Hide-and-Seek Management.

By Allard Marx, CEO of corporate branding research and development firm, INCIDE.

The phone rings, the receptionist answers with her best lilting voice, listens attentively, she frowns, (she has been asked for someone’s name you see) she looks down at the internal extension phone directory, and is struck by the bold lettering across the top. It is marked “TOP SECRET”…. True of false?

During our recent BrandVoice™ survey we telephoned nearly 200 company head offices to ask the names of the Human Resources manager/ director and then ranked the companies according to five response criteria (number of rings before answering, knowledge, courtesy, professionalism, holding time etc.). The results were the corporate head office equivalent of the worst tales of press-button-hold-wrong-department-start-again service-line mania.

Now we know why we can’t get through to real people – because some people do not want us to. Some companies even appear to create fictitious people who do not actually exist!

27 companies out of almost 200 surveyed have a policy not to give out names of any of their managers. Not ignorance, or an inability to find the name on the part of the receptionist, mind – but a policy! I ask you.

This is the new breed of hide-and-seek managers? One wonders, is this a resurgence of misplaced British privacy-seeking and is the UK once again lagging behind the US in customer management? Or is it only the companies that know they haven’t yet got it right where managers cower behind the parapet of this telephonic first line of defense? We cannot tell and would not like to speculate but it is especially ironic when these same managers and directors often pay for public relations to ensure that they appear in the media on their company’s behalf.

It is all in stark contrast to the US where you can virtually call CEO “Hank” or “Susan” directly and give him/her a piece of your mind (albeit maybe through the PA). Mind you, they never were embarrassed to admit that sales mattered either nor to call it by its proper name. American management is expected to put itself in the line of fire for the quality of their company’s customer interface and do so with courage and conviction.

In the US, success rubs off on them visibly, as, of course, does failure. When I visit the US, I have no problem getting through to a high number of senior people to ask for appointments. Only on Friday I rang the CEO of Sodexho USA and left a message. He rang back at 11.30 on Monday morning. It was 6.30am in Maryland. Try that here and it takes months.

But getting through to the appropriate person to act on your call is not just the preserve of B2B calls, customer enquiries or complaints. What of crises or emergencies? If you were to call a company at 2am to get response or action on some crisis or disaster in another time zone, how would the night guard respond?

He may be long forgotten but Jan Carlszon, the mid-Eighties CEO of SAS Scandinavian Airlines had a point. He became quite a service guru after writing a book called “Moments of Truth”. The concept was simple and hardly warranted reading his entire tomelet but the notion that his airline only ‘existed’ when a member of his staff interacted directly with a customer, was as evocative as it was compelling. He called each such interaction ‘a moment of truth’ and when he multiplied the number of customers the airline had with the number of interactions taking place during an average customer journey, he ended up with 50 million of the little blighters per year. These moments, he said, each one of them, were shaping the perceptions of his airline.

Capturing and analysing those moments partly inspired our development of a service intelligence system with the help of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.

The proprietary process uses video cameras, with customer knowledge and consent, and Morpho-psychology (the study of facial and body movements as an indication of a person’s thoughts). Unlike post-rationalised responses to a questionnaire, when applied to large numbers of customers and staff, the system provides results that are both quantitative and qualitative and gives real, live, insights to responses to service as they happen.

Not using concepts like ‘moments of truth’ when new similar ones may have replaced them is legitimate; Being slow to adopt revolutionary research techniques is understandable; But the hide-and-seek manager intent on withdrawing completely from the front line of service to customers seems as ludicrous as it is outdated.

Why should this be? Is it because:

a) Life is too good at the top for this to be disturbed by dissatisfied customers or any hassle at all

b) Companies believe that technology and other media have adequately replaced people

c) Management believes it is employing other people to do this and is far too occupied with the financial/investment community

Ever the pragmatist, my colleague Lindsey Handley feels it is amazing that CEO’s never call their own company, or pretend to be customers, to see how it comes across. Because if they did, then our survey’s statistics would surely be very different. And we would all get better service.

Finding out what of shapes corporate brand perceptions and reputations is surely key. By now everyone must know that a corporate brand (or reputation, if you will) is not just a logo. A corporate brand is how all its audiences perceive the company. The logo is the mnemonic device that unlocks the set of data concerning that company in the human mind. How a logo looks does help but how a company behaves, the service it provides, the willingness to stand up and be counted, what it says and the tone it adopts leave a much longer-lasting mark on the mind of customers. Why is this fact still being under-researched or even being ducked entirely?

So what should companies do to address these areas? Simply, they should:

1. Find out what the public, their employees, shareholders and customers think of them. Conduct research in other words.

2. Put themselves in other people’s shoes. Pretend to be a customer. But not get some mystery shopper Charlie to do it. Actually do it themselves.

3. Imbue their organisation with a thought process that makes it focus on the realities and eventualities of life as opposed to the conveniences.

Jan, thank you – those moments of truth are indeed crucial. CEO, make that call, visit that retail site of yours, try that flight.

Allard Marx. INCIDE tel. 020 7917 2860.