When I watch your ads I think – I could get all my gifts, all my fun accents, all my clothes/shoes/jewelry etc. in this, the coolest of places.  And that would make me cool – right?  Hell it might even make me young and cool.  Can’t beat that.

But then I go into the store (and the one nearest me is a new SuperTarget) and it kind of falls flat.  Oh the greeting card section is awesome (Hallmark should take note) and I could laugh my head off.  And the “notions” are usually pretty cool.  But then I head into women’s clothing and lingerie – and dammit – I’m in K Mart.  Sorry, but it had to be said.  And when I wander into their limited furniture section – I wonder why table joints that meet are a rarity, i.e. we’re not talking top quality here – and it shows.  I think cool requires some level of quality.

Now let’s talk service.  And we’re still in K Mart.  When I try on women’s clothing I have to interrupt the dressing room attendant in her personal conversation and navigate past an explosion of random (recently tried on) garments to fight my way into the hideously lighted and fun house mirrored sterile white cubicles that are guaranteed to make me look like a body that floated up in a polluted lake.  Now I ask you – is that cool?  I think we’re starting to see a pattern here.

But what surprises me the most is that we’re all buying into what the ads are telling us.  Even my own revelation was very recent.  I was talking to my partner, a very savvy marketer – and someone who is fooled by nothing.  The subject of Target arose and I noticed her eyes glaze over in a happy mist as she contemplated a trip to the great land of “Oz”.  And as I sat there watching her, it dawned on me that my own experience does not elicit a similar response.   In fact each visit to target has historically found me wondering what I was doing to make me feel as though I’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in – you guessed it – K Mart.  And now I have the answer – it’s not me – it’s Target and the Kool-Aid that they’ve managed to foist on an unsuspecting public.  Oh Target, I’m a little disappointed – but undeniably impressed.

We talk to companies everyday that spend lots of money to get new customers. But rarely give thought on how to keep them. Given that it costs five times more to win a new customer than keep an old one, it’s important to focus efforts on retention. One basic and very simple, yet overlooked, way is to focus on treating your customers with respect. That simple focus goes a long way to earning repeat business.

It’s often said that people tell three others about a good experience, but ten about a bad one. And with today’s technology, ten quickly becomes hundreds, so make sure every interaction ends well, even if it starts rocky. A bad experience can be turned into a good one with proper resolution. Do everything possible to make the customer whole.

Here are five basic tenets:

1. Never tell a customer, “I can’t help” OR “you’ll have to call back and talk to a supervisor”. Take ownership of the problem and find a way to resolve it.

2. Never blame someone else for not being able to help. Turn a bad incident into a warm memory by becoming your customer’s advocate.

3. Empower your employees to “do the right thing.” Correct problems immediately; clean up the mess later. When there’s a problem, take care of it while the customer now.

4. Be helpful – even if there’s no immediate profit in it.

5. Realize that your people will treat your customer the way they are treated.

There are about 50,000 call centers in the US alone. And many more thousands offshore. Competition is fierce, and a single bad experience with a company in any channel can lead to defection from a company. And rarely do defectors leave quietly. They tend to tell friends. They blog. They make themselves heard. Which is easier today than ever.

The fact is that a customer call center is a critical point of engagement for customers. It can make or break a relationship. Most companies know intuitively how important their call center interactions are, but they aren’t sure what the satisfaction drivers are.

Today an article regarding a new study by CFI Group on call center performance indices caught my eye because it gets at some of the key drivers that cause either pleasure or pain and ultimately determine satisfaction levels. CFI studied six industries: Banking, Cable and Satellite TV, Catalog Retail, Cellular Phone Service, Insurance, Personal Computer and reported on how they did and what factors drive satisfaction.

Here’s a few points I found interesting in the study:

• The most crucial factor contributing to satisfaction, loyalty, retention, and positive word-of mouth is not about how well you were treated during the call, but whether or not the CSR is able to resolve the caller’s issue. Unfortunately, 18% of customers do not have their issue resolved. The importance of this one factor is astounding. Customers who resolve their issue have satisfaction scores 46 points higher than those who do not. Furthermore, those who do not have their issue resolved are eight times more likely to defect.
• On average, about two-fifths (38%) of the respondents say they tried to reach the company first through a means other than the call center. Eighty-five percent of callers who try another method first try the company’s website, which fails to meet their needs, forcing them to try another channel to resolve their issue.
• Call center executives need to take a hard look at their training and monitoring programs to make sure that CSRs have the tools they need to answer the questions they are getting. And the bar is only getting higher as customers migrate to the web. If the “easy” questions are answered on the web, it leaves the more difficult issues for the CSRs to tackle.
• Not every issue can be addressed via the web, and one of the clear takeaways from this research is that improving the quality of the online channel could defer hundreds of thousands of unnecessary calls from the costly contact center channel. Contact centers help with resolving issues that can’t be resolved on the web. They should serve as a continuous feedback loop to the web operation. There can an should be processes in place to make enhancements to the website based on what the CSRs in the call center hear.

The early answer is, yes.

Some of the machines were installed in January and have seen sales increases of 5 percent to 35 percent without any change in prices, said a vice president with Cadbury’s U.S. beverages subsidiary.

According to Vending Times, an industry publication, vending was a $46 billion business in 2005, and it was virtually all cash. That makes it an appealing target for banks that issue credit cards.

In the last week, there have been three specific stories that brought this issue to the forefront and made me think about the effects of the ‘drive to bigness’.

In a February 14 internal memo, Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz criticized a number of decisions that have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience.

