A Grinchlike look at 2011

Well, even a Grinch like me has to admit it: 2010's been a fantastic year for those people at Rapide. We now have around a third of the FTSE as customers; we send about 3m text messages on their behalf each month; and a growing number of those are two-way conversations rather than blasts outwards. The MD even took the whole company to Vegas to celebrate. I dunno, kids today.

So just as the tree's losing its needles and the leftover turkey's gone into its last sandwich - what's my grumpy take on 2011? Well, here are my views on it. Take them with as large a pinch of salt as you want. (I certainly do.)

1.Mobile spreads outwards. Until now, we've had "connected" (wired-in computing, like your office desktop), on-the-road computing (your laptop), and mobile phone-based computing (everything you do on a tiny screen punctuated by frustrated intakes of breath.) This is going to change, but not in the way you think. Everything's moving to mobile. New form factors like Apple's iPad will be phones soon enough, and it can't be long before "dialling a number" gives way to "clicking a name". Personally, I can't wait.

The grumpy bit: the barrier here is simple: traffic jams on the airwaves. In 2010 we saw the USA's AT&T suffering serious bandwidth problems due to unexpectedly large chunks of customers using their iPhones for data. (A lot of data.) And worldwide, mobile phone operators have been ending their all-you-can-eat data download plans as their networks wussed out. My calling plan lets me download just 50Mb of data, which barely covers email! C'mon operators, get with the programme.

2. People realise that mobile's about moods as well as messages. There's a right time to send 'em an email, a right time to phone them, and a right time to not contact them at all. At Rapide we've done a fair bit of work on what mode of communication to use when; too many companies are making elementary errors here.

The grumpy bit: well, I hardly need to spell this out, but when was the last time you enjoyed getting an SMS from a company you'd never heard of? Fair enough, they want to contact you - but snail mail or email is the way to go here, and definitely not in bulk. We don't do spam at Rapide, and you shouldn't either.

3. Marketers look at the aggregate. Now "aggregate" isn't a word I use often. But you have to do something different when you're communicating regularly with 10,000 customers instead of one, and if you're not taking the 30,000ft view you're missing an opportunity. There may be a useful bit of information from taking a survey of a dozen customers. But there are a lot more insights if you look at what thousands of customers say naturally without bringing tickboxes and questionnaires into it. (If you doubt how easy this can be, check out Rapide's Rant & Rave sentiment analysis system; it does the heavy lifting for you. And yes, I was named after half of it.)

The grumpy bit: there's a lot of excuses here for "IVR hell", where the options you hear on the phone are never the ones you want (they're just the most common ones.) So take a leaf from First Direct, everyone: always make sure there's a real person to talk to, if that's what your business depends on. And most do.

4. People stop thinking about mobile... as mobile. That's the big one for me: instead of being something "special", 3G and 4G and all the other G's just become the normal way to communicate with customers and employees. Already about a third of young adults have no hardwired phone; it's a natural step to cut the cord completely.  

The grumpy bit here: see point 1. I really hope the network operators can build out their cellular infrastructure fast enough. But even if they don't... I've got a last point.

Perhaps most surprisingly... 

... wait for it, this is a good 'un...

5. SMS moves to the core.  Yes, good old text messaging hits back. Why? Because it's short, simple, and works just about everywhere - it can support practically any other communications effort and add value. Before you protest, consider the value of an SMS short code in your storefront where customers can text in their impressions, or simple SMS confirmations that double-check that a booking was made correctly. SMS can act as all those little nudges that send response rates skywards, and best of all it's easy as pie to add on to anything you're doing.

The grumpy bit: marketers can so easily go overboard on things like this. Newsflash, people: customers don't need to be in constant contact with you. Shock horror, they don't really want to be. What matters is touching them at the moment they want to be touched, or the moment where your little bit of communication can make the biggest difference. So let's talk to our customers, folks, but not be like that boring chap at the Christmas party who never lets you get a word in edgeways.

And that's the kind of prediction I like: Much as it pains me to say it, folks - a Happy New Year to you all.

