When I first started out in sales many years ago there was always an enigma around selling and whether it could be considered an honourable profession or not. When compared to the trusty banking profession there was no contest… one was considered to fleece you and the other a trusty bastion of the community.

Well over the last two years both professions have had it tough… the banks faced near collapse and the sales profession has had it tough… no one has been buying… but good news could be on the way… The good news is that the recession may be coming to an end; the banks are back making money and rumours have it that those bankers are beginning to pay themselves large bonuses again as rewards for their fatuous efforts in these trying times. But unfortunately, sales are still finding it tough… but at least the banks are looking better.

The funny thing about it, is that most bankers don’t actually create any wealth… they just move money around the system and they deal with winners and losers. The losers pay the winners with a hefty wodge creamed off to pay the banker. Real money that gets put into the banking system comes from only one place… us… interest and fees.

With interest rate in the UK continuing at an all time low of just 0.5% the cost of borrowing money is still on the increase. You would be hard pushed to find a personal loan with a rate below 10%. Mortgage rates are also creeping up. So this is how they are doing it… making Joe public pay for their mistakes… good business?… well if you are in a monopoly or a cartel then it seems you can do what you like.

Is it honourable to make our customers pay for our mistakes… “Sorry guys and girls, we’ve had a little bit of mismanaging the business, lost a lot of money and now we need to get back on an even footing… so this is what we are going to do… get some cash from the government to tide us over (which incidentally is tax payers money and the cost of the government giving away trillions will be borne by the tax payer) and then make you pay lots more… fair enough?… oh, and we need to start paying large bonuses again because being paid lots of money is not as nice as being paid obscene amounts of money.”

You know, I don’t think I could be a banker… I need to be able to sleep… at least I don’t think anyone has to worry about whether selling is an honourable profession or not when you can be benchmarked against bankers.

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It’s all very well talking about the theory of customer care, but you learn from experience and so let’s talk about it in practice and use a real example… of how not to do it.

There’s a lot of talk going around about a recession… banks playing up, people losing their jobs, governments buying banks, car makers wanting loans from governments, banks not loaning to each other, consumer spending down, house repossessions up, house prices falling… I could go on… generally things don’t look all that bright… attracting new customers may become a tad more difficult than it was before… so keeping hold of existing ones may be a good strategy… perhaps customer care is important after all.

So where does customer care start… at the bottom or the top the organisation? If staff morale is low do you get the right level of customer care? Is it important that the organisation looks after its staff just as much as it looks after its customers? If a company doesn’t seem to care about its staff how well will it look after its customers?

Let me give you an example of excellent customer care… British Airways… the world’s favourite airline… as they like to be known. Staff are pleasant, helpful and go out of their way to help. The lounges are exclusive, clean and relaxing. The food is good, the wines excellent and upgrades are often given… you want to fly with BA just in case you get one of those free upgrades. It is certainly what I do and have a BA gold card to prove it. But… alas… I feel I am day dreaming back to the 1990s. Back then BA was a well respected British institution that lived up to its self proclaimed status as the world’s favourite airline… but… alas… I fear no more.

I used to do a lot of flying in the 1990s… too much… so when it comes to flying I do believe I can recognise good service when I encounter it. I do believe I can recognise people who have a genuine interest in their customer. I am sad to say that I have been doing a lot less encountering and recognition lately. Admittedly I try not to fly and no longer have my gold card, but I still have my memories and things are not what they used to be. Perhaps with the advent of the no frills airlines, standards have been allowed to slip. Perhaps having a great British airline is no longer desirable.

Whether having a great British airline is desirable or not, BA still needs customers. So, caring for your customer should work for customer retention. Whatever the business making sure your customer has a good experience is important and never more so than in the service industry. So moving forward a few years let me update you with my latest BA experience and the Rottweiler of an air stewardess I met on the flight back to London from Toronto via St Johns. To say she had little sympathy for the suffering her passengers were subjected to on our horrendous journey back is an understatement… I should have mentioned to her that … “I have paid money to be on this flight, unlike you who are paid to be here”… although I doubt it would have made a difference.

We were diverted because a passenger was taken ill, but we were stranded because BA doesn’t seem able to organise the proverbial party in a brewery…

Did BA do the right thing by diverting?… yes.

Did they know the crew were on limited time and could not fly after a certain time?… yes.

Have BA ever diverted an aircraft before?… yes.

Has an aircraft ever diverted to St Johns?… about 2 or 3 a month.

How long did BA have to get the paperwork right before the crew ran out of time?… at least 3 hrs.

How long does it take to change flight plans?… we did it mid air by diverting to St Johns so can’t take that long.

