By Danny Sullivan
This week’s Call Centre Expo conference in Birmingham was overshadowed by the collapse of Lehmans and the sudden merger of two of the UK’s biggest banks in an apparent attempt to stave off a similar occurence on this side of the Atlantic. Wandering the floor and catching snippets of conversation, the same topics seemed to be on everyone’s mind.
With the economy in turmoil and at a conference full to the brim with technology vendors and service providers, it might have been reasonable to expect a poor turnout, but it seems this was not the case. A steady flow of booth traffic was the order of the day at the Sword ciboodle stand, and the CRM software company notched up a record number of leads at this year’s show.
Rachel Tait, marketing manager at Sword ciboodle, commented, “This has been our most successful show yet, and it appears that there is more demand than ever for technology that can help improve customer service.”
Interesting. Perhaps the effects of the slowing economy are yet to filter through to technology purchasers at large organizations, or could it be that these companies are recognizing the value that can be derived by focusing on the customer in times of economic uncertainty?
Earlier this summer, an article in Customer Strategy magazine by the University of Edinburgh’s Frank Kirwan laid out the argument against cutting back on customer service-related spend during a downturn, stating, “Those firms that increased marketing spend or spend on R&D, product launches or activities that affected customer perceptions of value-for-money, typically saw the largest increments to profitability and market share during the upturn.”
And, judging by the noise on the floor at Call Centre Expo, customer retention (let alone acquisition) will be one of the major preoccupations for businesses in the year ahead. All in all, the signs for companies in the customer service arena seem pretty good.
By Leo Valiquette
We have often talked about the merits, methods and tools for media monitoring on inmedialog, but it’s the amusing and bizarre aspects of the exercise that I want to illustrate today.
Media monitoring is, of course, the process of scanning media coverage for specific keywords and issues and presenting them to clients in the format that will best meet their needs. There are a number of free online tools and subscription-based services available for this. Some allow for extreme fine-tuning to narrow down search results with surgical precision. Others less so.
It’s the tools that fall into the latter category that often yield the most bizarre, and off base, search results. For one of our clients, upper limb prosthetics maker Touch Bionics, for example, I’ve learned far more than I wanted to about the new Bionic Commando video game, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and several other companies with bionic in their name that offer everything from energy drinks to home and office furnishings.
But it’s the news headlines picked up by search terms such as prosthetic, prostheses and amputee that are the most quirky, shocking or sad, as the case may be. The examples below all date from the past month or so and picked up a fair amount of press (I should know, I was deleting the hits from my inbox for days):
Horse gets prosthetic leg
Skydiver’s prosthetic leg falls off – and then vanishes into thin air – during jump
Police hunting for man who carries weapons in fake leg. Wife ‘could be in very serious danger’
Neb. man sues prosecutor to get his leg back
James Franco isn’t all natural down there
One-legged hooker slain
Cross-dressing mugger leaves breast behind
Wheelchair-bound thief steals condoms from Dallas 7-Eleven
By Francis Moran
In a remarkable combination of innovative journalism, corporate branding and GPS technology, the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation has embarked on a unique voyage of discovery that will see a BBC-branded, GPS-equipped standard shipping container quietly go about its business for a year, all the while beaming its coordinates back to the Beeb where its journey around the world will be tracked.
Members of the public can follow its journey on a special BBC web page. As of my writing this post, the container was just west of our Glasgow-based colleague, Danny Sullivan, where it was picking up its first cargo of — what else! — Scotch whisky. From there, it will go to the huge seaport of Southampton in southern England and from there to Asia. The BBC is hopeful the container will visit every corner of the globe, and that it will not wash overboard. Its correspondents will use the container as a continuing thread to pull together a series of stories that illustrate how goods are manufactured and shipped around the world and the lives of the people involved in doing so.
I was immediately attracted to this story. I have long had a fascination with TEUs, short for 20-foot-equivalent units, the proper name for the ubiquitous intermodal container that has revolutionized the global cargo industry, and the massive vessels that carry them from port to port.
One of the more memorable events I covered as a journalist in Halifax was the arrival of the first so-called 3G, for third-generation, container ship to visit that port. The night before, another reporter and I had been guests at a schnapps-fuelled reception thrown by a Swedish trade mission and then, on very few hours sleep and far too much aquavit, we caught a 6 a.m. harbour tug that was to meet the goliath of a vessel off Chebucto Head at the entrance to Halifax Harbour.
There have been few hangovers as memorable as the one that visited me as I fought for my sea legs on the aft deck of a diesel-driven tug boat out on the freezing cold and choppy waters of Halifax Harbour, all the while focusing a long telephoto lens on the coastline, the other harbour traffic and, of course, the huge ship we towed into Fairview Container Pier.
What I wouldn’t do for a good story and a great picture when I was young and foolish!
By Francis Moran
Those of you among our clients who had Linda Forrest working on your account have been missing her outstanding services these past several weeks because she booked off on maternity leave at the end of July. We’re delighted to announce that her latest project, a joint venture with husband Jack Forrest, has now been successfully launched. Little Parker Simon Edward Forrest came tumbling into the world, healthy if a touch late, on Wednesday of last week.
Linda, who is well used to clients who set, and then never meet, deadlines, managed little Parker’s protracted arrival with the self-same aplomb and reports that he is “a very agreeable baby.”
Like many agencies, inmedia has been staffed mainly by young women over the past 10 years and yet, this is the very first birth to a full-time inmedianaut. So forgive us if we treat it as a very special occasion.
Congratulations, Linda and Jack. Now get that little guy in here so we can properly look him over!