The importance of leeway

Now, this week's story involves a hotel chain's Call Centre. I'm not going to highlight the hotel chain - it happened to be Holiday Inn. Rather, I thought I'd make a point about empowerment, and how giving power away can often bring more power to your elbow. Especially if that elbow's holding a phone.

(Well, I mean, the hand at the end of the arm's doing the holding, but you know what I mean...)

An old friend - let's call him C - was a pretty loyal customer of Holiday Inn. Over the course of a year, he stayed at the same hotel more than thirty times. Sometime between his 30th and his last visit, he found it necessary to cancel a reservation. 

Only trouble was, he was an hour after the cancelling deadline. And when he protested to the Call Centre agent, she wouldn't budge.

Fair enough. An hour is an hour. But we all know how business works. For a customer with a thirty-stay record with the company... a loyal business traveller with that hotel on his itinerary practically every week ... the Call Centre agent could have made an exception. In fact, in today's ultra-competitive marketplace - where a single bad review on TripAdvisor can empty your rooms in a jiffy - understanding when to be flexible is a basic part of doing business.

And she wasn't allowed to do it. That's the other side to this story: it was obvious to C that she really, really wanted to cancel the one-night penalty fee. She was desperate to do it, because she knew exactly what the customer was about to do: cancel his next stay, and all the stays after that, forever. He could tell from her tone of voice. But she just didn't have the authority.

Holiday Inn was perfectly within its rights ... but sticking to them lost it a customer. Forever.

A lot of investors and managers consider this "business risk". Well, only if all you look at is the risk factor or empowering a junior staff member, it makes sense. But if you look through the other end of the telescope - at doing whatever it takes to satisfy the customer, rather than fencing in your Call Centre agents with rules and limits on their responsibility - it looks a whole lot more profitable.

So there's a thought for Call Centres across the industry: maybe, just maybe, you could empower your workers a little? In C's case, he was perfectly aware of what was happening, even confirming with the agent that she was, indeed, not authorised to be flexible in such instances. A good Call Centre agent, prevented from doing the thing she knew she had to do. The hotel chain missed a trick there.

C hasn't stayed at that hotel since. And - probably - will never do so again.

The folk at Rapide work with a few hotels (not, at the moment, Holiday Inn, but you never know) and recently put together one of their Thought Bubbles about Call Centres. Why not click over and take a look? I did.

Press 1 to send your customer into a blind panic, 2 to...

Music festivals are everywhere these days, aren't they? 

I mean, where there used to be a nice patchwork of green and yellow fields, these days it's pink polka dot tents all the way to the horizon. It's as if the British countryside has developed acne. Pretty much everywhere you look, if it's surrounded by a boundary hedge, there's a music festival taking place in it. 

I dunno, kids today. (In my day all we had were Woodstock and Live Aid, and we were grateful for it.) But this month's rant isn't about music festivals, per se: it's about something that happened to a young man of my acquaintance at one. You see, he lost a load of stuff and had to call a Call Centre. 

Now despite my name, I didn't want to rant about Call Centres, because they're such an easy target. We've all had our problems with Call Centres. But I thought this story was 'specially good... because it wasn't, in the end, about call queueing or endless touchtones. It's a simple tale of talking and listening - and what happens if you don't listen to your customer.

Anyway, let's call our young friend "Jarney". Picture, if you will, a music festival this summer. The delicate scents of exhaust fumes, unwashed socks, and other less legal substances are in the air. Jarney's wandering back to his tent (polka dot) after watching some hairy bloke not seen since the 60s play drums in a "supergroup" or something. 

(Definition of a supergroup: six people who didn't want to be in the same band before, playing a song none of them wrote. Supergroups are basically singalongs with better tuned guitars. Meanwhile, back at the story...)

The flap of his tent is, well, flapping. (It's what flaps do.) That's funny, thinks Jarney. Don't remember leaving that open. And on entering his little pink polka haven, he makes a horrifying discovery:

Everything's gone!

