Got my new car finally. 15 week wait from our friends at Volkswagen whilst it was built and shipped over from Mexico. Almost forgot what colour I'd ordered.
Now when I first started work in this industry, there was a lot of talk about CRM and Peppers & Rogers were all the rage with their chat about putting customer needs first, etc. etc.
So why is it now, in our hyper-modern digital world that I entered into a black-hole of communications between putting the order in and finally receiving the thing?
- Confirmation of order received by the factory? Nope.
- Running specification of its build - when, how and by whom? Nope.
- Realtime 'dotted line across the ocean' as it crosses the Atlantic? Nope.
That would be have been great on my iGoogle or as a Vista widget.
No, just 15 weeks of silence. Poor show. (And that's without mentioning that they somehow lost my details on the database for the payment. Hmm - must talk to the people who run the database).
Not really a dig at Volkswagen particularly as no-one in automotive seems to have cracked the 'waiting game'. Or in any other delivery-based sector it seems. (Well, FedEx and UPS are not bad, I suppose).
When we dreamed about realtime CRM in the early 90s, it was a bit of pipe dream. At best it turned into welcome packs and quarterly newsletters & magazines, booming the direct mail and contract publishing industries for a while. But I don't understand why digital is not really being used to allow people to access the level of detailed information they want, when they want and how they want. It's not DM, but I do get welcome emails and quarterly email newsletters. Lazy.
I'm sure there are some great examples. Just none for things I'm buying at the moment....
Rant over!
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