12 months of Christmas

It’s Christmas and ‘tis the season for banging out emails and so amongst the work mail and penile related spam my inbox attracts are an increasing number of commercial offers from retailers I shop with regularly.

A lot of these are welcome - offering discounts on goods I often buy, from traders I respect. However there is a problem. Some offers are starting to arrive so frequently as to appear desperate and as any person being courted will tell you, the cologne of desperation is not an attractive one.

In contrast to the retailer offering hourly discounts on everything from their granny to the kitchen sink are those absent who won’t or can’t compete in the currently rampant discount market – their brand value stubbornly intact, at least until the year’s profit figures come out.

Of course it’s proving hard for retailers to steer a straight ship in these unusual trading conditions – the route is somewhere between the rocks of discounting in the short term and the hard place of not devaluing your brand over the long term.

To do this takes resource – one of the prevailing myths is that email is cheap – it isn’t, at least not to do well and it also takes long term strategic thought. Some retailers may be in the fight for Christmas but what about January, February & March? Rather than the 12 days of Christmas, retailers should be thinking in terms of the 12 months of Christmas.

Lip service not customer service

HM Customs & Excise invited me to a small business workshop recently – the idea was to ask small businesses, who everyone in government agrees are extremely important to the economy, what we would like to see in terms of improvements in the way HMRC worked with small businesses and their view of the corporation tax system. Sounded like a good idea so I went along.

Actually none of us at the workshop had any problem with corporation tax but we did agree that we found HMRC quite rude to deal with and that the VAT system was rubbish. If any other supplier were to ask for money in the way they did, we’d bin them immediately we explained – we’re not treated as customers.

As if to prove our point, the workshop organisers then moved on to try and sell us a series of ideas on how corporation tax could be simplified and improved, none of which looked like they were going to make our lives any simpler.

We began to realise that the workshop we thought had been set up to listen to small businesses was actually a platform for the HMRC to peddle tax scheme proposals to improve a system we’d already said we didn’t want.

The decision had presumably already been made that change was needed and we were part of a farcical ‘consultation process’ to justify those changes. I should have guessed from the now disabled URL they used for the ‘simplification’ workshop website that we were entering a parallel governmental universe unrelated to the commercial world.

Unfortunately if you click on that url you'll now be taken to a 404 error page, I'm sure there is some sort of irony there.

Traffic - But not for the sake of traffic

It’s not just congestion zone stakeholders who are obsessed with traffic, so too it seems are some start-ups, and not in a good way.

Bizarrely some sites will send you an email asking you to log in to the website you’ve just joined to see your message. This is a bit like a receptionist phoning to say they have a message for you and would you mind going down to reception to hear it. Why not just give them the message? Of course this has nothing to do with making the customer’s life easier and everything to do with boosting the website’s visitor figures.

People rapidly get fed up with this. What they really want is to receive information by their preferred channel – usually email and have the option to start a dialogue if they need to. This is essential in some sectors – for example restaurants where customers will often have questions they need answering before and after they book.

Start-ups (indeed all sites) need to understand that customer experience drives the success of the site and that increased traffic is just a by-product of that. Trying to recycle customers through the site will just lead to them cycling off.