Did any member of the BA crew stay at the airport to advise passengers on what was happening?… No
Did anyone give proactive advice to passengers about taking duty free back into Canada, about entering the country after your one entry visa has been used, about losing connecting flights in London, about the procedure to get through ticket control when looking to board the replacement flight, exactly when the replacement was due so arrangements in London could be made, etc, etc?… No.

Talking of BA’s organisational skills you need look no further than the mess they made of opening Terminal 5 at Heathrow… and who was it that said something like…”it was not our finest hour” and “the buck stops with me” and then two of his directors suddenly left?… but the one where the buck stopped… stayed… along with the what I have seen written as 28,000 bags, 300 delayed flights and plenty of stranded passengers. The compensation offered to stranded passengers was criticised by the UK’s Consumer Watchdog for the Aviation Industry and BA were forced to pay ‘reasonable costs’… which to me, and I may be unreasonable in my assumption, shows just how much BA care about their customers… and in my experience they still have that care less policy.

However, back to the Rottweiler… she seemingly was taking her cue from the man at the top as she didn’t take into account that it was not our fault that she had to be diverted along with her airplane from New York to pick up paying passengers who were left stranded in St Johns in Newfoundland after being diverted due to a passenger being taken ill. Not the passenger’s fault and respectable of BA to divert due to a medical emergency… but you would have thought this was the first time that they have done this… divert… and so ‘clueless’ is another understatement.

So having sat in the aircraft on the tarmac for 4hrs and then after being let off and back into Canada to savour the delights of St Johns for a further seven hours… just waiting for grumpy to pick us up… our mushroom status was complete. Fed bull manure about not being able to complete paperwork and have bags taken off the aircraft while we were on it and then kept in the dark while waiting in St Johns. So when we finally boarded, approximately 12 hours after boarding in Toronto tired, bored and hungry we needed a crew who were a little sympathetic to our plight… not one who considered they were doing us a favour… and not one with grumpy herding us to our seats.

Mistakes and problems do happen, people will get things wrong… it’s what you do after the mistake has been made that sets you apart.

So all appeared to come good when BA wrote to me and said they have given me 10,000 BA miles into my account as way of recompense for their innate organisation skills – I thought this was very generous until I found out that BA Miles are not miles and that you needed at least 500 miles to get down the runway – 10,000 will get you from London to Paris. However, the salt was clearly rubbed in when a few days ago I had circular from BA saying that they will be paying out 5,000 BA air miles to passengers departing more than 15 minutes late… we were 15 hrs late… that means BA owes me 290,000 more miles if they want to compensate on equal terms. The 10,000 miles gesture is therefore more of an insult then actually wanting to retain customers and shows they have learned nothing from the Terminal 5 fiasco… BA… you need to up your customer care program as the old adage… ‘less is more’ does not apply when dealing with customers… unless of course you are trying to lose some.

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Customer Service… two very good words that can often be at the top of the oxymoron list of words that just don’t sit well together… like two supporters of different teams being asked to sit together, in harmony, to watch the match… and to be absolutely clear, my metaphor relates to football supporters watching a derby match… and for those that need translation… football can also be called soccer… and derby is not the town in middle England, nor the horse race that is run annually at Epsom Downs in Surrey which adds to the confusion because Epsom is nowhere near Derby… but to get back on course… the derby I refer to is not the cheese, but an important local competition. Ask Manchester United fans to live in harmony with Manchester City, or Portsmouth with Southampton or Rangers with Celtic… mixing these fans would be like mixing oil and water… it doesn’t work… and neither does customer service in many organisations.

Having used two metaphors in my opening paragraph… the first to help explain an oxymoron and the second to help explain the explanation, I’ve come to the conclusion that customer service is not so much an oxymoron but an idiom. As we all know, an idiom is a term or phrase whose meaning cannot be deduced from the literal definitions of the words used. For example, we Brits often refer to ‘kick the bucket’ as an endearing way to express the passing of one’s sole to another place… or more bluntly… it is a better way to express the word ‘die’. Now, if you took the literally meaning of ‘kick the bucket’ you would think that people go around doing nothing more harmful than putting one’s foot in contact with a water holding receptacle. Now for those not versed in local language a foreigner to our shores may well get into trouble in wondering why the middle of town is full of people six feet under ground having done nothing more than kick a bucket… and why they are buried with 6 feet when they should only have 2 just further complicates things… and having to explain that a grave yard is not a dead centre and therefore these people may not actually be in the middle of town is just a confusion too far… which is about how I felt today after speaking to customer services at British Midland Airways.

I’m a regular customer of BMI… I might not be their best customer but I try and use them whenever I can. I’ve used them so much in the past that I have lots of frequent flyer points… and now I like to use some of these loyalty points to upgrade from cattle class to mildly acceptable class… they call it club, but on short haul is only just acceptable. However having used my frequent flyer points, my loyalty to the airline puts me in a different class to everyone else. One would think better, but it appears cash still talks and those that fund the whole journey with cash… are king… and those that show loyalty and use their points are trailer trash… which of course, trailer trash… is an idiom, but I think more of American origin than British. An idiom can be thought of as a colloquial metaphor… so origins can be important as we will see later.

