Customers Think You Are C**ts

Photo via Bonnie Almedia

Recently a family member has been plagued by bad customer service, particularly by an Internet provider who tried to charge for an extra two months even after the provider had been switched.

So, this family member calls up and kindly asks if they can take this charge from the bill, yet the bloke on the other end of the phone replies with something similar to “Sorry, I can’t help you. You will just have to pay it.”

Sadly for the bloke who was in the overseas call centre, this family member likes a good argument. They then started to shout down the phone till and eventually demanded to speak to a supervisor, at which point the employee said this “Was not possible.” As you can imagine, the noise levels in the house suddenly became a lot higher and this continued for an hour or so. Eventually a rather frustrated figure walked back into the room where we all sat rather sheepishly and muttered, “They will call back tomorrow.”

The next day the phone rang and a Scottish bloke on the other end asked for the family member. And after a few minutes it was all sorted, with the man on the other end of the phone stating that “He’d be pissed off too.”

This got the cogs turning a bit and we’ve come to the conclusion that no amount of advertising will work if you have a bad product or customer service. It may well mask the flaws or get first time buyers to purchase the product, but the changes of a repeat purchase are low. To us, it seems that the best option is to work hard to make sure you have a reliable product and to secondly make sure you have a good support system for your customers. We think that there must be a way to bypass the bad training and lack of understanding that most people encounter with customer service.

With this, we’ve been throwing a few ideas around and are going to try and work on something to try and make the customer experience a little more bearable.

We’ll keep you posted on any developments.

Wise Words

(Via Stan Lee, created by Russell Davies.)

Another dedication...

...to Les Paul, who died in the early hours of yesterday morning. A true guitar legend, co-designer and name on one of, if not the, most sexiest guitars ever made.

This Is A Post In Dedication

For John Hughes.

We Have Mostly Been

Working on our entry for the D&AD digital workshops, which we submitted on Weds.
The brief was to persuade more football fans to purchase a replica shirt from the Nike online store rather than club shops.
Pissing around with stamps Wilf bought from FailBlog.


Developing some ideas we've had for our book and drinking lots of beverages, both alcoholic and non. The drinking bit has mostly been in the company of people who have some interesting things to say about advertising, including a rather fun first meeting with Sam and an eye opening chat with Alfred.

Worth A Look

A good presentation for those looking to the future and wising up.

Post Digital Marketing 2009

View more documents from Helge Tennø.

El numero nueve de Liverpool

Whilst researching some stuff for the D&AD Digital Workshops, we came across this gem from the people who brought us the Next Level viral. Lovely bit of humour in this ad, and matches our expectations on how far we reckon Liverpool would go to hold onto the Spaniard.

Whopper Idea

Nice Burger King idea. Wondering how many times the players will actually celebrate in this way.

But then again, countless fans will when playing with jumpers for goalposts. More here.

The Phone Apple Should Have Thought Of

Go to the website via the pic...
Wow, aren't mobile phones great??

Muse

Muse seem to have created an ARG, and we reckon it'll be big amongst the huge crazy Muse fanbase.

Looks like some sort of political war between asia and the states or something of that nature. Its called Project Eurasia, you can find it here.

We like ARG's in the right context, we created one for a uni project with the Science Museum Lates. Let us know what you think.

On Your Bike

This is well good, relates to the post below for sure.

Thought For Today

Real people do real things that brands cannot without looking false.

So instead just help people with their stuff.

You Like It, As Do We

Everyone seems to like this and we have to admit we are fans as well. Not sure what the process behind it was, apart from the fact that they seem to be fans. What does seem important to us is that it feels human and done with passion, thats no doubt the reason why everyone likes it.




Via Dan and several others.

Verbals Picks

A quick one, just to promote our mate Chris. He blogs here, he's a film production grad with a love of music and other creative stuffs.He's a good source of music.

New Beginnings

So we spent a day at D&AD New Blood, which was rather helpful and attended some awesome workshops particuarly with the creatives from LBi who have a really interesting way of thinking which we liked. It was an informative day, allowing us to have a look at some of the other courses and have a chat with those grads that may be our peers in the years to come.

We also had a look at some of the work producued by those we inspire to work for at the 'Everyone starts somewhere' exhibition. It must be said that, some people complain that D&AD does not do enough for those trying to get into the industry, yet to us it seems like they provide the perfect platform for graduates to launch their careers from.

The first website produced by Flo Heiss

Then came our rather hot graduation day, something we've been looking forward to for the last year. After getting a taste for the industry with our dissertations and placement unit, we've been eager to finish the uni work so to just get some alone time with our book, and finally that time has come.
We've recovered from the hangover but not the sun burn.
Now onto the website and hard work.