Sending customers into a spin

Customers all over Australia have been sent into a bit of a spin this week – in pretty much every sense of the word.

It was Westpac who launched the downward spiral with an interest rate rise almost double that of the Reserve Bank, but things then plummeted to new lows with an animation emailed to customers that was a journalist's wet dream in the otherwise quiet pre-Christmas season.

Twitter was also abuzz, with my favourite being @bigriveroz who wrote: "hey westpac, last time i checked, the local cafe selling banana smoothies didn't make $3.4b while in a cosy cartel protected by the govt".

And it didn't end there. CEO Gail Kelly hit the press the next day to spruik the importance of customer service and the bank's commitment to relationships and reliability. But it was sheer folly for Westpac to try to promote the positive side of the bank sharing their problems with customers, especially as most of the positives seem to have taken the shape of profits sprinkled with the odd bonus. In the same week, reports from the Fairfax stables were suggesting an annual $2.6m cash bonus for Kelly's efforts alone. It's often said that money makes the world go round, but by now the insensitivity was making most people a little dizzy.

However, insensitivity seems to be a popular character trait for most customer service departments around Australia. In my case, it was Foxtel, the 900-pound gorilla of subscription TV, trying to cosy up to me with some sweet talk this week.

Let me give you the background. After months of frustration, I'd finally decided to send a short email to Foxtel to complain about a problem with my service. To be perfectly honest, it was more of a quibble than a problem. However, Foxtel's holier-than-thou advertising paints a vivid portrait of suburban delight, which only serves to grate on me even more when things go wrong.

The return call from customer services started well – the female voice at the other end of the phone seemed helpful and happy to talk.

However, when it quickly became obvious that the best she could do was a paltry "Yes, it's annoying for me too!", I started to wonder whether the point of her call was to sympathise with me, but not actually do anything.

I responded with a polite pitch for service not sympathy, but she immediately hit me out of the park with another gem: "If I help you, I have to help 1.7 million people".

And when I touched a couple of light volleys over the net to see if she would even acknowledge some level of responsibility, she gamely responded with a barrage of cross-court forehands that offered tips but no fix, and I found myself pinned at the back of the court, waving my racket in vain as the ball quite literally spun out of control.

Taking pity on me for a fleeting moment, she did offer a free copy of the Foxtel magazine. However, when I suggested that Foxtel might want to consider making this a monthly occurrence, she threw her racket to the ground in frustration, telling me that she simply didn't have the time to be able to make that happen.

I finally teed up another ball, only for her to shout at the top of my backswing that "I could downgrade my subscription if I wanted". I looked up for a split second in sheer astonishment – how could getting even less possibly be a helpful solution? Needless to say, I completely missed the ball, and my humiliation at the hands of Foxtel's customer service was complete.

I'm not quite certain at what point the phone call became more about Foxtel than me, but it reminded me that businesses like Foxtel and the banks appear to be more about profit than people. I'm all for success in commerce, but surely customers should be the linchpin of that success, rather than have it come at their cost.

I still don't know when Foxtel plan to fix my little quibble.

But maybe that's because there are obviously much bigger problems facing their customers which they need to fix first.

How does it feel to feel?

My Friday afternoon took a rather sinister turn after a fight broke out at Melbourne airport.

A couple of guys walked through the terminal, found their man, and then came a violent eruption of punches until a couple of brave passengers stood between them. The attackers checked themselves, uttered a few choice words about broken noses, and then turned and traced their steps back through the airport.

It was all over quite quickly, but the emotion in the air was intense.

Admiration for the brave men who had put themselves in the middle of the melee, and stopped the fight from going any further. Fear from the female Qantas ground staff who found themselves in the thick of it as the fight spilled behind the customer service desk. And a mixture of anxiety, shock and excitement swirled around the scene, along with pretty much every other emotion you care to name.

And it reminded me of just how emotionally charged we are – as a species, I mean.

Yes, granted we spend a great deal of time thinking – "Cogito ergo sum", as Descartes once famously pronounced – but so much of our existence also relies upon our capacity to feel.