It all started with booking on line. Booking on line saves the airline money and generally, when it works, it is easy to do. However, it seems that booking on-line and using points to fund some of the journey does not allow you to reserve your seat. If you pay cash then the system will allow you to reserve your seat. My reservation confirmation sent to me by email says that I can manage my booking on-line… but I still can’t reserve my seat. I therefore call the customer service number shown on my confirmation. I called, had to listen to their on line advert about flying to wherever and then wait in a queue for an agent. The line dropped… I called again and listened to the same advert over again, then went into the queue and the line dropped again. I called a third time and listened dutifully to the advert… which is wasting my time and my call money… and went into the queue, and thankfully this time the line did not drop and after 5 minutes I heard the dulcet tones of someone sitting in a call centre in the middle of India. I explained what I wanted. I had to give the booking reference, my name, the first line of my address, my post code, the full details of my itinerary, my date of birth, by which time I was prepared to give my inside leg measurement, what I had to eat yesterday, the mileage on my car and anything else to confirm who I was. Having gone through all this and wasted 20 minutes of my life I was informed that because I use points I need to call another number. It’s not what it said on the confirmation. This man could book my seats… I know he can… he works for British Midland Airways… he has my reservation details on his screen… but could I persuade him to do it… no… unemotional, uninterested, jobs worth. I now had to ring another number and go through the whole thing again, except this time the dulcet tones had just too much of a local accent to be fully understood and so most things had to be repeated as I strained to work out what was being said. It’s not a pleasant experience speaking with someone you just don’t understand.

So, something that I could have done on-line when I booked the flight, which because I used some frequent flyer points – and cash I may add – I am in a different class of customer and the airline wants to penalise me for my audacity of using my loyalty points and therefore restrict me from booking my seat in the club class cabin. When I pay full cash the system will let me do this. I am therefore forced to pick up a phone and spend a whole day confirming who I am only to be told that the person on the end of the number I was given to call will not book my seats as I am a different class of passenger… one of the unclean who has had the audacity to use their loyalty to the airline points… and therefore I have to speak to someone else who has yet to be trained in building linguistic rapport with their customers and wants all the same information again from me  before they will deal with my request. I got there in the end… but customer service… no it is not, rather customer disservice… and that’s not an oxymoron.

Had a similar experience with customer service?… then add to this post and name and shame those corporations who have more customers than they sometimes deserve.

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Isn’t there some old saying that in order to avoid offending someone never mention religion or politics…

…so I’ll do religion first… it needs to be taken out of sales. There seems to be just too much of it going around at the moment and its damaging people’s wealth creation ability. The religion I’m talking about is that there are too many sales people who must be praying that their deal comes in… they are not doing much else to make sure the deal comes in, so they must be praying. Sure they are busy. Sure they are talking to the customer… but are they talking to the right people, saying the right things… no and no… so they must be praying… what else is there to do?… oh, I know… take control.

That’s religion dealt with and so to the next taboo topic… I believe those in government, and I’m being very parochial here to the UK at both central and local levels, have forgotten that they have customers. Some crazy stuff is going around at the moment for collecting even more tax. Fines for leaving bin lids ajar while waiting to be collected by the bin people, or too much in the bin, or bin bags on the side, or putting bins out the night before… yep central government is pressurising local government to go round giving out on the spot fines for waste infringement… it increases the revenue receipts, but how we are expected to get rid of our household waste… the guy in the sky only knows… but that’s mixing religion and politics. On top of the bins, metaphorically speaking otherwise we will be taxed for leaving stuff on top of the bins, we also have a ‘green’ tax for owning large cars… even though we bought them long before anyone considered them environmentally unfriendly… we seem to be paying for a lack of hindsight on the green issue. However, we now find we need the large cars to put all the rubbish in that the bin people won’t take and so we increase our costs in fuel and while making those extra trips pumpimg even more of the noxious stuff into the sky hoping we don’t choke the big man even more.  How green is that!

When you start fleecing your customers they will get their own back. No matter how bad the fall in revenue, never start fleecing your customer… during the current economic climate the temptation will be there… look at the energy companies. Irrespective of your religion it may be an idea to think about one of the lines from Matthew and Luke’s well known verse… “lead us not into temptation”… make sure the temptation does not become too much. It is something our government should remember as they should also remember they have customers. However, when your customer is also your shareholder, then you really are dumb for fleecing… wait for the shareholder meeting and see who is on the top table after the vote. There is a big shareholder meeting coming up across the pond later this year, ours will be soon, perhaps sooner if the fleecing continues.

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