Phone, wallet, credit cards, driver's license, the lot. Gone. Some fiend has stolen his entire life, and all the police have to go on is that he's not a fan of Hairy Freddie's 60s Supergroup.

Now I don't know if this has happened to you, but this is a serious thing when you're away from home. We never realise how reliant we are on those little magnetic-striped cards and pocket-size gadgets, do we? No, we don't. So young Jarney is suddenly an un-person. An undocumented alien. A Kafka character. He's off the database. And what's more, he's standing in a muddy field ... in yellow wellies ... outside a pink polka-dot tent.

Well, you'd feel worried too, wouldn't you?

Fortunately, unlike me, Jarney's got friends. He borrows a phone, spends some time finding out and listing numbers for reporting stolen mobiles and credit cards (another of those things none of us think about until we really have a need) and starts dialling. First up is to report his mobile phone. And he enters the Seventh Circle of Hell. Trust me, this one's an absolute corker.

Eventually, he gets through to a Call Centre agent. After some issues about not calling from his own phone and establishing his identity, conversation commences.

"Thank you Sir. Now, if you can just confirm your normal method of payment for me..."

"OK, but I need your help to complete this call quickly, because I've got to report all my cards missing too."

"So that's your address, thank you. Can you confirm your normal method of payment?"
"Have we completed the identification process? Because if we have, I need to report my phone stolen and then move on, because some dastardly villain is in possession of my debit card..."

"And can I just confirm your email address -"

"Yes, but I need to report my phone missing first and then end this call, because someone in a blue stripey jumper is enjoying a suite at the Ritz even as we speak..."

See the rub: the Call Centre agent isn't listening. He's hearing - in the sense they're speaking the same language - but he isn't listening. And study after study (those people at Rapide have done some research on this) you can't communicate without listening. 

"Thank you for confirming your email address, Sir - yes, yes. I appreciate that, but we like to keep our records updated..."

Jarney's obviously hopping from one yellow wellie to the other by now, because he's got four credit and debit cards about to furnish some thieve's penthouse and doesn't want to explain to his bank that he didn't really order £5000 of questionable items from Bulgaria. 

"OK, have you now noted on your system that  this phone has been STOLEN? And that the phone will be deactivated?"

"I've done that, Sir. I notice you're on the [deleted] tariff - let me just go through the latest Price Plans you may wish to take advantage of..."

"NO! NO! No price plans, please! I just need to confirm this phone number shouldn't be in use as of NOW so I can make some other calls!"

"But I notice you haven't been using all of your free minutes, Sir, and this month we have a special offer available to our loyal customers."

So there you have it. The Call Centre agent, following a script, simply wasn't able to "step outside the script" and deal with his customer's genuine problem. He didn't listen. And without listening, there can be no understanding. Nothing to do with technology; you note Jarney's not complaining about Press-1-for-this, Press-2-for-that sort of thing. It's all about the attitude of the Call Centre worker, and to be honest, that's something quite easy to fix - you've got to train them to listen first, and talk second.

The Rapide people recently wrote a piece on Call Centres, and how they can be turned into profit centres that serve customers properly. Why not ask them for a cheeky download?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me, a .....

Teutonic titan Mercedes has been voted the best customer service provider in the UK, at least as far as carmakers are concerned. Fair enough. I don't drive a Merc, so I can't say. But I know a man who does - and his rant isn't about Mercedes, but about a competitor trying to win away its customers. Like most of these blogs, Mr Merc isn't panning the competitor, which happened to be Porsche - rather, he's drawing attention to the lost opportunities Porsche could have exploited. All of which could have been resolved with a bit better communication.

Like all my rants, it's a real story from a real person. Here we go...

One day Mr Merc Owner gets an invitation in the mail. Inviting him to the UK launch of a very special vehicle: the new Porsche Panamera. No idea what "Panamera" means, but anyway it's the new four-seat one that Jeremy Clarkson refuses to look at 'cos it's too ugly. (In fairness, I don't think it looks bad at all.) Out of curiosity he decides to go down for a look.

