Random

Emails from hell

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From: A. Realone – HR Director 

Sent: 2 October 2011 12:05

To: All staff

Subject: Collections 

It has been brought to my notice that some people are concerned that the volume of birthday and other collections has simply grown too great. Even though we are careful to ensure contributions are voluntary, some people feel pressurised, and they certainly take quite a lot of time to organise.

Some time ago it was suggested that we just had collections for leavers/weddings/babies and birthdays with ‘0’ at the end. I have spoken to T.Heman about it and while he himself thinks it could be a good solution, he feels that this is not really a matter for the CEO to decide and suggests that we all vote on what we want to do.

Therefore please use the voting buttons above to have your say:

Vote 1: if you want everything to stay as it is

Vote 2: if you just want company collections for leavers/weddings/babies and birthdays with an ‘0’ at the end.

Vote 3: if you want them all to stop

A. Realone

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Are you depressed yet? You will be when I tell  you that this is one of a number of real emails that was sent on to me. The reason they were being sent on? Because people were laughing at HR. I guess on the upside, at least it was sent to me because they knew that I’d be laughing at HR too….

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Our profession is sadly stuffed with poor and mediocre people,  for every one of us (and I hope that I’m included in this) doing good progressive, HR management, there are three to five people making a mockery of the profession. And those aren’t good odds.

So in an attempt to raise the professional bar, I’d like to suggest an alternative response to the problem, feel free to adopt this style of response in any future communications……

 I hope you enjoy.

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From: A. Realone – HR Director 

Sent: 2 October 2011 12:05

To: All staff

Subject: Collections 

I thought I’d take a moment out to remind you that you are all adults, this isn’t a facet of your existence that sheds itself as you enter the doors of this hallowed building.  And being an adult means that you have free will and you have choices.  If there is something that is happening in the organisation that you don’t like you should feel free to challenge it directly with the people involved. If there is a collection for someone who you don’t want to participate in then feel free to say so.

If you feel incapable of doing so then perhaps you might want to go and have a chat with T.Heman about it (if you feel that it is appropriate for a CEO to be involved).  Let me know if you do, I’d love to listen in. 

In the meantime, to support our organisational TNA and to help us support you our valued employees, I’d be grateful if you’d take a moment to assess yourself against the following criteria and respond by using the voting buttons above:

Vote 1: if you need to grow a pair

Vote 2: if you don’t understand which pair you need to grow

Vote 3: if you understand the irony of this email and are going to quit whinging like a bunch of children

Best regards,

A. Realone

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PS. The names have been changed not to protect the innocent, but to hopefully keep me out of trouble!

How not to engage with customers

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I don’t profess to be any sort of marketing or customer service guru. That said, having spent the best part of a decade working in retail, I know a little about managing customer relationships and expectations. 

At the weekend my daughter fell in love with a certain pair of Converse shoes (for those of you that care, they’re the waterfall blue, double tongued variety).  The thing is, the shop that we were in didn’t have her size and so when we got home we went on the internet and eventually found a pair at a shop called Ozzy’s & Archive. Click, click, credit card. Job done.

Until Monday evening when I received an email saying,

“Hi Neil,

Thanks for your recent order of the Converse shoes!

Some bad news im afraid. We have just gone out of stock with this shoe!

We are changing our stock system and some so we are having to manually change stock levels on the site for now, unfortunately you placed an order before we had chance to change your items stock levels online.

Its upto you what you would like to do. Whether you want to choose another item to replace the shoes, or just have your order cancelled. Whatever you want, just let me know!

Again, sorry for the hassle,

Something about the tone really got to me (maybe the excessive use of exclamation marks).  As a customer, I don’t really care what your systems issues are, that is the rational explanation that YOU have for YOUR service failure, it isn’t the emotional attachment that I had with the product that (in my mind) I had already bought. And to compound this, there was there was no recognition of the disappointment – just a choose something else or get your money back standard response.

On the bottom of the email, however I noticed a Facebook page. So I thought I’d check it out. I “liked” the page (which felt somewhat counter intuitive…but hey!) and saw that there was a post about not winning a Retailer of the Year award. At this point you’ll understand I felt obliged to post something, so I wrote a comment on their wall:

Sadly rubbish customer service from Ozzy’s and Archive. You are a long way from Retailer of the Year if you can’t show your stock levels correctly on the site, take an order and then respond with a “choose a different product or have your money back” routine. One lost customer.

I checked back a little while later and lo and behold……my comment had disappeared.  Censorship? Well hang on a minute….so I wrote another comment:

Hi there, I wrote some feedback on here about the poor customer service that I received from Ozzy’s and Archive but it seems to have disappeared. Surely you haven’t deleted it?

And then things just got worse……within 10 minutes that comment was taken down too and my ability to post anything on that page was revoked.

Clearly someone didn’t want people to see any bad comments about their service. Which is what brings me here to write about this today.  The world with social media is a conversation, you might be able to constrain what people see or hear (to a certain extent) but you can’t control what they say.  And ignoring a negative situation, surely doesn’t change how people feel.

Engaging with customers that are disappointed and upset is as, if not more, important than engaging with customers that are advocates.  You can try to control the message, but somehow it will always get out. So wouldn’t it be better in the first place to engage?

Ozzy’s and Archive gave me bad customer service. It wasn’t abysmal, but it was pretty ropey. Through the way that they’ve handled it, however, they have turned a disgruntled customer into someone who wants to write about it and tell the world what a rubbish company he thinks they are. They had a choice how they reacted and treated me and they chose to try to make the problem go away.

Sadly for them, it didn’t.

As a side note, Ozzy’s emailed me again last night elaborating on their justification for their failure, but sadly I can’t reply as their Mailbox quota has been exceeded (how many more customer service crimes can one company commit?). If you want to see the screen prints of the various comments then you can see them below (I don’t normally take screen prints – as you can tell from the other tab open on the first one! – but funnily I had a hunch about this. Oh and I no longer like their page……but Maddy does have a new pair of Converse on the way to her……just from a different shop.

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Create value

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If you had to rank the professions on their level of creativity, where would you rank the HR profession? Probably somewhere on the continuum between accounting and marketing, probably closer to the former and further from the latter.  Creativity doesn’t figure highly in any core competencies I have ever seen and the nearest that we get is the more “business acceptable” innovation.  Somehow creativity feels soft, it raises images of artists and writers and nebulous concepts, whereas we of course want to look hard and mean and commercial and worthy of the much vaunted “seat at the top table”.

Of course, we deal in a world full of commercial imperatives that cannot be denied.  Most of us work in businesses that either need to make a profit, balance the books, or make savings regardless of the sector.  The question is not the what, but the how and creativity is a much undervalued tool in the drive for commercial solutions.  We need an answer, we look to past experience, to other businesses and to the HR press seldom do we look at our business, look inside ourselves and search for a new or different way. A way that is bespoke to our business and provides a competitive edge.

I’d suggest the first step any HR professional should ever take in considering a solution is to ask what the real problem is and only then to consider whether a solution is actually required and why? What value will it add? Is this driven by business need or by some other force.  What is the least intervention that would solve the problem and how does it fit culturally with the way that the business behaves?

Creativity requires you to be brave. It requires confidence and self belief and a willingness to plot a unique course.  But it also requires a closeness and in-depth understanding of your business and a desire to make a difference. Being creative isn’t the antithesis of being commercial. It is the start.