Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Posted by: Peter Massey | 23.09.2008
Got a classic call from NOP on behalf of Autoglass last night. Would I mind answering a few questions about my recently replaced windscreen? Sure. On a scale of one to ten, would you rate you r experience as excellent, good…. STOP!!! I’m willing to give you my feedback but I’m not willing to answer bland questions – is there a free form comments box so you can write them in? No. If I just tell you can you record it? No, we just ask the questions we’re given. But how can I tell you what I thought of your service then? You cant, we can only ask you the questions. If I give you feedback about your process can you give it someone. No. Your supervisor? Well…
You get the jist. A dumb process that damages NOP and Autoglass’ brands and the experience of doing business with them, avoids learning anything useful and costs loads of money. If you recognise this process in your business and want to do something about it – get in touch
For the record my feedback would have been:
Replacement process was great, guy was friendly, paperwork all pre done – fab
Booking process interesting. Must have involved maybe a dozen calls as the call centre, Ashford and Tonbridge sorted out who did what, I cancelled one visit, they cancelled one. I could go into detail and give you the fixes if anyone at Autoglass is interested in my feedback?
Uncategorized | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 31.07.2008
The contrast in use of tax payers resources, the politics and the bigger system and the good news….
Is my tax £ being well spent?
I love Jeremy Clarkson’s idea that the police shouldn’t be allowed to fine you for car parking until they return your stolen goods!
I was struck by the contrasting use of resources around Soho Square as I walked into work yesterday. In Greek St, there was a police cordon around a bar. Uh oh must have been a murder. Two officers, once taking photos of the scene. At the opposite end of the square, parked opposite Soho St, was a Smart car with CCTV on the roof. It was aimed up the one way street from the wrong end. Presumably to catch cyclists going the wrong way up the street, since cars cant turn into the street the wrong way easily given the shape of the traffic islands on Oxford St - itself a street only for buses and taxis so unlikely to generate much “driving” crime. There were two guys sat in the Smart car reading the Sun.
The contrasting focus of manpower is striking in a time of newspaper headlines about knife crime, rising prices and taxes.
The wider system
Not only do cameras everywhere make me feel less safe, but they make me aware of government. It strikes me that everything that is government charged, privatised and vaguely regulated (and I use the two words specifically), or is an effective monopoly is just going through the roof. Parking fines rising to £120, gas going up 35%, my station car parking going up 17%, fuel rising to £1.34 - but more noticeably the gap between unleaded and diesel jumping from circa 6p to 14p. Yet the money raised doesnt seem to make any difference to the services offered.
It seems that an economic downturn is a great excuse to screw customers. Does the government thing that people don’t see the connection between the way government governs and regulates, the way business works and the way investors invest.
Maybe Mr Brown would be better trying to make the adjustments in pricing happen in the stockmarket, not in the high street. Centrica and British Gas is a great case in point. Poor old British Gas has to hike prices whilst Centrica raises its dividend to shareholders, claiming poor old pensioners need the money from their pension funds. Doesnt matter, its still the customers who fork out more to investors via a business and weak regualtion/competition. It feels like we are just paying for the fact that the government sold all the family silver years ago and can no longer control large multinational players, many foreign owned, who will do what they need to do to keep their shareholders happy overseas as funding gets harder to raise.
So Mr Brown - go find a better lever to pull - talk to the analysts and investors. Unless they expect and accept that profits will suffer as markets restructure, without sacking CEOs or ransacking share prices, the CEOs will continue to pump customers for short term gain.
But what about the good news?
The good news is that there are richer pickings for CEOs and government to be made from removing waste than even pumping customers for money they dont want to give. The Cabinet Office agenda is to save 50% of “avoidable contact” with citizens from every goverement department. Not to sack people and save money, but to free people up to do more valuable things (than catching cyclists….). Now this I get. If CEOs set the same challenge to remove 50% of unncessary contact then there would be real change in the customer experience. At the moment there’s a lot of pussyfooting around with cost savings, not fundamental change.
Why is contact rate so important to the experience and the economics? Take for example, last week I had to get my divorce papers done. I really dont like paperwork, but 8 years hanging around is ridiculous. But heh it’s easy - I managed the hard bits easily with only 2 contacts. (Dont let that give you ideas!).