The rear end doesn't look that bad, Jezza!

 

Bear in mind Mercedes drivers, along with perhaps BMW 5-series and ups, are the absolute be-all and end-all must-reach target for Porsche's new 4-seater car. Of which our Mr Merc is one. (With apologies to Janis Joplin - his friends don't all drive Porsches. Most of them drive Mercs, too. That makes him a "high-value prospect".) These are men - they are nearly all men - who enjoy their cars, like the feel of quality and solidity inherent to their brand, and who tend to be rather brand loyal.

This is the audience Porsche simply has to grip the imaginations of. Because this Porsche, the 4-seater one, won't be bought by "normal" Porsche buyers - the City boys and sportscar enthusiasts who like the little two-seater with a punch in the boot. Try telling them it came off the same drawing board as the Volkswagen Beetle.)  No, the target demographic for the four-up is older, wiser, less boy-racer. It's neither easy nor cheap to get 50 guys like this together in one room, so if you can manage it - and Porsche did - you've got to "pay off" their investment: make it worthwhile for both sides.

The canapes were pretty good, though

So when our Mercedes owner turns up at the event in London, he's expecting something a bit, y'know, interesting.

A (small) glass of fizz and a plate of canapes later, he's still waiting.

There's no workshop open where these mature petrolheads can look the car over and pop the bonnet. There's nobody offering him a test drive. (Apparently there's a desk upstairs where you can do that, not exactly lit up in green neon.) He restocks his canape plate and walks around a bit.

After an hour of chatting to fellow businessmen (he's quite possibly made more marketing capital out of the event that Porsche has) he's wondering if Porsche actually want to sell any Panameras. Maybe they're going into business as caterers instead and he's got the wrong idea about what they're prospecting for.

So instead of feeling interested in the new Porsche, he goes away feeling mildly aggrieved at their customer service. And a while later, the only followup he gets is a single letter from the dealership, asking him to "get in contact" if he wants a demonstration drive.

Now what gets me worked up about this story is there were so many moments where the right approach by a marketer would've made a big difference. They had at least eight "touchpoints" where he was ready to give a positive response. When he first got the letter. When he agreed to come along. When he arrived at the venue. When he first hit the nibbles table. And so on. All, it seems, wasted.

I still like the look of the Porsche, meself. But small blue apostrophes aren't exactly Porsche's target demographic. Panamera? Pan a marketing department, is what our Mr Merc says...

Growing pains for a car dealer

I haven't told you about my friend H's husband, have I? Well, like me he's a bit of an expert on customer service issues, and told me about an absolute humdinger he had with his car dealer ... one of those bury-your-face-in-your-hands ones, the sort that could've been solved so easily with just the odd phone call or two. So I thought I'd relay it to you lot. Take a comfortable Seat and read on...

There are two cars in H's family, During 'er indoors' pregnancy he had one of those blinding flashes of insight: heyheyhey, kid on the way, I might just need a bigger car! (Dunno what he had before - probably a Smart or something.) So off he went round the dealer to see what was on the forecourts.

Well, when you visit a dealer they take your phone number. And after several months of basically nuisance phone calls from the dealer asking if he's had made his mind up, the addition to the family arrived - and confirmed his worst fears.

The baby was a ginger.

Sorry. That was my joke. (I hope Scottish people have a sense of humour.)

What his worst fear really was, was that his car was too small. This realisation may not have been unprompted by his lady wife, who also decided that his car was now too small to transport the precious cargo of their little boy and his belongings (it's amazing how much stuff a baby can accumulate before even getting a credit card, eh?) and that we (meaning "he") should replace it for a larger one. Dutifully he agreed and on a hot sunny Sunday afternoon in June,  off they went to the dealer.

With some cars you expect trouble. Not others...

At the dealer they were welcomed with the usual questioning by the salesman of ‘how much do you want to spend?" (Note to sales folk: you're not estate agents: try to sell the car not the cost.)

