conversation between a 3 1/2 year old child and a 27 1/3 year old customer service representative. So often, the personality and identity of large organisations, such as Sainsbury’s (a UK Supermarket), gets lost behind walls of best practise and automated responses.
While I wouldn’t necessarily describe Sainsbury’s as a challenger brand, this is the type of response you would expect from great challengers like Zappo’s, Virgin America and innocent smoothies.
It’s a Challenger behaviour that we’ve begun to see more and more. And that is the simple act of not treating your customers like idiots. I think it comes from the idea that a customer who has chosen your brand, your challenger brand, surely must be pretty smart.
Basic, you’d think, but it seems that the vast majority of brands assume you are a dribbling banjo-playing moron, who having been duped into being a customer by lowest common denominator marketing, now needs to be lulled with platitudes, scripts and crackling pan-pipe covers of Girls Aloud.
I am writing a much longer, more boring blog on this (and have been writing it for months to much amusement of other ebf-ers), but this was such a good example, I had to share.
“The simple act of not treating your customers like idiots.”
For many brands I think it’s more a case of treating your consumers (small c) like Customers (big C). This isn’t an issue for Sainsbury because they sell direct to the end user. Consumers and Customers are one and the same for them.
But for packaged good brands, Sainsbury is the Customer. Customers get one to one contact, they get listened to, they get entertained. Consumers are only seen and heard a few times a year from behind a two way mirror in a focus group viewing studio.
One of the biggest impacts of digitally enabled social interactions has been to amplify the marketing impact of good customer service. Social channels allow brands to treat consumers like Customers.
It is c2C marketing (treating consumers like Customers).
These interactions are more powerful than advertising at an individual level. The strategic challenge is how to achieve broadcast scale.
Very nicely put Phil, I really like the idea of c2C marketing.
It is certainly easier for retailers like Sainsbury to do this, or any other brand with regular consumer interaction – though there are still few who do it brilliantly.
But I do think there are certainly things that packaged goods companies do, without the need for it to be digital.
innocent’s packaging is a great example, as is Yorkie’s “Not for girls” and also Huggies’ approach to mothers and their children. All of these examples “spoke” to their consumers, way before digital was even an option.
Its extremely impressive to see customer services dealing with a 3yrs old feedback with some sense of equality, giving the 3yrs old equal amount of attention given to an adult. An easy way out of it is to adress the parent/guardian, to maintain brand tone and avoid communication risks. Or even worst, ignoring it.
Its impressive too that 3yrs olds can comprehend the concept of communicating with a brand.
In my world, when building a customer service platform on Facebook and Twitter, there are natural screeners that screen out those who are younger than 13 years old. Nevertheless, that screener doesn’t exist on certain direct online communication platforms, and makes me think “setting brand communication with a child guidelines might be more of a requirement than a smart-to-have at some point”
All in all, very interesting post.