Santander UK Chief Executive Ana Botín gets a free copy of The Business of Influence

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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In an endeavour to improve customer satisfaction, Santander UK Chief Executive Ana Botín has taken the decision this week to bring call centres back from India to the UK.

Actually, “to improve customer service” is possibly looking at the situation glass half full when perhaps it’s actually half empty. More accurately, the move appears primarily motivated by a desire to reduce customer dissatisfaction.

Call centres were offshored in 2003 (when the banking operation was known as Abbey – acquired by Santander Group in 2004).

Interestingly, the FT reports that Santander UK’s move follows a diktat by the UK’s Financial Services Authority that banks publish complaint numbers for the first time in 2010, making Santander more visibly the most complained-about bank for the first half of the year, and second only to Barclays during the second half.

We are one. We'd like to look like one, talk like one, act like one.

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There is only one HSBC, one Nokia, one Ford, one Leica. That’s fact. More important than fact, the customer only sees there being one.

Which is the straight forward unquestionable reason why it upsets anyone at all when we interact with a representative of a company, or have any kind of communication with a company, and the response effectively belies the fragmentation of the organisation, the fact that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and actually doesn’t care.

I put “they” in quotes, because we can learn two almost contradictory things from our use of this pronoun. First off, it indicates that we all recognise in natural language that an organisation is simply a collection of people. Just because the 20th Century bred organisations with tens of thousands of people making up “they”, doesn’t detract from the fact that it is still just people. Like you and me.

That’s why we use “they” as the pronoun for a company more often than not in place of the grammatically correct “it”.

Secondly, the “they” also indicates what’s known as the reification of an organisation. In other words, we teach ourselves to consider the organisation as an entity in its own right, a thing, a tangible thing that lives and breathes of itself. We have abstracted it away from being the collection of individuals that it actually is.

Customerservice on Philip Sheldrake

Santander UK Chief Executive Ana Botín gets a free copy of The Business of Influence

We are one. We'd like to look like one, talk like one, act like one.