Humour

Picking your customer’s brain - 1

T A Balasubramanian initiates his three-part record of a brainstorming or brain-washing session that has been called to find ways to improve Baffle Corporation’s marketing effectiveness.

You, Papyrus Bytewala, the ever-hassled CIO, are sitting at the usual large round conference table facing Brando Bhatt, the excitable marketing head of Baffle. Fin Fina, the no-nonsense chief of finance, is also present, ready to slice and dice everything that involves money. Gulabi Manpowa, the genteel head of human resources, is there, too. She has been dragged in to provide suggestions about how to improve morale among sales troopers, and hopefully, look for more of the kind this year, assuming a boom period ahead.

Brando, who loves to convert meetings into grand product presentations by ushering in the hype of brand new vendors, has now invited Bulbul Warrior, sales manager, Market Blaster Inc. His rationale is that vendors help to provide insights from an ‘outsider’s perspective’ as he likes to call it. Bulbul Warrior, on the other hand, is clearly hoping that this meeting will give her a platform to make a sales pitch for her company.

“You know Baffle Corporation has been looking at ways to reach out to our customers,” begins Brando, after the preliminary exchange of names and cards. “We believe that by doing this we will energise Baffle’s customers to buy more. We are all busy sales people, so we just go around selling, and sometimes we wonder who our best customers are. We’re also quite clueless about what our customers expect from us.”

“I can understand, Brando. I’m so busy handling memos about meetings, I don’t have any time to energise your manpower requirements myself,” says Gulabi, winking.

“We have not really spent too much time in looking at what our customers think,” Brando plods on, “and in any case we might be disappointed if we did. Instead of speaking with them, which we actually do not enjoy at all, since they only complain endlessly about bad service, we want to use some brand new technology that will allow us to better pinpoint our customers, uncover all their deepest desires and passions, and thereby automatically help us to sell more to them.”

Fin Fina looks at him with his usual expressionless stare, as if he is studying a worm.

“So we would like to get some new ideas about how to improve our selling technology, and we believe an experienced company like Market Blaster can help us,” he concludes, looking at Bulbul expectantly.

“Yes, of course, Brandy. Can I call you Brandy?” says Bulbul, seizing the opportunity with both hands, and putting on her most dazzling sales smile. “We have years of experience in blasting … I mean, understanding customers and their needs. You must have heard all the talk about customer relationship management, or CRM. Well, CRM is considered to be an arcane black art... something both technical and artistic, and something you could not possibly understand without consultants, but that is not true. CRM is not difficult or complicated, it is just plain foggy.”

“Foggy? You mean, it’s like all the other vapourware we keep paying for, year after year?” says Fin Fina, with a snort.

“Well, I would not put it that way, Mr Fina, or can I call you Finny?

Fina looks like he has seen a ghost, since nobody in the office has ever called him by his first name before, and especially not ‘Finny’.

“At Market Blaster,” Bulbul continues, smiling in an expansive sales mode, “we have invested a fortune in research to make everything simple with our own foggy … I mean easy, solution, called Customer Razzle Magnet, or CRM for short. One of the problems with most other slapped-together CRM solutions you find in the market is that there are quite a lot of individuals within organisations using them, so you need a lot of licences, which can be expensive. We avoid this problem by allowing you to pay for a 1000-license version of Customer Razzle Magnet all at once.”

“But we do not have 1000 people in sales,” says Gulabi. “We only need it for 50,” she protests.

“That’s the beauty of our software. We allow you to expand as well, Gulu. Can I call you Gulu?” says Bulbul, intensifying her special sales smile. “Once you start using Customer Razzle Magnet, your sales will start zooming up, and what do you do when that happens?”

“Expand our marketing office?” says Brando, who seems a little disconcerted at being renamed Brandy. Being the host for this meeting, however, he appears to have swallowed his pride manfully for the moment.

“Yes, that’s true. And you will have to hire more sales troopers, Brandy,” says Bulbul, with a husky laugh and a new version of her dazzling smile. “Our one-size-fits-all 1000-license solution will be the perfect excuse for you to plan for all those dynamic sales kids you will soon be hiring.”

“How, exactly does your Customer Razzle Magnet work?” you ask. CIOs are very technology-driven customers, and you like to get down to brass tracks, and you are immune to all this razzle-dazzle, or so you imagine.

“That’s a good question, Pappy … is it OK to call you Pappy?” coos Bulbul, tilting her head to one side and looking at you with a special smile now. “We take you on a spiral, actually, to really practice things like “customer intimacy”, “customer interaction”, “customer loyalty” and lastly – “customer partnership”. But to simplify what I’m saying, let us assume that customer partnership is something you get when you do things to encourage your customers to cling closer to you.”

“Like we’re binding the customer to us with hoops of steel?” says Gulabi, admiringly, drawing inspiration from Shakespeare.

“Hoops of steel is right, Gulu. That’s what makes customers your partners. You find ways to make them stay with you. The most effective way to assure growth in your profitability is to turn your already-existing customers into sticky customers. Getting sticky customers calls for superglue, and that superglue has a special name. Can anyone tell me what it is?”

“Araldite?” asks Brando, not always the brightest kid in school.

“Now, now, Brandy,” says Bulbul, sweetly. “We are being cheeky, aren’t we? It’s all about reaching into your customer’s brain and discovering what makes her tick.”

“How do we do that?” says Gulabi. “And is that legal? Isn’t my customer’s brain her private space?”

“Oh, we don’t suggest that you steal from your customer’s brain, Gulu,” says Bulbul, effusively. “Customers are more than willing to disclose what’s on their minds if you stick to them closely, and win their loyalty. Besides, you probably already have that information. All that Customer Razzle Magnet does is to pull together all the relevant data about your customers that Baffle holds in different places, and makes it painlessly available to everybody,” says Bulbul.

Fin Fina, as usual, lets out a derisive snort to show that he has a sense of comic timing, too.

(to be continued next week)