With the topic of customer data being on every marketing director’s hit list, then I believe it is a good time to share a story based on my mother’s favourite question (see above) and how far we have advanced since, “I was a lad.”
In the late sixties, a transformational event occurred in the Saunders household. No, this was not colour television, that would have to await Princess Anne’s (first) marriage, four years later in 1973. The new arrival was something far more important – my parents had their very own telephone installed. Well I say very own, but it wasn’t really, because they had to rent it from an earlier, customer hostile version of BT, known as the General Post Office and our house also had something called a party line, shared with some anonymous person in the same town.
About every third Tuesday, the phone did actually make a disarmingly loud noise, thereby upsetting the dog, but it was only after the second ring that the most adjacent of the family braved the Woodbine fog emanating from the parlour, grabbed the receiver and in best TV announcer voice, solemnly intone, “21480.” Note should be made that a solitary ring would signify only disappointment, for in those halcyon days of inbound communications this meant it was our invisible copper sharing twin who was required on the line.
What about indulging in the ludicrous extravagance (father’s words) of an outbound call? Well that would mean you needed to know a number to dial. Now, in reality, the six other people we knew who owned a phone had five digit numbers that could easily be committed to memory, but my mother had seen the rather fetching automated flip up phone number index which Auntie Dorothy had gracing her Habitat telephone table and sibling rivalry demanded satisfaction. Despite my father’s complaints that this was a total waste of money and all the numbers we needed could be safely jotted on the back of a convenient used copy of The Sporting Life (a racing paper of the time), my mother won the day – this was the inevitable outcome of all such discussions, the only variable being the time taken to extract a concession and cue a hasty retreat of the defeated male party to the turf accountants in high dudgeon.
Problems at Saunders Towers were only just beginning though – no system had been agreed upon for data entry, so our closest friend, Frank Wood, was duly and variously filed under W, F and B (the latter for his curious nickname of Beano – don’t ask) and also under A for his wife’s name, Audrey. With the proliferation of phone ownership and a modest expansion of our social circle, some of whom now lived out of town and so had lengthy extra digits to record, then you can guess that, by the time of Prince Charles’ (first) marriage in 1981, our telephone index was a complete mess. By this time, Rita had sadly passed on, but it may have been easier to reach her, “beyond the veil,” rather than find a reliable phone number for any surviving acquaintance.
In extreme circumstances, reference could be made to the automated index’s predecessor, a big green exercise book of foolscap dimensions, with the word “Addresses” lazily displayed front, but not centre, courtesy of a blue “dymo” embossed label – a fashion of the period. Now historians may quibble over whether this tome dated from pre- or post-war, but every Christmas the task of addressing cards to relatives and even friends could not be completed without a family meeting to decipher the current record from the numerous crossings out and somewhat random categorisation of names and addresses within – the recent addition of phone numbers to the mix had not helped with legibility or accuracy of the content.
The point of these ramblings is that the self same lessons which may have excluded poor old Frank Wood from a quick call regarding a secret trip to the Dog and Gun, or the receipt of a festive greeting card, still need to be learned. Nothing is more important than customer data, other than the process by which you record it, maintain it and manage it. The advantage we have now is the modern database, or CRM system has replaced the pop up index, presenting numerous opportunities to engage with our customers in person, by phone and digitally. A wealth of automated systems and segmentation awaits us as modern marketing people, but only if everyone in the business understands that entering a postcode in the phone number field is a crime so heinous that no punishment has yet been invented to match it.
So, my sincere apologies if I ever contact you as Mr Customer Person at Address Line 3, in which case, please feel free to send me ironic feedback and/or rotten tomatoes. You’ll find my details in your database.
Guest Blog by Mark Saunders, Group Marketing Director at Nine Group.
