You Have Huge Amounts of Data…so Why are you Starved of Knowledge?

Despite spending hours on the 'phone or online your customers are just not connecting with you, resulting in angry customers hanging up and going elsewhere.                         

 We are becoming more and more divided by technology. Your customers' dread interactive voice-response, the on-hold  music that doubles the annoyance of queuing, the codes  are all barriers to effective communication.  The rage among your customers has reached an intensity, which is now causing great damage to your relationship with your customers. We are now dehumanising our customer relationships even more than conventional advertising ever did, the very objective of which  was to do the exact opposite! Your customers appear to be invisible to  you except as  computer generated stereotypes, while your organisation is viewed as remote and unreachable causing stress and suspicion rather than customer satisfaction.  According to a recent study by database software specialist Data Vantage. Fully eighty nine percent of service providers are failing to deliver the seamless service your customers want.  Causing damage to your brands, customers to defect, thus putting more pressure on sales. It would appear that most customer information in to days service organisations, expensively acquired, is wasted, and what does get through to Management is contaminated, diluted or otherwise unusable.  All this results in huge amounts of waste. Companies are drowning in data however, they are, oddly enough, starved of knowledge!  All resulting from a misunderstanding of that little word "Communication"! It would appear, understandably I hasten to add, that one of the main reasons this frustration and anger occurs, is when one of your customers calls your 'phone centre to complain about a bill. and then they receive a threatening reminder through the  post a week later!  In reality you and your customers are being divided  by technology, your relationship, conducted through computers has become so depersonalised as to be dangerous to the very well being of your brands and business.  And sad to say any new channel of communication simply increases management's' opportunity to repeat mistakes. For example if you send an email, your call centre will not have seen it!        As we said earlier, all resulting from a complete misunderstanding of  that word "communication". So let us examine that word ˜communication' a little more closely. The dictionary definition of communications is as follows:  Communication. n. 1. transmitting 2. A giving or exchange of information, etc.  by talk, writing b) the information so given 3. A means of communicating  4. The science of transmitting information. The interesting fact is the  expression 'the exchange of information' . Communication is not a one-way flow of information. Talking at or to someone does not imply successful communication. This only occurs when the receiver actually receives themessage, which the sender intended to send. Message rejection, misinterpretation and misunderstanding are the opposite of effective communication. However most marketing communication today depends on a single-step communications model. A message sender,  the message receiver. This basic model assumes that the sender is active, whilst the receiver is inactive or passive and the message is comprehended properly. In this case if  the message is creatively prepared and sent through the right medium and, if it cuts through all the other noise, and then if it is decoded correctly the messagehas done its job!  In closing please allow me to stress that we are, despite appearances, creating more problems than we realise, all this new technology is doing is alienating your customers more than ever before. With all the other problems, clutter, meaningless noise, mistrust, it is now vital that we rethink  our position on all commercial communication. The fact is that you, the Clients, can literally halve your colossal marketing budgets and, armed with a true interpretation and understanding of the word "communication" and be far morecost effectiveâ¦on all counts!