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Recently I was asked by one of our Sydney Talent Agents to join her on a client visit to a high profile Ad Agency group. I jumped at the chance because I love speaking with clients, and we were booked to meet two very senior people, both at Executive Creative Director level.

We arrived on time (5 minutes early actually, as is my wont) and waited in the trendy, borderline pretentiously creative reception.

And we waited.

And waited.

At 10 past the meeting hour we asked the receptionist for an update. She looked a little confused. She made a call. She clearly got a disconcerting answer, and then disappeared out of sight.

We continued to wait.

Eventually she came back and it was clear she had bad news.

The Creative duo had been “called into a meeting”. She paused, and then added (in what I could see was a moment of embarrassed inspiration) “by the CEO”

We explained we had an appointment, confirmed the day before. She offered to call the HR Manager, and she did, but that person was unavailable. I could see she was the innocent party here, and very uncomfortable, so I asked if we could have a 2 minute chat with one of the ECDs, to set up another time, but she got even more flustered, and we left on the basis they would call to reset the meeting.

Neither of them did. Ever.

They never contacted us again. Not to apologise for wasting our time, not to reset the meeting. A meeting they had both firmly agreed to at the outset, verbally and via follow up email.

Then, three weeks ago I spent 5 days in Tokyo. On that trip I met with 7 clients, all at CEO, Marketing Director or VP HR level.

I was struck by the demeanor of these clients when it came to dealing with us, their supplier. Most were Japanese, but two of the people we visited were Westerners, living in Japan for some time.

On each occasion we were clearly expected and were greeted as honoured guests. The receptionist buzzed, and within few moments a PA or assistant greeted us and showed us to a meeting room. We were rarely left in the reception for more than a few minutes.

Always, refreshments were offered. Water, tea and many times small cakes and biscuits as well.

On not a single occasion did the person we were there to meet keep us waiting. CEO or not, the meeting with us started on time.

The shortest meeting we had lasted an hour. Length of meeting does not dictate quality of course, but it does mean that your presence there is taken seriously, and that time has been allocated.

To cap it off I was struck by one final act of good old-fashioned manners.

At the conclusion of every meeting, the senior person saw us not only to the door, not only to reception, but actually walked us to the lift and waited till it arrived. They then shook hands, thanked us for our time and pressed “ground floor” for us, and waited till the door closed.

Compare this to our super-cool ECDs in Sydney who stood us up without a second thought, or even the courtesy of coming to reception to tell us why.

It’s amazing the effect this all had on me. I now remember each person I met on that trip vividly (I do about 100 client visits a year, and many events, so that’s not always true!), I feel a high level of commitment to these clients in terms of Firebrand filling their needs, and I follow up with the local office, even now, to check on progress. And, truthfully, I felt a little better about myself, and what we do for a living.

And it got me thinking. Being ‘the client’ does not make you special. Being special is what makes you special.

I like to think I treat my suppliers with respect. But this lesson from Japan made sure I will give it extra thought from now on.

In a position of ‘power’ or not, being rude is being rude. And being a jerk is just, well, being a jerk.

The savage truth is that most recruiters have no idea how to build relationships with their clients, nor how to develop business opportunities through their day-to-day interaction with customers.

It’s an ironic tragedy, but the more technology we have available, the less recruiters actually use that technology to connect with clients and candidates in a meaningful way.

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Walk into most recruitment consulting offices now days, and its like walking into a typing pool. Everyone bashing away at emails, texts, and social networking updates.

Now here is the point. About 70% of the e-mails we send are unnecessary, or at least the message could have been better delivered verbally. Sending email is a missed opportunity much of the time. It’s also supremely unproductive.

Recruiting is about relationships. Selling is about hunting, persuading, seducing and consummating. Email is bland, annoying and often not read by our clients.

Please do not misunderstand my message here. Email and the newer technologies and communications platforms have incredible application and I use them all the time. I am after all engaging with you via a blog and via a video too, right now.  But I keep asking myself “what outcome am I trying to achieve, and am I more likely to achieve it by phone or face-to-face?”

Our job as recruiters is about compelling people to action. What we do, or should do, is create outcomes and facilitate decisions. Email does not do that. Your job is about selling, understanding and building trust. Email does not do that.

Success in recruitment is about connecting. Technology is an enabler. If you want to compete, make sure you and your team talk to clients and candidates on every possible occasion. Ask questions, listen actively, and solve problems.

Challenge people in your office. Why send an email?  Why not pick up the phone or even go and see the person?

Less email, less typing, less laptop, less desktop. More talking, more listening, more asking, more necktop!

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This post may offend some readers, recruiters or not. But only because it’s going to cut close to the bone for many.