A visit to directgov led to all the forms and how to fill them in. A copy of the marriage certificate within 24 hours all done online. The only contact was to check the fee to pay - it looked like the figure it was, but it didnt say “divorce” on it, so I called to check - all details being quickly available to do that too. The other contact? Meet with the ex to sign the forms too, of course. Job nearly done. A great experience, very little work for me or anyone else, for a complex task.
Then there was splitting a pension. I shall keep the innocent unnamed since they were very helpful. But suffice to say, after looking at the website and even starting with a personal contact, it took several people to get involved to clearly establish what needed to happen. No action has been taken yet, but I can see why their SLA is 4 months to act! I havent counted the calls or emails but it must have been a dozen. Must have cost them a fortune.
So maybe the goverment’s transformation agenda is working better than we notice. Maybe private business can learn a thing or two. Certainly government is giving The Best Service Is No Service serious attention. And we’re going to try and help with an event on the 29th September - a goverment summit we’re running with Contact Centre Clinic in Liverpool. The Cabinet Office will be speaking along with several top public and private companies. But mainly we’ll be causing people to talk to each other and take back specific actions they can take in their government department, police force, NHS body or local authority. And of course private companies are welcome to learn too. Get in touch with joanne.sparkes@budd.uk.com for more details. PS and its £250 - good experiences are always less expensive to give than dumb ones!
Government, Healthcare, Uncategorized, contact rate, customer experience, the best service is no service | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 23.06.2008
A customer on my train spent 50 minutes this morning arguing with the guard. The guard’s credit card machine had taken his transaction twice according to the receipts. The guard “knew” it hadn’t because it made this error before.
The customer wanted confirmation that it hadn’t taken his money twice. The guard couldn’t do that but asked the customer to write in. Naturally the customer did not want to waste his time when it wasn’t his fault. Both were locked in an impasse.
The supervisor was called by phone. The conversation was not understood by the supervisor. Several times the customer asked the supervisor not to talk over him. He eventually told him (”Jim”) that he did not believe that Jim “understood what I’m saying” since he hadn’t listened to him.
My point isn’t better training for the ticket man or the supervisor. It’s two questions:
Why didn’t the machine get fixed when the conductor knew it was broken?
How much time was wasted and how much damage done to SouthEastern’s brand?
Uncategorized, complaint, customer experience, the best service is no service, train | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 3.06.2008
”What our customers are saying” (wocas) processes do 3 things
1) They let m
anagement know what customers and frontline staff know is obvious.
It’s a bit like this weather stone. Management create lots of feedback mechanisms because they are in the cosy indoors and can’t feel the rain to tell them its raining.
2) They motivate frontline staff to collect insights because management act on them (thus making the agent sound much more intelligent and allowing smart people to use their brains)
3) The systematic action – the bit most companies can’t do but high performing companies do (see our 2008 F+S survey of 71 UK companies in Q1 2008 in the library. It shows how high performance companies collect the same types of feedback as lower performing ones - and that the difference comes from what they do with it
Let us know if you want an inhouse webinar on the topic or a private session just for you! - peter.massey@budd.uk.com
Uncategorized | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 3.06.2008
A journalist asked me why businesses are poor on email responses. The thought that went through my head was “why should they be?”
- Generation Y consumers don’t use much email so why develop it further
- It’s too late now! We’ve been trained, as consumers, that email doesnt work well when you send it most companies. Even if they respond at all, you don’t get any answers
- email is very good for getting things wrong, it’s a poor 2 way conversation. So it’s better to phone back. Seldom happens but a great wow if a company does.
- c2c communities are much more useful – insightful and supportive – if companies know how to foster them without interfering they are a great source of insight and support (Innocent is a good example) . Get in touch (peter.massey@budd.uk.com) if you want to talk more about how you can develop communities in c2c or b2b.
More fundamentally email off cues from websites are usually a substitute for really giving customers the answers they want, how they want them and where they want them. That’s because most companies:
- Don’t have metrics that show them what contact they have in other channels because their websites dont help
- When customers get in touch they don’t ask for feedback on why they had to get in touch
- They can’t act on the feedback they have, let alone more complex feedback like that if they got it
- They don’t have fast pubishing processes that can get changes made in minutes rather than weeks
Read about how Amazon does some of these processes in the Skyline and “what our customers are saying” sections of our site or take a look at some of the papers in the library
Uncategorized | No Comments
Posted by: Jo Sparkes | 23.05.2008
On Sunday 25th May, Penny Hicks of Budd and Elspeth Ryan will run hard and hopefully complete the Edinburgh marathon. At the same time they are raising money for the British Red Cross, helping people in crisis all over the world. The British Red Cross has launched an appeal to help tens of thousands of people affected by the major earthquake in China.
