Several years ago I was looking for a particularly powerful desk lamp for my rather badly lit office. You’d think there would be plenty of such items around – and indeed there are – but not quite as powerful as I needed. In the course of my search I happened upon a company who had the insight to name their company after their target group. None of your ‘Lamps R Us’ or ‘Lights 4 U’ or even ‘Pratt’s Lamps’ (the owner’s name). No, they hit on a perfect name: ‘Serious Readers’.
The website, brochure and advertising all add up to an excellent package of product and customer. Not only that; the service is excellent. A person at the other end of the phone with a name who remembers yours, who phones back, responds to emails and goes to great trouble to both answer questions and fix anything wrong (the switch on my £100 lamp broke and another lamp was dispatched in a day, followed by calls to ensure all was well.).
And then they blew it completely. The dreaded Customer Satisfaction Survey. Somehow I feel they had fallen into the grip of a marketing consultant who advised this already excellent company, doing what they do with dedication, common sense and exemplary good manners that they needed to find out what their customers think of them. Essentially there’s nothing wrong with that but the online questionnaire was simply dreadful. Page after page of repetition, ludicrously phrased questions for seven-point scales, plus a whole series of even more irritating questions designed to identify attitudes and lifestyles. What was particularly irksome was that each idea was presented in at least four different phrasings. For example: ‘Serious Readers are genuinely committed to my satisfaction’ and ‘Serious Readers will do whatever it takes to make me happy’. Page after page of what in the end was just annoying sycophancy and I could feel my goodwill slowly draining away as I ploughed on. But it didn’t stop there…
The lifestyle and attitude questions were just creepy: agree/disagree statements phrased in a mixture of faux consumer slang and empty jargon like ‘they don’t make ’em like they used to’ and ‘modern business constantly builds a better tomorrow’ – never mind six ridiculously worded questions about whether I do or don’t like shopping.
The company clearly understands its market – people who take their reading seriously and want good lighting – and that the need for good lighting increases with age and weakening eyesight. Given the reasonable supposition that middle-aged serious readers are probably fairly beady about the written word, why insult them with this drivel?
CRM has a lot to answer for.