Creative Agency Secrets

I have just bought a new motorbike and went to my insurance broker to get a new quote for insurance.
Easy peasy.  They found a good price and ‘tied’ it into my existing bike, which I am not selling, to give me a good price for two bikes.
So far so good.

Then I get the insurance certificates in the post.

A day later I get a letter asking me to provide
1.  Proof of No Claims Bonus
2. Photocopy of my driving license
3.  Photocopy of Compulsory Basic Training Certificate

DARN.  Basic error.  Very basic.

A company with whom I have dealt for 5 years and who has had this information from me before appears to have no means of accessing it.
What does it look like?  They are treating me like a new customer who they’ve never dealt with before not an existing customer who has just bought a second product from them (and this should be a sign of increasing profitability from my account and rising lifetime value).

I wrote them this little email to the sales@ address.

You write asking for proof of no claims, copy of my driving license and my CBT certificate

You have been my insurance broker since I got my bike.  You have arranged every year’s cover for me; you have had all this information from our previous dealings.

Please look in your files and if you don’t have them, I will come and visit you as a consultant (this is what I do for a living) and advise you on how to re-order your processes in order for customers to be better served.  An organisation should ‘remember’ when it has had this sort of information from a customer before and should be able to call up copy data in circumstances like this one thus saving the customer time and money.  And also, incidentally, creating a process that ties the customer into your services and making it harder to switch to another provider because your service is better and takes less of the customer’s time than a competitor who has to acquire these documents afresh.

Tell me you have this information.

If you don’t.  I will provide them.  And I would like to meet your Sales Director.

We will see what transpires.

NOTE TO SELF   

Advise all clients to check internal procedures for dealing with lapsed clients and how information is stored in accounts, marketing, database, customer services. 

Could this happen to us?

Now, most of you readers know that I am a enthusiastic rower and sculler.  And here’s a great cross-over article about management theory and team building that is being used by one of the top rowing teams in teh world, Cambridge University, to try and aide its efforts to win the Boat Race.

Mark de Rond, has been following the crew and its professional coaching team for a year for his researches.  He is a Management Theorist at the Judge Business School.  It was Mark who set up the collaboration for his researches.  I expect the book that comes out of it will be very insightful. 

Anyway, here’s the Economist article.

Rhythm and blues

Mar 29th 2007 | CAMBRIDGE

From The Economist print edition

Can voguish management theory help to win a venerable race?

CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY’S “blue boat”, which faces its Oxford rival in the 153rd
boat race on April 7th, glides past the browns and greys of the East
Anglian fenland. The oars cup and spill the water, leaving eight evenly
spaced dimples in the river behind them. Two catamarans track the
boat’s progress. In the first, Duncan Holland, the coach, looks for
flaws in the rowers’ technique. In the second sits a less congruous
figure: Mark de Rond, a management theorist from Cambridge’s Judge
Business School. He thinks this time-honoured contest holds lessons for
business today.

As in any
company, the members of the boat club are torn between competition and
co-operation. Colleagues vie with each other for preferment, yet must
collaborate closely to fend off competition from without. To win a seat
in the blue boat a rower must outshine his clubmates; but to go fast,
rowers must synchronise their efforts with the same people they are
trying to outdo.

On one recent
outing Mr Holland noticed the tell-tale signs of a “rhythm fight”
between two decorated rowers: each was trying, perhaps unwittingly, to
impose his natural tempo on the other. Some coaches might just tell one
to speed up and the other to slow down. But Mr Holland is willing to
try some b-school thinking. So, like the problem-solving circles
pioneered by Japanese steel plants, his rowers are encouraged to spot
and solve such glitches for themselves. “I lead from the side,” he says.

Picking the
best eight from more than 30 hopefuls proved tricky: not all of the
possible permutations added up to the sum of their parts. Jake
Cornelius, for example, arrived from Stanford University as one of the
strongest rowers, but he seemed to upset the rhythm of the boat. So he
was advised to row “anonymously”. As another rower put it: you stand
out by not sticking out.

Dan
O’Shaughnessy, by contrast, may not have the smoothest technique, but
he still belongs in the swiftest boat. A flamboyant character, he gets
the best out of his crewmates, who like to have him around, Mr de Rond
says. Their views were backed by an article in the Harvard Business Review,
which found that workmates prize amiability over ability, preferring
the “loveable fool” to the “competent jerk”. Employees may be reluctant
to admit this, but managers should take heed: teams that like each
other also seem to work better together.

So both
rowers will take their seats in the blue boat next week. The race is
always a test of strength, stamina and technique. But this year’s event
may also show whether some innovative management thinking holds water.

I enjoyed
a bit of witty graffiti on my way into Cambridge this morning…

I picked up two themes around the R&D and jobs being outsourced within a couple of days.
the Economist ran a briefing on Corporate R&D and then I picked up this Network World article on IBM’s Böblingen laboratory which is being staffed up not relocated.

The Economist summarises the history of R&D thus..

In the waning days of the second world war, Vannevar Bush, science
adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt, penned a report that served as
the blueprint for what would become America’s enormously successful
information-technology industry in the second half of the 20th century.
With the grandiose title “Science, The Endless Frontier”, Bush (no
relation to the current president) laid out a vision for
government-funded science and engineering that would unite academia,
industry and (this being wartime) the armed forces. This it achieved
by, in effect, keeping them apart.

Under Bush’s plan, universities researched basic science and then
industry developed these findings to the point where they could get to
market. The idea of R&D as two distinct
activities was born. Firms soon organised themselves along similar
lines, keeping white-coated scientists safely apart from scruffy
engineers.

But this utopian existence is ending

Now the big corporate laboratories are either gone or a shadow of what
they were. Companies tinker with today’s products rather than pay
researchers to think big thoughts. More often than not, firms hungry
for innovation look to mergers and acquisitions with their peers,
partnerships with universities and takeovers of venture-capital-backed
start-ups. The traditional separation of research and development
enshrined by Bush in 1945 is rapidly disappearing, especially in the
information-technology industry……

…..Now the laboratory has to apply science to real and immediate concerns. Often the distinction between “R” and “D”
is blurred. For instance, a recent research paper from the laboratory
about the bonding of gold atoms smacks of pure science. But as
semiconductors move to the atomic scale, answering this sort of
question will solve production problems ten years out.

But John Seely Brown (former director of IBM’s PARC) has the last word

But the message from mammon is different. “When I started out running PARC,
I thought 99% of the work was creating the innovation, and then
throwing it over the transom for dumb marketers to figure out how to
market it,” says Mr Brown. “And now I realise that there is at least as
much creativity in finding ways to take the idea to market as coming up
with the idea in the first place. I would have spent my time
differently had I figured this out early on.”

Sounds like the opportunities for creative thought in marketplaces
where you can get close to consumers and marketers are the ones that
will flourish in the long term.  Hopefully Böblingen will fall into
this category and continue to buck the trend.