The following is an account of the earthquake that has been sent to us from someone teaching in Chengdu:
“I have been living in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, for a year and a half now. Sichuan, a comparatively poor and densely populated province in Western China, whose mountains slowly rise to join the Tibetan Plateau. Sichuan has a reputation for delicious food and a relaxed and leisurely attitude to life, and I’ve really enjoyed living here. The students I’ve taught at primary and middle schools, as well as at university have all impressed me deeply with their friendliness, intelligence and hard-working nature. So you can imagine the deep sorrow I feel when I think of all those bright young students cruelly robbed of their futures when their school buildings and lives collapsed down on top of them. A loss of any one of these children is a loss to us all.
I was at University teaching when the earthquake happened. At first I thought it was a plane or large truck going past. That might explain the crashing, banging and rumbling. I looked at the words on the projector screen jumping around. Then a student stood up and shouted ‘earthquake!’. We all ran out of the building. We didn’t know that’s not what you’re supposed to do; none of us had experienced an earthquake before. Fortunately we were lucky. Cracks appeared in buildings but very few fell down. At a friends school, two dormitory buildings collapsed (most students in China board at their schools) but the students were in class at the time. It wasn’t until I returned to my swaying 9th floor flat on Monday evening that the full horror of the situation emerged. The next day was awful; the heavy rain was non-stop and wall-to-wall TV coverage of silent, crushed bodies and wailing students clinging on to life was harrowing. The worst thought was that there were thousands more at that point that had yet to be reached by rescue teams. I couldn’t stop shaking, and I was never sure if it was the ground of me. In fact, nothing seems certain or sure anymore. In Chengdu, people are still so frightened that they are sleeping on the streets, sometimes with just a bamboo mat to keep themselves clean. Any open area or patch of grass currently resembles a campsite.
A week later, and people are still living in fear, even in Chengdu. The aftershocks happen nearly everyday, reminding people that this still isn’t over. Rumours bounce around the city in minutes. “The water is contaminated” and sure enough, minutes later in the shops, the bottled water and milk is disappearing fast. Irate customers are shouting at the sales girls that they need all that they’re buying. “There will be a big aftershock in 20 minutes: run outside!” My friends moan that it’s raining, its rumour, but we all still feel nervous and unsettled. Last night we receive another rumour - “in the next 3 days, there will be an earthquake of 6 to 7 magnitude; it was on the news”. We listen to the streets fill with cars beeping at each other, in a race to get out of the city. We think it’s another rumour, but we turn on the TV anyway. I’m surprised, there is a government warning of another big aftershock. The panic and fear infects me, and I cycle through the gridlocked streets to join my friends in the park. I takes me half an hour to find them among the thousands of other’s bedded down there. We give a mattress to a solitary elderly lady, sitting on a small chair in the mud. Dawn breaks, it’s all OK. But all of the schools are closed for another week. The banks shut at random times. Hundreds of people are queuing to buy tents, because it will rain tonight and people don’t dare to stay indoors. Even in Chengdu, life is not back to normal. But for those living in the refugee camps, in the mountains and near devastated towns, there is no hope of normality for months and probably years.
My students tell me of their hometowns. They say that where there were two mountains, there is now only one; whole villages have been buried by the landslides. Towns the size of Newbury have lost 3-5000 souls. Those that survived are now homeless (there are an estimated 5 million who now have no place to live), the children, orphaned. There are many tales of heroism and hope however. Those of us in Chengdu are organising donations of cash and supplies that are immediately sent out to the affected areas; many of my university students are volunteering in local hospitals and in the disaster zone. However, given the scale of the destruction, more help is still needed. Basics like rubber gloves for medics are in short supply; children’s shoes and other essentials like camp beds are urgently required, as well as basic medicines, tents and food and drink. The people of Sichuan have always been incredibly generous and warm-hearted in welcoming me into their lives. They now need others to show the same generosity to help them rebuild their lives and their futures.”
To help Penny and Elspeth raise money for the Red Cross please visit their justgiving page:
http://www.justgiving.com/elspethryan
Uncategorized | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 16.05.2008
I feel like I’ve been a blog free zone this last month – travelling and conferences taking up the slack between work and play. So here are some highlights, in chronological order, that you might find useful from the last 3 weeks… Tell me which you’d like more on and I’ll write more.
