This blog is about improving the relationship between organizations and the people who work for them. And, it’s dedicated to the millions of people around the world who go to work every day wanting to do a great job.
Customer
From the inside looking out
Earlier in my career I worked for one of the most admired brands in Canada. It’s the kind of thing that makes you proud. You walk into any situation and people are all over you about how great it must be. Except it wasn’t. The buzz and hype had created an external brand that didn’t match the internal reality.
What brings this to mind is that two more of the world’s most powerful and valued brands have taken big hits to their reputations in the past few weeks. And both of them for misleading customers.
DELL is accused of hiding significant and potentially dangerous technical issues from their business customers. Recently unsealed lawsuit documents reveal cover-up and purposeful deception that may have gone on for years.
Apple’s iphone customers have complained of dropped calls since the first iphone hit the market. They were told it was a network problem. A small problem of design which meant you just had to hold it a certain way. Then a software problem. Now, according to consumer reports the phone’s hardware is flawed. And it looks like Apple may have known about this problem for some time.
The thing is when we say DELL and Apple knew and have been misleading customers, we mean DELL and Apple employees knew and have been misleading customers. Certainly not all employees new. But, most certainly some of them did. And, no doubt many of them suspected the truth.
What’s it like to be on the inside of brands like these? To know that the customer’s brand experience is build in whole or in part on a myth. To know that if anyone really took a look behind the curtain they’d find behaviours that were questionable if not unethical or illegal. To know that your boss or your colleague is misleading you?
Rising employee cynicism and plummeting trust in leadership tell the tale. So the next time you’re asked how communications can help reverse these trends don’t start drafting new and better messages to push. Stop yourself from building a inspiring internal campaign or refreshing the intranet. Do start thinking about how you can help set the conditions for getting the right conversations going with the right people around where and how the employee experience is not aligned with the brand and discovering what needs to change.
Some additional reading
I went to see if I could find the values statements for DELL and Apple. Read in the context of what is in the news now, they are pretty interesting.
- Check out Dell’s official ‘Soul of Dell’
- Apples doesn’t publish its values statement on the web, but I did find a pdf post that looks pretty credible. If the actual values statement “customer empathy” is especially chilling.
And, I’ve been following the animated discussion on the smoke and mirrors of employer branding with Sean Trainor at CIPR Inside that adds another dimension to this post.
Random Posts:
Friendly. Not familiar.
There’s been a lot of talk about making organizations more human from a customer point of view lately. I think the most recent iteration of this idea has been inspired by Design Thinking and the role of empathy in customer relationships [thanks Dan Gray and the gang at CommScrum for getting me reading this literature].
The idea is that if you really understand and care about your customers and show it you can build long-term sustainable relationships with them. Not exactly breakthrough thinking.
Anyway it’s not the idea that’s bad. The idea’s fantastic. And there are organizations that do it and do it well. It’s authentically who they are. The problem starts when not particularly nice organizations decide they are going to institutionalize niceness. And, a recent post by Julien Smith got me thinking about something that had just happened to me.
A story. I called my bank about something a few weeks ago and the person on the end of the phone asked if she could call me Deborah [a little familiar] and then began using my name in every second sentence. Then she asked if she could wish me happy birthday… it was the next week. I felt completely creeped me out.
My grandmother ran her own business successfully for years. Her mantra: “Be friendly. Not familiar.” This clearly broke that rule. This woman didn’t know me. I didn’t know her. I wasn’t calling for a personal relationship with her. I wanted to complete a transaction with the institution. This was simply a pretence of friendly. It was manipulative. She knew it and I knew it.
And this got me thinking about what it must be like to be an employee in an organization that’s decided it’s time to be warm and friendly with customers when the organization has never been warm and friendly before.
Imagine you’re the employee who’s asked to behave this way. You’re given the scripts – customer says “x”, service rep says “y”. If you’re the Borg it’s perfect. If you’re a customer service rep who’s really trying to understand a customer need and meet it? Not so much. It must get pretty hollow pretty fast for the employee. I know it did for the customer.
What do you think? Can you be more human from a customer point of view when you aren’t from an employee point of view? Can organizations institutionalize empathy?
Post script – Had to call the bank again this morning and different person same script… although this lady didn’t ask for permission, just asked if this was Deborah and promptly hung up on me twice! I’m really feeling the love.
Random Posts:
Learning from the Vatican [part 2]
At the time, I found the nun’s description of the disciplined efficiency of the Vatican communication at once awe inspiring and horrifying [see earlier post]. And, even more now as every day brings news of new sexual abuse scandals and questions about who knew what and when?
I have no ‘inside’ knowledge and use the situation of the Church to explore what can and does go wrong in organizations and perhaps gain some understanding of what that might mean to us as communicators.
As an organization, the Church had much that corporate communicators wish for:
- A clarity of vision, mission and values [more on this later]
- A trusted and recognized brand
- Strong and visible and articulate leadership
- Powerful rituals and symbols
- A relationship rather than a transactional focus to clients
- Few layers between the CEO to the front line
- A structured and disciplined approach to communicating
- A continuous flow of rich information out of HQ and back from the ‘front lines’
- A global network of potential communicators [priests] who by calling and training are more empathetic than your average manager
- Opportunity for weekly conversation with clients and potential clients.
So, what happened? And what can we learn from this? [to follow]
Random Posts:
“No charges after Axor exec’s trip”
Imagine you’re an employee at Axor, a large Montreal development company. You wake up one day earlier this month to read that your president and chairman has been arrested and jailed in Florida for drug possession. Turns out he was carrying valium and didn’t have his prescription with him. So the good news is that the arrest was the result of a silly technicality. How many of us carry our prescriptions with us when we travel? You’re sympathetic and probably supportive.
The less good news is that you now know your top executive is taking prescription drugs to reduce anxiety.
What’s he so anxious about that he’s taking valium? If it’s about business should you be anxious too? If it’s something else can he be fully focused on the business and on this drug?
So from a communication point of this little moment is interesting and potentially instructive.
As an institution when, what and how would you communicate on this with employees? clients? Or would you?