My mate explained that he ("she") had decided what car he ("she") would like, and sat back to let said wife do the remaining complicated stuff. (Including, but not limited to: choosing the colour, and deciding which optional extras she wanted. Heated seats were Exhibit A here.) The salesman’s face lit up as you'd expect.

A delivery date for the new car was confirmed as 8 weeks. So off they went, thinking all was good. During the 8 weeks he sold his existing car and prepared for the new arrival... or, I suppose, the second new arrival.

As you'd expect from this blog, the delivery date came and went, without any communication from the dealer. The family waited.

And waited.

And - well, you get the idea.

Eventually at week 13 his missus decided that enough was enough, and contacted the dealer herself. She kindly offered to collect hubby from work (remember, he'd sold his own car at this point) and take him home, but on the way home she made a detour to the dealer to have a "wee discussion".

They sat in front of a selection of salesmen and managers while they ("she") talked and explained that annoying her any further would, in the Great Scheme of Things, not be advisable. In the meantime he sat quietly ("with a sort of quiet authority", I believe) letting her get on with trying to get to the bottom of the problem.

Eventually they were told that the dealer did not want to provide them with bad news ...  so didn't contact them at all.

PAAARPPPP!!!! Airhorn blunder! (Sorry - that's a Rapide thing. One of the management team blows an airhorn when a major event happens, and it's loud enough to make a vuvuzela go home in tears.) When you have bad news and you don't contact the customer, the perception of the problem doubles in size every day. Ask Forrester.

As some kind of apology the dealer offered a free MOT on her car when it was due, which was welcomed by H's husband. (He spent the money and she got the freebie. Go figure.)

You'll recall this saga began on "a hot sunny Sunday in June." Well, sometime in late October came the announcement that the car's ready to be collected.

H's husband reports it was "the fastest handover he'd ever experienced".. and think what the viewing conditions are on a garage forecourt in late October. He signed the paperwork clearly stating the car was collected in the dark and that he was unable to clearly check everything for damage.

The sun rose the next day. (It does that.) He's sitting in his car when he notices some damage to the internal dashboard... and radio... and gearstick.. and hand brake lever and door panels. Oh dear.

So he whizzes round to the dealer to "inform" them. First the dealer welcomed him with open arms, but after he explained the problems everything changed as they tried to apportion the responsibility for the damage back to him. (Rule Two of customer service: give your customer the benefit of the doubt.) C'mon Mr Dealer, this is a car that took three months to arrive... isn't there a fair chance that something could've happened in those months?

He managed to stay calm as the dealer booked the car in to get the parts replaced. But the replacement parts were also damaged (his life's sort of a comedy show by now) and the car needed to be booked in again later. Eventually the second batch of replacement parts turned up at the dealer, so the car visits the dealer again.
The car was dropped off in the morning and handed over with an agreement that if there was any problems he would be contacted.

That evening after work he walks to the dealer with the fond hope of collecting his car. Only to be told (by a individual needing to attend an anger management course) that it was not finished and that he shouldn't have expected a phone call informing him of the delay.

So - and this is where it gets truly sitcom-ish - he had to walk 4 miles home in the cold (where’s the lady wife at THIS moment, eh?)

The problem (a broken wire on some test equipment at the dealer) resulted in the car being held captive for 5 days. On checking it over (in daylight this time) he found the paintwork on the door had been damaged by the dealer. Once again, the dealer promised to make good the damage, which consisted of sending him a couple of touch-up sticks in the post.

H's husband does not like the car anymore and wants to sell it.

I'm not going to mention the carmaker or the dealer here, because it's irrelevant: this little story is illustrative. On at least nine occasions, the dealer had every opportunity to make things right, and it could have been very simple - as simple as a phone call, or even a text message. Maybe the customer wouldn't have been entirely happy, but at least they might have been mollified.  Cover up a problem and you just make it worse.

And there's the lesson: no matter how bad the situation is, you've got to, got to, got to, stay in contact with your customer. Rapide's put together one of its Thought Bubbles on this very subject - drop them a line.