Earlier this week, Adam Ferrier wrote in his blog, Consumer Psychologist, about the Melbourne Cup, gambling and the concept of variable positive reinforcement – the practice of rewarding desired behaviour (for example, gambling) at random times and with random amounts. And he wondered why marketers didn't use this concept more often and not just in promotions, under the pretext that, "If it's the strongest conditioner of human behaviour, shouldn't marketers be trying to understand it and applying its principles in a slightly more sophisticated way"?

Again, what Adam is raising here is the very visceral nature of the human race – ideas that relate to our deepest inward feelings rather than to our intellect.

The automotive industry, for one, has always worked hard on designing a human feel to its cars. Not simply when it comes to how they function, but also how they look. In fact, most cars smile.

If you look at the VW Beetle or the new model Mazda 3 (just to name a couple), the bonnet, grille and headlights are often designed and positioned to mirror a human face. And a happy one at that.

At the opposite end of the scale to happiness is loss – specifically death, in the form of cult brand, Death Cigarettes.

Here's some of the on-pack copy:

A pack of Death cigarettes leaves no doubt as to the risks of smoking. We don't print a health warning just because it's law. We believe in telling the truth...a responsible way to market a legally available consumer product which kills people when used exactly as intended.

You couldn't get a more honest smoke.

As humans, we are a complex race full of raw emotion and feeling. They say the truth hurts, and they're right. But not because it's true in thought, more so because it hurts our feelings.

So it is, that the most successful brands are often also the most primal. And if you ask me, that feels just about right.

The dizzy heights of failure (and other stories)

When it comes to social commentary, I have often found music much more insightful than the latest trend report. The Clash, Dylan, The Jam, Nirvana. Poetry, not PowerPoint.

Whatever your personal preferences, Britpop, for example, neatly summed up the attitude of a generation in the UK. So much so that it's only fitting the last word should have gone to Jarvis Cocker of Pulp fame. His first solo release delivered a great one-liner on the state of the nation post Labour's resurgence under Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"The cream cannot help but always rise up to the top. Well, I say: Shit floats."

And, to be perfectly blunt, I think the same is true of many management teams.

David Maister, the renowned professional services thinker, has always said that at any one time, 10% of your workforce are underperforming and should be managed out of the business. Whenever people hear this view (or is it a statistic?), most automatically assume that means 10% of the rank and file, but that would be a gross oversight given the impact of the decisions made by an organisation's top echelon. And, as Jarvis so graphically explained, the cream isn't necessarily the only thing that rises to the top.

The economic crisis has caused a raft of issues. Few more worrying for your top executive than the unwanted exposure brought on by the fact that many of the so-called cream have received hefty bonuses, seemingly as a reward for failure.

Careers have been killed, but at the same time I have also seen countless underperformers actually promoted through failure. No doubt promoted into a position from where they could presumably do less harm, but hardly the right signal for those surging through the ranks on the wave of success. Jarvis would feel vindicated.

It would be easy to see where this is all heading, if it weren't for the fact that failure is often viewed as a good thing.

In short, if you're not failing, you're simply not trying hard enough. And according to many, this recent failure of our economic systems was inevitable. They say it was the recession that had to happen. We had to fail in order to reset the balance.

So it seems our fate was more in the hands of the gods and fickle fortune than the chief executives and their chairmen. It wasn't their fault, just plain old bad luck.

Not quite.

If we were to take Jarvis at face value, things simply rise and fall. But that isn't quite true, actually they go around in cycles. Which conveniently brings me back to the point where I started. The Britpop revolution of the 1990s (Blur, Oasis, Pulp) took many of its cues from the British Invasion of the 1960s (The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks). Similar trends, similar times. And it won't be long before the 1960s come to life again in another age.

The same can be said for our current economic situation, only none of our financial leaders saw it coming with the same vision or insight as those record executives. History will say that we failed, so let's hope we change our tune in time for the encore. If not, then Kevin Rudd – the cream of Canberra – will be back shouting from the very top of the steaming pile about "the usual political shitstorm". Jarvis would be proud.