Lies, incompetence and customer service.

Everyone gets the basic concept and premise of "Marketing" don’t they? Sure they do. 
You hire a marketing manager, who puts together a team of bright young things, who select and hire an advertising agency that is also full of bright young things, who take a brief and respond with a campaign that is mostly on television ‘cos its sexy but if they must, in order to get some more reach, will also include a bit of outdoor, some radio for price promotions and special offers plus a bit of print and probably some sponsorship – and together it all costs millions of dollars and will make the client famous and look good. 
And that’s largely it, isn’t it? 
Oh, if only it were that simple. 
But it’s not, of course, simple at all and, as I bang on about it in this column all too frequently, the overall marketing effect achieved by a business is driven by the total of every behaviour in which that business engages – good and bad. 
In the past few days we have endured a nightmarish customer service experience with one company, a household name that is right up there in the marketing expenditure league table and no doubt has many bright young things working really hard on all that really sexy marketing stuff. However, this company has also demonstrated the following:

• That it has front line staff who are incompetent in dealing with customers.

• That it has front line staff who lie to customers.

• That it has front line staff who don’t give a damn about customers.

• That it has front line staff who make promises and then fail to deliver.

• That it can turn a very simple and routine request for service into a time consuming, irritating and costly experience for the only people the money comes from – the customer. 
That household name is Vodafone. 
And the complex, difficult and challenging problem that we, as customers, presented to Vodafone? 
A simple call, five days ago, to arrange a change of address and the associated requirement to discontinue our existing telephone numbers and to arrange new numbers for our new home. 
How hard can that be? Here is how hard: 
At the time of writing, the service to our current home and my office (phone and broadband/fax lines) has been discontinued, in error. (We are not shifting for another week.) 
This is just the latest event in a sorry saga that began several days ago and has involved my wife spending several hours (yes, several hours) on the phone to Vodafone where she has spoken to innumerable customer service representatives, team leaders, members of their provisioning team and god knows who else. 
And all we wanted to do was to shift house and have Vodafone do their bit from the telecoms perspective.

During this process, my wife has had to endure incompetence, lies, failure to keep records of calls, failure to return calls or to have promised supervisors or team leaders call back as promised and, with the exception of just one or two people, a complete failure to appear to give a damn. She is also now far more familiar with Vodafone’s library of call holding music than it is healthy for anyone to be. 
This experience has highlighted, perhaps more than any other that we have encountered in recent times, the vital marketing reality that every single person in a business is, in effect, a mini-marketing director and has the power to influence, for good or bad, the relationship between a business and its market. 
It is a compelling marketing truth that you can spend the equivalent of a small country’s GDP on advertising, sales promotion, sponsorship and the rest of that sexy stuff but it will all come to nought if the day to day functioning of your business does not fit with, reflect and meet the needs of your market. 
If there is a disconnect between market needs and service provision and experience, all the bright young things in the marketing departments of the world will be as much use to your business success as tits on a bull. 
Note: I offered Vodafone a right of reply. I have just received the following response: 
"We sincerely apologise for what we know has been a very frustrating experience and we are working with the various teams involved to review our processes and understand what went wrong. Vodafone has put a great deal of focus into improving Service delivery in the last year and we are disappointed that this has occurred. We believe the issue is a result of a miscommunication, and we are focusing on discovering why this happened and how to prevent it from occurring in the future". 

Brian Meredith is CEO of The Marketing Bureau (www.themarketingbureau.co.nz). Email[email protected]