Porcupines Part IV: A Jack Russell Betrayed

Final post on porcupines, I promise. We’ve reviewed the regrettable things marketers do to perfectly lovely people that make them angry, demanding and rude. First we can ignore them. If that doesn’t work, there’s always cornering them with unnecessary or unwanted stuff and today we discuss the big one: Betraying them.  There are five ways (at least) companies can betray their customers and make some porcupines:

Don’t deliver
This can be a product that doesn’t work as promised or it can be a hideous experience with your service. It can be installers who don’t show up on time or products that arrive missing parts or manuals. Airlines and hotels are famous for porcupine-making on this level. I guarantee you can watch a spunky, friendly Jack Russell Terrier turn into a porcupine right in front of you by asking them about a terrible hotel stay or an airline issue.  Interestingly, two of the brands we hold up as examples of customer service excellence are Ritz-Carlton and Southwest Airlines . What do they do that’s special? They deliver as promised almost all the time and if they don’t they make it right.

Set them up badly
Probably this is part of delivering but so many companies do it so badly that it merits its own little mention here.  Somewhere between the sales person shaking the customer’s hand and running off with the big cheque, and the installer, trainer or service person showing up to deliver whatever was sold, a rift in space-time occurs. This is the only possible explanation I can find for the repeated inability of most businesses to get their customers up and running properly. It applies to software, telecommunications, catering, call centre outsourcing, window washing and probably even outplacement services. If you’ve worked in an office for any length of time, you have seen this illustration of the space-time issue.

I wish Stephen Hawking would work on this instead of whatever he’s wasting his time on. We need this solved. It makes Porcupines.

Treat them like a consumer
This is for those of you who work for a consumer-centric company that also happens to have business customers. It’s hard enough to get the perky teenage models off the sell sheets and replace them with men in suits, but it’s even trickier to get stuff done when your call centre greets business people with their first name and asks about the weather.

If you sell to businesses, you need to be set up to sell to businesses. That means call centres that don’t close when the streetlights come on, and a basic understanding that when something doesn’t work in a business, someone isn’t making money. And when someone isn’t making money, they are growing quills.

Don’t fix things
In some recent research I discovered a startling fact: business people get it when other business people can’t always deliver. They understand that what you do is complicated and probably doesn’t work 100 percent of the time. That’s because what they do is also complicated and doesn’t work all the time. And they know how that conversation goes and they know how it ought to end. It ought to end with three things:

1. an apology
2. an acknowledgement that the failure to deliver is being taken seriously
3. a prioritized fix

Do this and the quills go away and the Jack Russell comes back out to play. Lie about the situation, treat it frivolously, diminish in anyway the impact on someone’s business or forget to say you’re sorry and all bets are off.

Finally, of course, fix it. Send your best, not your cheapest, people to make it right. Take the time to train them about how to work with business customers and don’t let them leave or hang up until everything is working just fine in the customer’s view.

Be an idiot
It’s a good thing Steve Jobs makes such pretty and wonderful things. Because on every other level he’s an idiot. He’s arrogant, disrespectful, dismissive. So is Heinz, the ketchup company, which managed to turn its biggest fan into an epic porcupine by shutting down his Facebook page celebrating their product. Idiots.

IBM paid for its decades of idiocy a few years back and Lou had to bail them out.  Goldman Sachs, General Motors and other recent idiots needed U.S. taxpayers to bail them out.  At some level, everyone of them betrayed a bunch of Jack Russells.

So the final  point on pointy creatures is this. If you are anything but humble, respectful and accommodating, you are an idiot and that will come back to haunt you like a stupid dog in a barn full of porcupines.

Extra Reading If you want to explore the world of terrible travel experiences, check out Doug Lansky. His wonderful Titanic Awards website is long gone, but his book of the same title is around and he is  worth checking out as a keynote speaker.