"Good customer service is really, really important to us," said the recorded woman's voice on the cold call I received just as I was walking back to the car with the parking ticket the other evening. We were going out to eat. Didn't catch the name of the company, although I let the call run for a bit, but I did appreciate the bone-headed irony of talking about customer service via a badly timed, recorded cold call.
Yesterday night, the dry cleaner emailed to ask how I felt about the experience of dropping off my dry cleaning earlier, and today the company that does my car insurance wants to know what I think of it. Except that it doesn't - it actually wants me to spend ten minutes ticking boxes in a survey run by a third party. If only I was enough of a nerd to call up the company directly and offer my views.
A phrase I haven't heard for a while is "work to rule". Back in the - seventies, maybe? - it was an industrial-relations thing: you work exactly to the letter of your employment contract. Short of a strike, but making a point by being deliberately inflexible. Perhaps the online-marketing equivalent would be taking everything absolutely literally - rushing into the nearest branch and sharing the excitement with the staff behind the counter, every time an offer arrives.
Yesterday night, the dry cleaner emailed to ask how I felt about the experience of dropping off my dry cleaning earlier, and today the company that does my car insurance wants to know what I think of it. Except that it doesn't - it actually wants me to spend ten minutes ticking boxes in a survey run by a third party. If only I was enough of a nerd to call up the company directly and offer my views.
A phrase I haven't heard for a while is "work to rule". Back in the - seventies, maybe? - it was an industrial-relations thing: you work exactly to the letter of your employment contract. Short of a strike, but making a point by being deliberately inflexible. Perhaps the online-marketing equivalent would be taking everything absolutely literally - rushing into the nearest branch and sharing the excitement with the staff behind the counter, every time an offer arrives.