Sandwiched in paradise

Numerous texts were sent from here, in flagrant violation of H&S.

I know I'm supposed to be the office curmudgeon, but it's hard to be grumpy when you're sunning yourself by a pool with its own waterfall.

Yes, the Rapide team is visiting Las Vegas, and a frown doesn't fit with forty-degree heat and one of the best hotels in town. Which means I've got to do something that doesn't normally come hard to me: find something to be grumpy about. Oh yes... Subway.

No, not the underground railway thing (it runs above ground here in Vegas, anyway.) I'm talking sandwiches here. You know, those "subs, "half subs", the famous "footlongs". Subway does, about 60 varieties of bread and fillings that you'd think would be sandwich heaven... but aren't, in one very particular way. And the rest of the team were heading off for the steaks at Smith & Wollensky, where I couldn't find something to complain about if I worked all week at it.

So being me, I sloped away from the joints the rest of the crowd were visiting - and went for a sandwich in the nearest Subway.

You see, I enjoy a good sandwich, and Subway does plenty of them. The meatball marinara. The trusty BLT. The Cold Cut Combo, the Oven Roasted Chicken, and the cringingly-spelt Veggie Delite. (I feel better already.)

But there's one big problem: these sarnies FALL APART.

Yes, in the land of the supersized dashboard cupholder, the eight-lane boulevard and the 24-hr drive-through, Subway don't do a single sandwich you can eat at the wheel without a $200 cleaning bill.

The problem starts with the bread. It's a victim of its own freshness I don't know if the franchisees bake it on the premises, but it just comes apart in your hands. (If you're lucky enough to have hands. I sort of levitate it towards my mouth.) The Sandwich Biosphere is divided into One-Handed and Two-Handed sandwiches, and Subways are - beyond any doubt - Two-Handed Sandwiches.

And the bread problem's exacerbated by the fillings. A lot of them are "loose leaf", not "glued together" by the sauces (actually, Subway are a bit stingy with their sauces sometimes.) So once the bread's broken, scattering crumbs all over your rental Kia, the salad items are in hot pursuit. And those black olive slices are hell to pick up from a dark footwell, believe me.

This is America, land of the car? I mean, I could practically make out the Hertz and Avis representatives discreetly stationed outside the Subway branch, forever on alert for stray squirts of meatball sauce and ryebread crumbs on their Kias and Saturns.

Look, there's no shortage of reasons to like Subway. The 2009 Zagat Fast-Food Survey rated Subway the number one provider of "Healthy Options". In business terms, they're the Number 1 Franchise in America, which must mean plenty of people are spending their recession-depleted pay packets on footlongs. But a gripe's a gripe, and this is a major missed opportunity for the Subway bods.

That's why after a Subway when I'm on my way somewhere, I always feel slightly - y'know - dissatisfied somehow, as if something containing huge promise just didn't quite deliver. I'll be back at Subway again, no problem, but next time I'm leaving the rental car behind.

Why can I never find the Marmite in Tesco?

You know what I hate? Never being able to find the Marmite in Tesco.

(Actually it happens in all supermarkets, but Tesco just happens to be my closest. And I like shopping there. Certainly don't have a problem with the deli counter or the beer section... but it's little things like this that sour the whole experience, so I thought I'd write about it. Culture of continuous improvement, that's what I say.)

I mean, it's hard enough for a punctuation mark to reach the shelf in the first place, let alone find out the Marmite's not where you expect it to be when you get there.

But Marmite's a bit of a special case, isn't it?

Even though it works best on toast, it's not in the "spreads" section. You know, all those vegetable fat and margarine-type things (along with actual butter, but who buys that these days?) For some reason, Tesco's marketing boffins don't think Marmite and butter belong on the same shelf.

Well, that's fair enough I suppose. (Some weirdos do other things with Marmite, like stirring it into hot water. I mean, nobody does that with butter. Nobody who isn't Mongolian, anyway.) But it's never in the non-buttery spreads section either. You can grope your way along the mayonnaise and mustard shelves as far as you want, but you'll never reach the yellow-lidded jar of desire, oh dear me no. And that's when I start to get a little agitated.