“Over the past ten years, in order to achieve the growth, development, and scale necessary to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores and beyond, we have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have lead to the watering down of the Starbucks experience, and, what some might call the commoditization of our brand.”

He goes on to list what he sees as the underlying issues they need to solve and to take his share of responsibility for those decisions. Many initially questioned the authenticity of the memo, but according to a story in AdAge the company confirmed it as authentic.

Whole Foods is another example where the quest for big has caused a drift toward the middle, thereby losing some of what made it successful in the first place. In a story in today’s New York Times, it says some people believe the chain is “not living up to its core values — in particular, protecting the environment and supporting organic agriculture and local farmers. In interviews, some of the customers who describe themselves as committed to these values say they have become disillusioned and taken their business elsewhere. “They are at such a level you expect the best from them, and if you don’t live up to it, people notice,” said Todd Hale, a senior vice president of consumer and shopper insights for Nielsen, the market research company.”

Whole Foods has grown from a small business to a mega-chain with 193 stores, and just last week announced a deal to acquire the 110 stores of its largest rival, Wild Oats.

In the Advertising Agency business, an industry already under intense pressure and scrutiny relative to the efficacy of the full-service agency business model, Forrester Research further added to the pain with the release of a rather bleak report entitled “Help Wanted: 21st Century Agency”. The report says clients are dissatisfied, but for no clear reason that data can back up. (Just think of what happened with Cramer-Krasselt late last week.) Instead it’s a vague disenchantment and disappointment that value is not being delivered at a meaningful enough level.

Today’s struggle may be a result of sins of the past — the way in which the agency industry grew. In the quest for ‘bigger’, agency holding companies purchased lots of diversified companies and specialty services groups in the belief they could create an integrated offering by virtue of having these ‘units’ that their full service agencies could call on as needed. The logic was that because it was all under the same holding company banner (keeping the money in the family) it could integrate the offering while still allowing these specialized units to have their own clients/projects thereby avoiding the competitive conflict problem. Seems logical on the surface. The media agnostic pitch to clients worked well for a while because the story made sense. Agency holding companies got real big.

But, the approach didn’t deliver real integration or integrated thinking on a holistic level (in part because of P&L lines that worked against collaboration among agency sister companies and in part because of the infamous above the line/below the line mentality). At best, it delivered a multi-channel marketing capabilities set. Without the thinking, you can’t create an integrated solution or deliver a customer-centric or user-oriented approach that is in sync with today’s media/consumer scape. So now agencies are desperately trying to fold these capabilities and units into the main agency body and reworking their process and operations, as well as changing internal mindsets to get to a more integrated and accountable service deliver. (On top of scrambling to keep up with the quickly changing media landscape.) It’s a difficult predicament, but one that we need to find innovative solutions for in order to thrive and maintain value as a strategic partner. Because as one anonymous CMO was quoted as saying: “Client-side marketers are better at managing integrated campaigns and being media-agnostic.”

There are a lot of people doing some heavy-duty introspection and that bodes well. Personally, I find it refreshing that Schultz is doing some soul searching about Starbucks and like this post in TomPeters.com “I was beginning to wonder whether another great experience was going to surrender to the short-term gains of operational excellence, Howard Schultz gave me faith.”, I too have hope that if someone as revered as Howard Schultz gets it, maybe others will too. The upside of pushing the question to the forefront is that if we truly look at and understand the realities and effects of the all-out quest for ‘big’, perhaps we can create ‘better’. As Howard Schultz is famous for saying, “success is not an entitlement.” It has to be earned over and over and over.

But, I’ve been impressed with some of the steps they’ve taken to own up to the mistakes including the “customers’ bill of rights” unveiled Tuesday. I’ve been particularly impressed by the stand up nature of JetBlue CEO David Neeleman. He’s taken all the blame for the Valentine’s Day operational meltdown. No finger pointing or hiding. He has apologized in e-mails, in news reports, on JetBlue’s website, on a YouTube video and even on “Late Night With David Letterman.” And it feels like a genuine, heartfelt apology. Most airline executives (or any executive for that matter) are more inclined to hide beneath their desks and let their minions handle the angry mobs. But Neeleman has been standup enough to be not only the face of the problem, but is earning credibility as the face of the solution as well.

Its clear JetBlue takes its hard-won brand fame seriously, and from the video and triage response it seems like they are making real, fundamental changes on behalf of their customers. That’s encouraging and impressive. That kind of humility and transparency about the problem goes a long way to mitigate customer frustrations. Every company and everyone makes mistakes, but too many try to “spin” their way out of it by trying to offload blame on circumstances or finger pointing at others. Owning up to it and taking this kind of genuine approach will help JetBlue restore confidence and ensure their evangelists remain loyal.

I like being able to get my bank balance at 3am or call and make a change in my Sprint account whenever I choose.  I’m a big user of automated self-service technology both online and via phone.  But it seems like it has gone so far that automated systems have been used/abused to conceal how to reach an actual person. So I’ve got to hand it to CitiBank.  What a simple yet brilliant idea.  Press “0″ and get connected with an operator. Gee…something we already intuitively know and understand.  They are actually making the task of customer service easier, not harder.  I’m sure it wasn’t just a case of corporate benevolence on CitiBank’s part.  It was probably a decision based on competitive logic.  We all get frustrated interacting with machines when we have a problem we want solved–no matter how smart the system might be, it can’t think or empathize. 

I was going to record the magic words I discovered today, but found that someone’s already cracked the code on many of the biggies.  Check out Paul English’s brilliant IVR Cheat Sheet.  While you’re there, check out the rest of the site.  There are some great tips and a way you can make yourself heard.