1) LimeBridge’s 12th global gathering in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We missed the tornado a few miles south in Texas, but managed a European shopping competition since everything is so cheap. As Frederic said at the car hire desk (adopt cheesy french accent here…) “Surely we should take a driver with ze car at this price!” Given how cheap things are we did start a serious discussion about offshoring to America – it’s maybe not as daft as it sounds, at least in US brands or B2B.
We spent lots of talking about the book “The Best Service Is No Service” whch has now sold out in Australia and judging by the orders of 100+ at a time, will soon be in its second print run. Not bad after a month and a half.
But what shall we focus on in “book 2”? Suggestions on a postcard please. We’re thinking about “The complete systems model of how the customer experience and contact points drive economics in a business model” – maybe with a shorter title!
2) GOC – the Global Operating Council, alias the US CCO Forum, but focused on outsourcing and offshoring since that’s the biggest part of the US model. This was also the 12th meeting they’d had and ably hosted at the Avis centre in Tulsa. We giggled at the sign on the door saying “No fireams or dangerous weapons allowed on these premises” but apparently people sometimes forget and bring them in…… We had an excellent visit to Direct TV (think the US version of Sky) as well. The big take aways?
• The Philippines are already as saturated as India for voice. Some very interesting insights shared on which outsourcers are performing or not.
• Performance management, environment, coaching , work force management and lifestyle are still underutilized weapons of mass employment in the US. These were good companies but you’d be sacked in the UK for the lowest of the attrition levels being achieved
3) From the US it was straight into the Professional Planning Forum Annual Conference in Manchester. Apart from the best way to run a packed conference of 350 people in many streams and have a party too, there were fabulous shared case studies from all the Award finalists. The final Innovation award went to EDF for their work on contact elimination. We launched the 2008 F+S Research, which was carried out in conjunction with PPF. You can download the paper from our library. Another blog is called for on this striking work!
4) Madrid was the next stop for an in-house conference, a format that many of our clients use. Whilst we have designed and facilitated some, this one was just the key note speaker role again. With countries from all over Europe represented, it is noticeable how similar the issues are and how enormous are the opportunities to avoid reinventing wheels by learning from each other.
5) Finally to this week’s ECMW conference in London with about 500 in the audience and Richard Branson headlining. In fact the interview with him was rather tame, yet intriguing. Chairing so many conferences, one starts to feel like there are no new things out there. And at the same time so many things to learn.
The highlight for me was Daniel Pink, an author and former speech writer for Al Gore. Before his “green” film that would have not have been something you’d talk about. Anyway, he got my best speaker rating, and I loved his use of “levity, brevity and repetition” to get his messages across. What was the message? That Abundance, Asia and Automation are taking over. And in that environment its really important to develop right brain creative skills to compete.
Given he followed one of the most painful speakers I’ve seen in a long while – and I see a few – arguing for lots of maths and analysis, he was on a winner from the start. His technique was “scream, preach and shout” – and nope it didn’t work.
Other highlights? Fred Reicheld was masterful in his arguments for how he developed the Netpromoter scoring system after listening to very simple work at Enterprise (car hire not space ships) and Ritz Carlton and others. They had all talked about the Golden Rule – do to others what you’d like to have done to you – and from this came the referral question. Personally I still think saying you intend to recommend when asked is verydifferent from having recommended but lots not lose sight of the bigger prize – getting the board to balance finance and customer issues.
Willie Walsh of BA getting the best airline results but not taking his fat bonus in light of the debacle at Terminal 5 is a good case of recognising when the balance isn’t right.
Let me know your thoughts and what you want more on at peter.massey@budd.uk.com
Uncategorized | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 4.04.2008
first direct’s withdrawal of mortgages to new customers took the news by storm yesterday. It wasn’t a surprise. As we reported on the 11th of Feb blog entry, it was evident the product was selling “too well”.
So how come it took til now to do something? Why did it have to reach crisis point? I wonder who’s getting what blame?
But they did get brave and do the right thing. Look after the existing customers and the ones who already applied and stop taking more business that couldn’t be handled properly.
Bravo!
Listening to customers it must have been evident it had to happen. I wonder why they didnt just up the rates a bit in February and take more business at a higher margin, avoiding the negative publicity and “first rock” factor?
It’s interesting that there’s now a BBC Today programme on Saturdays that’s designed to do exactly this. Pick up the stories from the customers before the journalists can.