And I don’t care if I sound old-fashioned, because actually it’s nothing to do with ‘fashion’ or ‘generation’. It’s got everything to do with basic good manners and respect for other people.

So here goes… How did it get to be “OK” for people to be late for everything?

Because as far as I am concerned, it’s not OK.

In recent years it seems that a meeting set to start at 9 am, for some people means in the general vicinity of any time which starts with the numeral ‘9’. Like 9.30 for example.

People drift in at 9.10 or 9.20, or even later. And they smile warmly at the waiting group, as they unwrap their bacon sandwich, apparently totally unconcerned that others have been there since five to nine, prepared and ready to start.

10 people kept waiting in a meeting for 20 minutes, while some selfish pratt who idles his way via the coffee shop, is actually 20 minutes times 10, which is 200 minutes wasted – while you keep us waiting because you did not catch the earlier bus. That is over 3 hours wasted. By you! How much has that cost the business? Shall I send you an invoice?

And an arrangement to meet someone for a business meeting at a coffee shop at 3 pm, more often than not means at 3.10 you get a text saying ‘I am five minutes away’ which inevitably means 10 minutes, and so you wait for 15 or 20 minutes, kicking your heels in frustration.

And often these ‘latecomers’ are people who have requested the meeting in the first place, are asking for your help, or are selling something. Fat chance mate!

And of course this has massive application to the recruitment industry, where lateness is both commonplace and hugely damaging to your personal and corporate brand.

And it’s not only business.

Why do people, invited for a dinner party at 7.30, think its cool to arrive at 8.30? It’s rude. It’s inconsiderate. And it’s selfish, as I witnessed in a coffee shop near my home one weekend. Three “ladies who lunch” (a species not confined to, but heavily represented on, the lower North Shore of Sydney) were chatting loudly at the table next to me. One inquired what time the ‘drinks do’ was that night. The reply for all the world to hear was ‘Oh 7.30, but we won’t get there till 9 because by then it will have warmed up and all the interesting people will have arrived’. Nice. Imagine if everyone took that view. Cocktail parties would start at 3 am eventually.

Or a dinner at a restaurant where I was meeting two other couples. My wife was away, so I was flying solo. I arrived at two minutes to eight for an eight o’clock booking. At 8.20, I was into my second glass of Pinot and at half-past I got a text saying ‘on the way’. We finally were all seated at 8.45. There were not even attempted excuses from either of the two couples, who seemed oblivious to the fact I might actually have got there at the agreed time. Meanwhile I had put a huge dent in the bottle of Pinot, and was ready to go home.

And it is not that we lead ‘busy lives’. That’s a given, we all do, and it’s a cop out to use that as an excuse. It’s simply that some people no longer even pretend that they think your time is as important as theirs. And technology makes it worse. It seems texting or emailing that you are late somehow means you are no longer late.

Rubbish.

You are rude. And inconsiderate.

And I act on it to. My dentist kept me waiting 50 minutes not long ago. I walked out, past a literally open-mouthed receptionist who had never seen a patient act on their frustration, only to get a frantic call from the dentist herself as I got into my car.

Sure she was “busy”, another patient took longer than she expected, blah blah.

But hold on, I am busy too! I would not keep her waiting 45 minutes if she came to see me as a candidate. And yet I am HER customer. I told her I have been coming to you for 15 years but don’t take me for granted. See fewer patients in a day if you have to, but see me on time or close to it. She has never kept me waiting again.

Me? Am I ever late? Sure, sometimes. That’s inevitable even with the best intentions. But I never plan to be late. I never ‘let time slide’ because my stuff is more important than yours.

I am not talking about the odd occasion of lateness. I am talking about people who are routinely late. In fact, never on time. You know who I am talking about!

And certainly I consider serial lateness a character flaw which I take into account when working out who to promote, who to hire and who to count amongst my real friends.

It’s that important.

Last week I blogged on why so many recruiters have a shallow understanding of what ‘competitive’ in our business actually means.

And so how do we thrive in a competitive world? What is the way to differentiate in 2010 and beyond?

Well it’s not cool to say it out loud, but as far as I am concerned it’s what technology cannot do that our clients will continue to pay for.

It’s a source of constant amazement to me how many of us in this industry have been completely seduced by the technology spin doctors. We are terrified that the Internet will wipe out our business. We agonise over social networking and how it will change the talent-sourcing model. We quake at the power of LinkedIn, and we are hypnotised by the thought our competitors will develop a piece of technology that somehow will make our service redundant.
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Don’t get me wrong. Technology is reshaping our business and having leading-edge technology is crucial, in as much as it allows your consultants to compete on an even playing field, and gives them the tools to give clients and talent what they really want.

