Pi-Consulting

“If a new communications technology is going to work”, we used to say, “it will work first by spreading dirty pictures”. And so it proved, from postcards through cinema, video, mobile phones, DVD and now the internet. The internet, however, having conferred unimagined growth on the porn business over the last decade or so, now seems to be turning the growth phenomenon into reverse drive. In 2005, says trade publication AVN, pornographic video sales and rentals stood at $4.28 billion. Last year the figure drooped to only 3.62 billion. The total sex-related entertainment market is still substantial at $13 billion, but current trends suggest that the wilting video business may detumesce the whole market, with other revenue not growing fast enough to counter the vid-pic droop. Some porn-industry mavens blame a technology-led drift to do-it-yourself online sex. Says one: “People are making movies in their houses and dropping them on websites. …It’s killing the market”. The prurient now have easy and anonymous access to “porn from nowhere”, at greatly reduced prices compared to those charged by the big distributors. Says another rueful inside commentator, “The barrier… is so low. All you need is a video camera and a couple of people to have sex”. Purveyors of the Internet Porn industry are meeting this week for their summer business expo, XBIZ, at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas. Seminars include “How to Protect Your Content”, “Driving New Traffic to your Website” and “Legalities of the New 2257 regulations”. Just proves there is a trade show for every industry. Sources: New York Times, XBiz Summer Forum, Pi.

Sam’s Club, the warehousing sales arm of Wal-Mart, has being busy discovering a new kind of member. Founded with the original idea of being the outlet of choice for small businesses, the Club began to find itself bumping up against intrinsic limits to the buying power of its core constituency. Whoops, what happened to all that growth? Wait a minute. Who else likes saving money on bulk purchases of boring stuff like dishwasher tablets and toilet rolls? Why… moms, dummy! And guess what? They represent kind of, like, 80% of all regular shoppers! Wow! Why not get moms to be members? History has yet to relate if non-business users will be the saving of Sam’s Club, and how the original small business membership will feel about it if they are. Sources: Wall Street Journal Online, WARC Bulletin, Pi.

Ask Silvio Berlusconi where advertising clutter comes from. If his memory gets hazy, remind him about his motorcycle days.

Long before his expansion into the politics racket, Signor Berlusconi established himself as the capo di tutti capi of Italian TV. Back in the 1980’s, advertisers were complaining that the dead hand of RAI, Italy’s then monopoly state network broadcaster, was restricting their access to the airwaves. The young Berlusconi spotted an opportunity, and invested much of his newly-minted property fortune in snapping up local TV stations across the country and forging them into networks.

When the government slapped an interdict on national networking by anyone that wasn’t their own RAI, Berlusconi biked hundreds of tapes of his sultry soap operas and sexy variety shows to his provincial TV stations. By pure coincidence, they all decided to transmit the same shows at the same time, turning hundreds of individual TV stations into de facto national networks again. The stratagem toppled RAI’s top shows from their dominant position in the ratings. The “bicycle thief” had broken the government monopoly. The law duly bowed to the inevitable (Italian laws often do), the Berlusconi networks were legalized, and Don Silvio unleashed such a torrent of TV ads on a goggle-eyed public that it surprised even the Italians. Advertisers were delighted. (more…)

You know what an oxymoron is: it’s one of those definitions that internally contradicts itself, like “Military Intelligence” (thank you, Groucho Marx) and “Compassionate Conservatism”, (the drowned remains of which went to a watery grave under the New Orleans levees last year).

Here’s an oxymoron for our times: “Customer Service Line”.

Everyone who has had occasion to phone one recently will know what we are talking about. All you wanted was politely and good-naturedly to report your problem to a fellow human being, and hear what they were proposing to do about it.

Instead, you listened to a recording so meaninglessly and ingratiatingly upbeat that the lady who made it HAD to be on happy pills, you listened to six series of four options which failed to include the one you wanted, and you wound up in a loop of endlessly repeating but totally irrelevant instructions to “contact your so-and-so supplier”. If you were lucky, you were then treated to a music loop-tape that sounded like Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik played on half-empty pickle jars. If not, you were simply dumped into that eerily silent corner of electronic space-time from whose bourne no traveler returns. That’s when you threw the telephone handset at the wall, and shouted to anyone who happened to be listening that you would sooner die than do business with (supply company name here) ever again.

Customer service? More like a foolproof mechanism for avoiding human contact with your customers, let alone having to satisfy them about anything.

It doesn’t take the massed talents of the Harvard Business School to figure out that hiding behind the voice-recorded equivalent of a barbed-wire fence is probably bad for business. How can this imbecility be so widely practiced by companies whose mission statements formally commit them to “listening to the voice of the consumer”? And how did those companies plan to do so without ever actually answering the #!^%* phone?

We’re guessing, but we suspect that the honest answer in most cases would be “We’re on a cost-cutting drive, and dealing with all those callers in real time would be prohibitively expensive”.

One recipient of 21st-century corporations’ maddening refusal to talk to people decided to fight back, as reported recently in the New York Times. Entrepreneur Paul M. English lost his rag in the Summer of 2005, did some research, and posted an item on his long-standing blog. It was in effect a leaked “magic code-book” giving out keypad sequences that would get his fellow-sufferers past various companies’ wall of blather and “options”, and instead put them through instantaneously to an “RHB” (or Real Human Being).

The result was electrifying. Visitors to English’s blog applauded, added more codes to the ones English had unearthed, and started spreading the word to others. The result was first a slew of articles in the mainstream press, then a decision to start GetHuman.com, a dedicated website for those who wanted not just to get mad, but to get even ….or perhaps just to get through. The site identifies itself as the spearhead for a fight-back movement to “change the face” (or more properly the voice) “of customer service”. A large electronics retailer’ secret code is apparently 111##, followed by ignoring three dummy prompts demanding your home phone number. Reaching an “RHB” at a well-known bank is as simple as dialing 0#0#0#0#0#0#. And so on. The secret call-through pathways of four hundred companies have already been revealed to their frustrated customers.

English describes his site as a crusade against corporate arrogance. “Why do the executives running these call centers think they can decide when I deserve to speak to a human being and when I don’t?”, he reasonably asks.

Curiously, there is an upside to all this for the companies concerned, did they but know it. First, the pressure to respond can prompt them to simplify and streamline such procedures as online ordering of goods and the tracking of internet orders. If those things happen more smoothly, many irate phone calls would never be made in the first place. And when the aggrieved and frustrated consumer does get through, says Richard Shapiro of the Center for Client Retention, “Companies will find that customers who interact with human beings are more likely to volunteer useful information, try a new product, or develop a loyalty to the company concerned. Excessive voice automation eliminates all that”.

Okay, caller, I’ll just put you on hold while you think about that. Here’s a little music…..

Picture John Wayne as Genghis Khan, his head encased in a spike-topped wok, and wearing baggy Mongolian trousers which stop four inches above his ankles. He claps his hands imperiously. Bring on the dancing girls! Hand gripping the pommel of his scimitar (cryptic movie symbolism, you understand), Wayne leers through narrowed eyes at Susan Hayward, who is swirling tempestuously in something diaphanous, and declaims the immortal words, “I feel this Tartar woman is for me, and my blood says: Take Her!”.

Yessir, this wonderful American movie moment really exists. Since you ask, it was in a 1950s Hollywood extravaganza called “The Conqueror”, a jewel of the movie-maker’s art which all concerned doubtless spent the rest of their lives drinking to forget. (more…)