What our customers are saying is in the public domain. Shouldn’t you be picking it up in your business first?
Talk to us about the “what our customers are saying” process
Uncategorized, WOCAS, first direct, listening, word of mouth | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 29.02.2008
It may sound like a Disney song, but “a whole new world” of doing business was on the table at a meeting I went to last night. It was to listen to a few ideas from Doc Searls latterly from Harvard, a pioneer of the internet having dropped everything in 1989: “I didn’t know why but I knew it’d be big”.
He’s perhaps best known for being a co-author of the “Clue Train Manifesto” which amongst its 95 declarations said “We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it”. So as you can imagine that appeals to us at Budd. In fact it reads like a catalogue of dumb things. It makes you wish you’d thought of it!
It also claims “Markets are conversations”.
One of the insights Doc shared was from a Nigerian pastor. “When you’re in a market and you see something you like, how do you open the conversation? An American would say: “How much does it cost?”. But a Nigerian wouldn’t. If you talk for 20 minutes and learn a lot about how it was made, who did it and why and so on – and vice versa, why the buyer is there, why they might want it etc - then what happens to the price? It will be different. It will represent a different thing.
He was explaining the difference between “two moral systems”. In the pastor’s view: money and relationship. Too much of the commercial or western world is based on money. Much of the world is based on relationship not money. The two clash exactly in that Robert Redford & Demi Moore film “Indecent Proposal” where the question is “what price for your wife?”. That clash is of systems is why marketing and CRM don’t work. Why sellers don’t really mean they want a relationship. Ultimately why companies don’t listen to consumers.
On the othe hand, if you go to the market to have a conversation, you’ll learn a lot and you may find something that works for both buyer and seller needs. Only then do you set a value on it. If you go to market to look for price, you will get what you get. Too much of the commercial world goes to market to sell things, not to start meaningful conversations.
The point is that, in our commercial world, we are trying to bring together two systems, of relationship and money that don’t come together, unless you look at the world in a different way. So what is this whole new world?
Well Doc is now focusing his time on this question. Because he thinks it will be as transforming as industrialisation, the internet or blogging.
He’s not alone in that many other groups have been interested for some while. Not least the snappily titled “Buyer Centric Commerce Forum” which started in 2002 around the work of author Alan Mitchell and his book “Right Side Up”.
It’s a space where consumers and businesses have equal power. Where marketing’s one way conversations of one to many and the buying of products by individuals is replaced. Information smoothes out the blindness to performance and price. So buyers can see what other buyers can see. The conversations on the web are too fast and complete to let ignorance of competitive offerings go unaddressed. Eventually buyer and seller power are more equally dispersed. But not without responsibility for the buyer.
So you can see this happening already. What is so radical? Well the next step…. Let’s see if I can exemplify it.
The key may lie in something called “vendor relationship management or VRM”. Sounds like CRM through the looking glass.
Buyers own their own data about themselves and businesses are vendors who are permitted to use the data for a specific purpose when sanctioned by the buyer. When someone wants something they describe their problem, specify it and put their need on line. Companies or vendors who can meet that need are allowed to look at that buyer information and the relevant personal information so that they can start a conversation and eventually decide what to “bid” as a solution and at what price to bid.
The company doesn’t need to buy, collect or hold lots of data in CRM systems. It doesn’t need to spam lots of people to find sales leads. It doesn’t need to advertise to generate demand. It doesn’t need to offer an approximate solution. It can have complete up to date data with which to have a good conversation with its potential customer. It can, if permitted, have relevant, accurate data from all its customers.
The economics of marketing change. The marketing costs can go down to zero. The cost of converting leads goes down to zero. The costs of considering needs and deciding what to sell will rise. And the speed of learning what sells will be instant. The tailoring of offers will be common place. It’s “just in time” buying where the customers set out their demand and vendors decide who and how best to meet that demand.
There could be an increased cost to the customer in time. Time to keep their data up to date? But in practice wouldn’t this be a saving? A saving over talking to many vendors who cant meet your need, who ask for the same old same old data to be able to understand who you are and what you want.
No one has the mechanisms yet, but they probably aren’t complicated. Think of a series of web pages or feeds that you own: WhoIam.com; WhatIwant.com; Whatdoyouthink.com. And an equivalent set that the company or vendor owns: Whatwecanoffer.com. And what’s in the middle? WhatelseIcouldget.com. Whatsbestforyou.com. VRM? Not so very different maybe. But think about the way the process would have changed.
