The Bad Pitch Blog is an entertaining, albeit harrowing, waltz through our industry, showcasing the epic fails of the worst of our colleagues. A recent post highlighted the unfortunate correspondence between a journalist looking to become a PR practitioner and a prospective employer. It’s not pretty.

MediaBistro summarized the piece late last week, offering its own two cents on the matter.

Regular followers of this blog will know that lousy customer service is one subject certain to get my rant on. My consistent points are that the cost of acquiring customers is almost always far higher than the cost of keeping them, that effective customer service is the only sustainable competitive differentiator, and that most customer-service operations fail by forcing their agents to be powerless automatons more interested in getting the customer off the line than actually servicing them.

So while browsing through the WhyHire.Me blog of my pal Andy Church today, I was delighted to come across his happy experience with what he called empowered customer service from Canadian cellular carrier Rogers Wireless. The fact that he gives a shout-out to what, in my experience, is one of the least helpful categories of customer-service providers in existence, cellular telephone companies, makes it all the more necessary to give his experience a broader airing.

Technorati Tags: Customer service, Andy Church, Rogers Wireless

Senator Ted Kennedy died late yesterday, the latest tragedy in the long string to befall the family that has so captivated the world these last 50 years. His passing is also the latest high-profile death to spawn a flurry of internet traffic, blog posts, Tweets, and the like.

Being a child of the 80s, it has been a rough year, with iconic figures like Michael Jackson and John Hughes, director of some of my favourite movies, passing away unexpectedly, shocking their many followers.

We truly live in an era of mass communication. Sometimes that brings us together, other times it alienates us. In times when people need to have even a virtual shoulder to cry on, the many means of expression available to them, the virtual support system at their ready disposal is of great comfort indeed.

Bob Lefsetz, editor of the Lefsetz Letter, a music industry trade newsletter, was on the Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos last year talking about just how messed up the music industry is (quite) and he touched on the fact that in today’s modern age, there is so much media available that we’re less connected to one another. Ironically, the glut of media channels meant to provide us with more content, ostensibly, one assumes, in order to provide us with more cultural touch points to be able to discuss with one another, is providing each of us with customized content that it’s unlikely that any of our friends or contacts are aware of. His example was a television show that he’d seen and adored that aired on an obscure cable channel and despite his evangelism about the program, had yet to meet another human who had seen it.

These recent high profile deaths and the public’s reaction to them represent the flip side to Lefsetz’s argument. When Michael Jackson died, it was said that he almost took the internet with him, so compelled were his legions of fans to flock to news sites, to write blog posts about what his music had meant to them, what his impact on our society had been, some to mock, others to mourn…

What can we as modern marketers learn from this? In the same way that on a personal level the many channels available to us can draw us closer or push us further apart, they accomplish the same when used for business, for promotion. The media channels are many, the messages on them innumerable, but focused messaging on the proper channels can bring your market closer, can provide them with the niche information that they need, can, in short, sell more of your stuff.

When baggage handlers for U.S. air carrier United Airlines manhandled and broke Dave Carroll’s beloved, custom-made, $3,500 Taylor acoustic guitar while he and his band-mates looked in impotent disbelief from inside the aircraft, and then refused to compensate him for it, the Canadian musician didn’t get mad, he got even. He wrote a song, “United Breaks Guitars,” posted it on YouTube and, nearly five-million viewings later, Carroll has become the lyrical poster-boy for disgruntled airline passengers everywhere and United is learning very difficult and expensive lessons about the power of the individual in the age of social media.

The key lesson United needs to learn here is that it broke much more than Carroll’s guitar. It broke the cardinal rule of customer service and it broke my first law of competitive differentiation. That law states that the only sustainable competitive differentiation for most companies in today’s economy is superior customer service. In an era where a technological advantage lasts only as long as it takes competitors to reverse engineer your product or leap-frog over it with an innovation of their own, and where a price advantage erodes just as swiftly as your competitors can off-shore their own manufacturing, keeping your customers happy is the sole long-term strategy you can employ to develop and sustain a sharp differentiation from those competitors.

In the challenging world of airline travel, where every operator goes to the same places at the same time for much the same price, it’s the only differentiator.

Canada’s WestJet Airlines, which used to be an upstart little operation out of Calgary, has stolen fully 37 percent of the domestic airline business right out from under the nose of the once-monopolistic Air Canada by emphasising and delivering on a promise to treat its customers better. Air Canada’s reputation for lousy customer service is so well established I have named my annual award for the worst customer-service experience of the year after the airline and one of its (surprise!) baggage people who displayed the same indifference that drove Carroll to song.

Superior customer service doesn’t mean nothing will ever go wrong, and you’ll never have a disgruntled customer on your hands. However, if you assume an orientation from the outset that says your customers will be well treated, it’s amazing how many fewer things will actually go wrong and how forgiving those consumers will be when they do. And when something does go wrong, superior customer service is all about setting it right again. It’s all about how you treat customers in good times and in bad.

When I awarded the 2008 edition of my “Air Canada-Harold McGowan Memorial Award for Truly Egregious Customer Service” to the Canadian online DVD-rental service Zip back in November, the post I wrote on our blog unleashed a fury of responses the likes of which I had never before or since experienced. I had to block most of them because they were simply frothing-at-the-mouth irrational and offensive. And they completely missed the point. My complaint was much less about my actual experience with the service, which, in my view, had deteriorated substantially over the few years I was a subscriber, and all about the utterly indifferent response I got from Zip’s customer-service people.

One more recent responder, whose slightly more reasonable comment I now wish I had actually allowed, told me I wasn’t the centre of the universe. How completely wrong. As a customer, I am exactly the centre of the universe since no company will have a universe without customers.

