If you’re a social landlord, how do you get people in debt to trust you enough to talk? Peabody is one of London’s oldest and largest housing associations. Their Collections team look after collecting rent and service charges from social and shared ownership residents. We were already working with Peabody on an organisation-wide cultural change …
I seem to have spent the last week putting together various crisis comms for our clients. You might have to do the same thing at some point so I wanted to share what we’ve learned so far. 1. Don’t state the bleeding obvious If you’re responding to something everyone knows about because it’s in the …
Being human when you’re communicating in a crisis Read More »
I think it’s time we came clean about something; McDonald’s coffee is actually pretty good. It may not be independent, single bean, cold-extracted blahppuchino, but it’s a decent cup. And, face it, if you’re out and about, hacking into a town centre, paying the second mortgage parking fees and finding a spot isn’t always easy. …
It’s amazing what you find in a cup of McDonald’s Coffee Read More »
“But we spend so much time on bureaucracy that we never get anything done.” We’d barely started the workshop and already it was turning into a moanfest. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – the air often needs a good clearing before you can get down to achieving anything that really matters, but this was …
The right sort of bureaucracy: reducing corporate bureaucracy Read More »
In the 1980s, poet Ted Hughes noticed that the children’s poems he was judging as part of a competition were getting longer. Some were running to nearly 100 pages. Although they were were fluent and often creative, Hughes described them as ‘strangely boring’. Rather than concentrated, condensed thought, they felt diluted and thin. Just because …
Some of us are old enough to remember when British Rail coffee was a national joke. Today, almost every station has a little shop or a van that makes coffee I’d have crawled over hot nails for in the ’80s and ’90s. At Oxford, we’re lucky enough to have Little Italy (@LIEBtweet) who know all …
I’m beginning to believe that organisations have forgotten how to say sorry; not just on a person to person level, but corporately. Take Tesco’s latest foray into public apology… It seems that some of this year’s Christmas turkeys weren’t quite up to scratch, with customers complaining they were sold “rancid, rotten” birds. The social media …
Anyone who works in customer experience will tell you that, without the Chief Executive’s understanding and endorsement of how vital CX is, any programme will be a lot harder to get off the ground. That’s assuming it ever flaps its way off the runway in the first place. We’re working on a customer experience programme …
What does AI mean for customer service centres? As a customer fighting the now traditional battle to get a promised callback out of Vodafone, I’m rather looking forward to artificial intelligence (AI) taking over a few jobs, smoothing a few processes and actually keeping promises. After all, a bot doesn’t get a bad case of …
Customers make emotional decisions all the time. Making sure you understand how emotion works in your customers’ journeys is one of the most effective ways to make people loyal, satisfied and create the feelings that make them remember and recommend you. Thanks to my dog-walking pal Anna, here’s a story about dementors, flowers and customer …
Designing emotion back into the customer journey Read More »