Let’s say I want to get a weekend away. I check whoIam.com is complete with my latest data. I go to a virtual coach on whatIwant.com and work out as much as I can about what I want. I then release a feed into the middle, into the VRM or whatever that “matrix” comes to mean. I get questions from whatwecanoffer.com and I decide what I want. It’s been run through whatelsecoudIget.com already so I know if its ok because of what lots of people say.
Not so different from a reverse auction on eBay. Or Amazon’s ecosystem maybe.
The fundamental difference? Behaviours of buyers and sellers would change. A buyer gets help to specify what is their need. Buyers who can’t specify their need, or who aren’t yet ready to buy, don’t come forward to absorb sales effort. A seller gets free buyer leads. It has all the data they need to sell the right thing. Sellers who try to sell things that don’t meet needs, change or disappear fast. The waste in traditional sales and marketing disappears.
It’s a frightening thought for wasteful businesses with big sales and marketing budgets. It’s great for upstart businesses who change their marketing $$ into listening $$. They change their approach and win.
But how will it happen in practice?
We don’t know, but that’s what this meeting was about. Maybe it starts with building some simple prototypes.
Maybe it’s already happening. A client told me the other day their business was changing. Their clients, insurance companies, were losing business very fast to the aggregators – moneysupermarket.com, confused.com etc. This is an early example – but its still in the old world. Its product and seller centric. Imagine those aggregator tools applying to everything you want and being you centric… . Data entered once into a secure facebook/eBay/Amazon for buying. A whole new world. Just around the corner
Get in touch if you’d like to stretch your thinking…. peter.massey@budd.uk.com
Uncategorized | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 22.02.2008
Just for fun: An elderly lady actually wrote this letter to her bank. The bank manager thought it amusing enough to have it published in The Times
Dear Sir,
I am writing to thank you for bouncing my cheque with which I endeavoured to pay my plumber last month. By my calculations, three’nanoseconds’ must have elapsed between his presenting the cheque and the arrival in my account of the funds needed to honour it. I refer, of course, to the automatic monthly deposit of my Pension, an arrangement which, I admit, has been in place for only eight years. You are to be commended for seizing that brief window of opportunity, and also for debiting my account £30 by way of penalty for the inconvenience caused to your bank.
My thankfulness springs from the manner in which this incident has caused me to rethink my errant financial ways. I noticed that whereas I personally attend to your telephone calls and letters, when I try to contact you, I am confronted by the impersonal, overcharging, re-recorded, faceless entity which your bank has become. From now on, I, like you, choose only to deal with a flesh-and-blood person. My mortgage and loan payments will therefore and hereafter no longer be automatic, but will arrive at your bank by cheque, addressed personally and confidentially to an employee at your bank whom you must nominate.
Be aware that it is an offence under the Postal Act for any other person to open such an envelope.
Please find attached an Application Contact Status which I require your chosen employee to complete. I am sorry it runs to eight pages, but in order that I know as much about him or her as your bank knows about me, there is no alternative. Please note that all copies of his or her medical history must be countersigned by a Solicitor, and the mandatory details of his/her financial situation (income, debts, assets and liabilities) must be accompanied by documented proof.
In due course, I will issue your employee with a PIN number which he/she must quote in dealings with me. I regret that it cannot be shorter than 28 digits but, again, I have modelled it on the number of button presses required of me to access my account balance on your phone bank service. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Let me level the playing field even further. When you call me, press buttons as follows:
1– To make an appointment to see me.
2– To query a missing payment.
3– To transfer the call to my living room in case I am there.
4– To transfer the call to my bedroom in case I am sleeping.
5– To transfer the call to my toilet in case I am attending to nature.
6– To transfer the call to my mobile phone if I am not at home.
7– To leave a message on my computer (a password to access my computer is required. A password will be communicated to you at a later date to the Authorized Contact.)
8– To return to the main menu and to listen to options 1 through 8
9– To make a general complaint or inquiry, the contact will then be put on hold, pending the attention of my automated answering service.
While this may, on occasion, involve a lengthy wait, uplifting music will play for the duration of the call.
Regrettably, but again following your example, I must also levy an establishment fee to cover the setting up of this new arrangement.
May I wish you a happy, if ever so slightly less prosperous, New Year.
Your Humble Client
Uncategorized | No Comments
