Tuesday 16 December 2008

Two million mistakes

So, a marketing agency has been fired because of innacuracy in the statistics it used in its mailings. According to the report, 2m out of 184m of the letters mailed in the last few years, have been 'wrong'.

You could argue that this is a special case, because it involves the BBC, which has become supremely sensitive to any allegations of impropriety after various episodes of phone-vote rigging and lapses in editorial standards.

Or you could look at the absolute numbers, and say two million letters with avoidable errors constitutes a great deal of damage to public trust.

Or look again, and see that the whole story is based on one complaint to a national newspaper, a newspaper which had already embarked on a campaign against the BBC. And the complaint was triggered by the receipt by one person of duplicate mailings which carried different statistics.

So actually the _real_ mistake
was to mail the duplicate, with different data.

How much do you trust the process you use to ensure you only mail people once? Do you think you need to understand it a little better?


photo: www.ClownInsurance.co.uk (yes, really)

Monday 15 December 2008

Basics

A couple of weeks ago, those nice people at British Gas decided to send its customers a heartwarming message about its commitment to the environment. I received a small box containing four low-energy lightbulbs, and a nice leaflet explaining how much money they might help me save.

Except - and stop me if you've heard this before ...

1. I got two boxes, a couple of days apart
2. The name on one of the letters was wrong
3. The salutation on both letters was gibberish
4. The postman had to knock on the door each time, because the box would not fit through the letterbox (or indeed _any_ letterbox, so his round that week was taking a very long time indeed, about which of course he was rather upset)

Arrange the following words into a well-known phrase or saying: foot, shoot, the, in, yourself

I think I understand how this has happened. At the same time I am speechless at the waste, ignorance and arrogance the whole thing betrays.

The letter was signed by the Managing Director. I may not be the first to be writing him a slightly more carefully crafted response.

Monday 8 December 2008

Crunch?

1. The local coffee shop says it has never been busier, and they are surprised, as they expected to be an early casualty of people cutting back on discretionary spending.

2. A household name in doors and windows quoted us a laugh-out-loud high price for a replacement door, admitted that 'they don't sell many of these', and ended the call.

3. One of our many local charity shops is dutifully offering '3 for 2' packs of its (charity!) Christmas cards.

It's a confusing picture of the economy at the moment, almost as if we don't quite know how we're supposed to behave.

Picture: 30cakesin30days

Friday 5 December 2008

Utopia

Attended a briefing session yesterday from the Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Not only was the content fascinating, it was also interesting to listen to the language being used.

One initiative in development, Utopia, is actually an exercise in the management of the complete customer lifecycle (the Chief Exec calls it the 'patient experience', and acknowledge that they are at the 'foothills' of this approach).

They are developing a programme of 'Evidence Based Design' which will involve patients in the re-design of the way care is provided.

There is acute awareness of the challenges of the marketplace which has been created by the changes in funding and oversight of the health service.

It's a hugely complex organisation, with 700,000 patients / customers a year. And it's starting to talk about the patients' perspective, and how to incorporate that into service delivery. For an organisation whose processes were mostly built in the 1940s, it's impressive stuff. What are you doing at your company?

photo: Frank C Muller