Taylor Guitars, by way of sharp contrast to United, offered to repair Carroll’s guitar for free and further capitalised with a YouTube video of their own directing viewers to their web site to learn more about how to protect your guitar when travelling.

The singer himself has shot to newfound stardom and is booking new gigs left, right and centre, and the world awaits the second in what he promises will be a trilogy of songs about his experiences with United. He has also turned down all new offers of compensation from United, saying it had its chance to deal properly with his complaint. (In fact, the second song promises to be all about United customer-relations agent Ms. Irlweg who, Carroll says, was the last person at United to tell him he would be receiving no compensation.)

And United? Well, the Times of London claimed the fallout delivered a 10 per cent hit to United’s stock price, costing its shareholders about $180-million. It would be nice to think a consumer backlash of this nature could cause that kind of real pain to an unfeeling global corporation, but the stock-price dive probably had more to do with lousy second-quarter results that were released as Carroll’s video was going viral. Still, the airline and its utterly indifferent front-line agents, whom Carroll names and shames in his catchy and witty song, have become the laughing stock of the world wide web.

Update: The second in Carroll’s trilogy of revenge hymns is now up on YouTube.

Technorati Tags: Customer service, Dave Carroll, United, Westjet, Air Canada, Taylor Guitars, social media, YouTube

The last year for me has been filled with work of a different sort entirely.

It’s hard to believe that I bid a fond farewell to the blogosphere just over one year ago, as I went on maternity leave. We welcomed wee Parker in early September of last year and since he was last written about in this forum, he’s changed from a baby to a little boy, toddling around, saying first words, changing our world in so many delightful ways.

I returned from leave to find some new clients in the stable, some familiar clients with new stories to tell and a heavy schedule of releases and launches slated for the Fall. It’s a busy time here at inmedia and I’m glad to be back on board to help lighten the load of my colleagues, connect with clients new and old and get back in touch with the media and analyst targets on their behalf.

As Francis has said, we’re renewing our commitment to the blog and look forward to reconnecting with our readers and with other writers in the marketing and PR realms online.

It’s been an interesting spring and summer here at inmedia.

The global economic downturn undoubtedly had its impact on us. Although we are headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, we have not been an Ottawa agency for a long time now. Over the past few years, we have worked for clients in Kelowna, Calgary, Toronto, Montréal, Halifax, Fredericton, Moncton and St. John’s. Outside Canada, for many years we have had a substantial footprint in Scotland, where we have clients in Glasgow and Livingston, and we have worked for clients in Farnborough and London in England. In the U.S., we’ve had clients in Boston, Jersey City, Chicago, San Jose and Phoenix.

Based on this extensive geographic diversification, we thought we might be able to better weather the economic storms that began to rage last year.

We were wrong.

Though our clients might be almost everywhere, they are, in the main, selling into just one market — the U.S. enterprise. And that market is a very badly wounded beast that is only now, and very tentatively, beginning to get back on its feet. As our clients cancelled or delayed programs, their spending with us fell and we found ourselves once again in an adjustment mode that, after nearly 11 years as a technology-focused public relations boutique, is not unfamiliar territory to us.

Our response was three-fold.

First, we’ve gone virtual. We’ve put our servers and shared resources in the cloud, locked the office doors for good and given back the key. With clients all over two continents, we’ve essentially been virtual to most of them anyway. We believe it makes us the kind of agile and responsive service offering this new economy demands.

Second, we focused our PR business development efforts on opportunities where we believed we would be given a real chance to demonstrate our differentiation. This has paid outstanding dividends, with four new clients engaging with us over the past 60 days. Two others have renewed their programs, and two more that had reduced programs are again spending a bit more with us, albeit on an ad-hoc basis as they continue to sharply evaluate every dollar and pound. And our pipeline is fairly robust.

Third, and most critically, we also began to focus on areas where our unique capabilities would gain us higher-value work. Public relations is a terribly commodified business, and the buyers of PR-agency services are still too-often wedded to ancient notions to which our approach simply fails to pay homage.

(This is not a universal truth, let me hasten to add. Our most recent account win saw us triumph over three U.S. boutique agencies and a large and experienced agency with extensive feet on the street on both sides of the Atlantic. The final round, between us and the big guys, offered the client a sharply differentiated choice, I believe. Entirely to their credit, they gave us every chance to show them a clear foretaste of what they would experience if they hired us, and they obviously liked what we showed them. Far too often, however, we never even get the chance to show how we’re different, or the prospect simply fails to grasp how that difference might change the PR agency game in their favour.)

In addition to this long-standing commodification of PR, the economic downturn has created a new class of competitors and made all existing competitors even hungrier. There are now legions of one-person PR shops staffed by perfectly competent former agency and client-side types whose practically non-existent overhead and sometimes-lifestyle approach to business make it impossible to compete. At the other end of the scale, we have bowed out of agency-selection processes where large multinational agencies were offering more services at a lower cost than we could manage as they struggled to at least cover their infrastructure costs.

It’s enough to make any wise business person look to new opportunities, and we have, with considerable early success.

So where are we going? We will continue to seek out high-value PR opportunities where our value proposition as a small but very senior band of sharply focused players with global capabilities can compete. But we’ll also look for opportunities to work with clients on a more strategic level, where the broader marketing and even business decisions get sorted. Although much of the last 10 years has been about guiding technology companies through the specific challenges of harnessing media and analyst coverage, we have a broader and more strategic pedigree that we’re keen to put to work.

In short, we bring technology to market. Stay tuned for more on this as we renew our commitment to this blog.

Technorati Tags: inmedia, technology marketing, public relations, business development, marketing strategy