A colleague of mine went to the pub the other day. Not an unusual action in itself but one which stayed with the rest of the office for a couple of days.
Louis, who is an advertisement executive on Converter, one of HVR’s sister papers, went to a curry night at our local hostelry.

To cut a very long story short, most of the curries were off the menu and even the ones which were on didn’t come with the advertised nan bread. “We ain’t got none – simple as,” said the waitress.

Which brings me neatly to another tirade about customer service.

When I interviewed Pete Baxter of Autodesk, one of the questions I asked him was how Autodesk got the ideas to upgrade the programs.

Were there banks and banks of research and development geeks back in head office in the US coming up with the 20 new releases which the company promises each year?

Pete said there were some but obviously not as many as I had envisaged.

And anyway Autodesk r&d persons spend a lot of time out of the office, talking to their customers, getting feedback, prioritising the work and even changing direction.

What a revolutionary idea!

Fancy asking the customers what they want!

Mostly, these days, I find there are any number of barriers to good customer service and all of them masquerading as good customer service.

For instance, how many times recently have you phoned a supplier recently and got straight through?

Mostly I get a voice mail or, having listened to numerous options, I press a revelant key and wait in a queue for my turn with a real person while a metal voice tells me “Our customers are important to us” .

How refreshing that Autodesk has its gun-slingers (well, it is an American company) – the heavy users – who have a dialogue with the technicians.

It is just so easy.

As Pete says: “We could spend a lot of time second-guessing what our customers want”.

But he insists it is simpler to ask them.

As I say, talking to customers and finding out what they want – revolutionary!

Of course, being a paragon of virtue, you can still get through to me on the telephone.

If I am not there, you could find Louis has picked up my calls. For all our sakes, please don’t mention the curry.

Paul Braithwaite, Editor

 1 June 2006