(Watch most men in your local Tesco superstore - you'll see them check the butter section, then the "things in glass jars" section, and finally walk around with furrowed brows for a few minutes before giving up. Trust me, they're looking for the Marmite. (Men never ask for help in these situations.) My sister Rave never seems to have a problem; maybe it's just a man thing.

Usually, the last part of my Marmite quest involves a foray into the Bread section. Given Marmite's deep and meaningful relationship with toast, you'd expect the Tesco people to at least have put the two within an aisle's reach of each other. But no. The dark brown stuff always seems to be at least one shelf-stack removed from the tasty breakfast ingredients that make it sing. And that's plain silly.

So you might think I'm short of Marmite, but no. In fact, I have about eight jars of Marmite in my kitchen. Because Marmite is so hard to find, I grab a jar whenever and wherever I see it. And that's not very "customer-facing" on Tesco's part, now is it? I'm annoyed.

Let's have some proper customer engagement!

I'm Rant. And I'm one frustrated little apostrophe.

You might think being a small blue punctuation mark'd be enough reason to be frustrated, but that's not it. (Not all of it, anyway.) Most of the time I quite enjoy being a small blue punctuation mark. Bit of 'sleb culture to it - it's good to be different, that sort of thing - although Hello! magazine hasn't exactly been a-knocking. (And if they did, I'd do the usual thing: just sit here without enough opposable thumbs to work the doorknob.)

But anyway, this is my blog. Yes, that article you read this morning was wrong. There aren't a hundred million blogs on the web any more - there's a hundred million and one. So why did I bother? I mean, I'm not yer average save-the-planet, hug-the-trees type. My idea of a good time is sitting down on benches displaying "Wet Paint" signs so I can have a good complain to the park people.

But give me a moment, you'll be dazzled. Really you will. (Sorry. I get a bit sarky sometimes. Goes with the job.) You see, I work for Rapide Communication. These people do customer and employee engagement - connecting people together, whether it's by their phones, their computers, their iWotsits or just plain nattering face-to-face. The idea is, if you listen to enough people carefully enough, and take the time to really understand what they're saying, you can make the sort of changes in your business that make a HUGE difference. "Customer-driven", "Creating delight", you know the buzzwords. And they love doing it. Brings a tear to the eye, it really does. (I'm doing it again, aren't I?)

When I say I "work for them", I don't mean they pay me a salary or anything (that's another thing to be curmudgeonly about) but they put up with me around the office and my face is on their posters and stuff. Along with my sister Rave, we're the twin faces of customer engagement. Real customer engagement - that means talking to people and listening back, not the Your-Call-Is-Important-To-Us stuff you hear from helpdesks.

You might not have seen us, but whenever you have a bit of aggro with a company because it's not paying attention ... or on the other hand, when a company's done something brilliant that made you jump for joy and shout "Hallelujah!"... and you just wanted to talk to them about it ... one of us was there, hovering just behind your shoulder. Oh, yes we were.

(Well, maybe not every time. Six billion people in this world and only 24 hours in a day you know. Besides, if I don't get out of the office by 5.30 the traffic on University Road is awful.)

So that's us: I'm Rant, she's Rave. We've got a nose for customer engagement. (All right, two noses.) I do the gnashing-and-wailing stuff: every time someone around here has a story to tell about a missed opportunity to sort something out - something they could lose a customer over, something that's fixable but never seems to be picked up - they talk to me. And starting now, I tell those stories on my blog. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Well, you don't have to be afraid. Being Midlands born and bred means I tell it like it is. That means I'm going to name names. (That's the fun part.) So if your job has anything to do with customers (hint: it has) feel free to come back and have a read from time to time. (There's an Atom feed too, if you prefer it without the pretty pictures. See if I care.) Stories from my mates here are already coming in: I'd better get writing. Blogging's a slow process when all you can do is bounce up and down on a keyboard one letter at a time, but it keeps the weight off...