But technology will not destroy our industry. At least not all of it – and definitely not the part we want!

And here is why.  Finding a job or recruiting a new staff member is not a commodity purchase. We are not dealing with the same psychology which drives i-Tunes, e-trade or amazon.com.

This is important because it means that the real value provided by quality recruiters will still have a market.  That is, screening, evaluating, persuading, assessing, negotiating, advising, consulting and acting, as an advocate for employers will still have tremendous value.

It is on these competencies that we need to compete.

But it’s also more than interpersonal recruiting skills (which by the way were largely lost during the decade-long hiring boom that preceded the GFC). Talent management is where the real battle for recruitment dominance will be fought. Building talent communities and managing effective communications channels with those communities is where the holy grail lies.

And we will need to compete in other ways too. Customers will increasingly call the tune. And by customers I mean talent as well as clients. The customer experience will build or tarnish your brand like never before. This is where social media will be able to destroy your business. Get it wrong and your brand will be brought down at viral speed. That’s where we have to compete. How we deal with customers and manage their expectations and experience with us.

Lack of personal interaction is doing our industry no favours. In fact I consider it one of our deepest flaws. Many recruiters use technology to avoid connecting personally with talent, when in fact the real advantage of technology is to get much closer to many more quality candidates.

So social media and technology generally is a threat to you only if you fail to recognise this fact…

… there will continue to be a market for tailored, personalised, high quality business solutions based on an advisory, consultative model, where access to talent is the differentiator.

Don’t be sucked in to competing on the basis of who can commoditise what we do the best. Don’t play the low margin, process game.

As your competitors claim, “we are bigger, have cooler technology and therefore we can do it faster and cheaper” or technology-driven platforms push to cut out recruiters altogether, your premise for doing business is…

“I can solve your problem because I understand your need and I know where the talent live”

There is one word you will always find in any analysis or even casual discussion about the recruitment industry.

Competition

Get two recruiters or more together, in any setting, and I bet that 90 % of the conversation will be about how competitive its all become and how to beat the competition.

A few years ago my office was at 275 George Street in Sydney. That building has 12 floors, and at that time it housed 14 recruitment companies! Seriously. We used to loose candidates on the way up in the elevator!

But what does competitive really mean?  And if we competed effectively in the past, will the same tactics work for us going forward?

Well I first started to compete as a recruiter in Australia in January 1980. Since then I have been able to get first hand experience of what the very best our industry has had to offer in terms of competition here and all over the world. And many of those recruiters have built superior businesses through quality service, innovation and exceeding customer expectations

…but the vast majority have not!

For almost all my recruitment life in Australia in New Zealand, as well as my exposure to the industry in the UK, Europe and Asia, “competition” for most recruiters has meant one or more of these things…

Speed: Urgency is good. It’s what clients want. But for many recruiters what “speed’ means is how quickly we can respond to requests for help from clients. And that usually leads to competition based on how fast we can work – not on the quality of what we do. So “competition” in that case leads to shortcuts, sloppy process and often results in unseemly resume races and squabbles over who represented candidates first. Ugly, unproductive and damaging to our reputations

Volume: This is the form of “competition “ where recruiters are being exhorted by desperate managers, totally bereft of new ideas, to do more sales calls, send out more spam, make more unwelcome visits. And yes, activity is crucial to recruiting success, but it needs to be quality, targeted activities, not volume of intrusive approaches which means we actually end up competing on who can annoy our clients the most!

Price:  The final competitive weapon of he or she who has nothing else to offer, resulting in the very essence of what we do as an industry being devalued in the eyes of our clients. And of course selling on price alone means our own margins are relentlessly squeezed to the point where we are all working harder and harder for less and less return – and how smart is that when you really think about it? Competitive pricing is key, sure. But value is the issue we should be competing on.  No matter what you charge you will always find someone who will charge less. And that is a slippery slope none of us want to risk.

Aggression: Truthfully, I like the word “aggression” when it comes to business, just as I encourage my sons to be aggressive on the rugby field. But my type of aggression is the healthy type. Passionate, committed, loving to win more than loose.  Always within the rules and never malicious. But too often recruiters think aggression means rubbishing your competition to clients and candidates, and bullying customers into decisions they don’t really want or need to make, all for the sake of closing the deal at all costs. And that is exactly the type of behavior that perpetuates the poor image our industry currently suffers with many of our customers using us begrudgingly  – and in some cases with undisguised resentment.

Dishonesty: And here I am using the softest word I can think of for competition based on lying, manipulation, and withholding of information. And it’s rife in our industry and I have commented on it more than once before (Integrity. It’s a bit like virginity. Either you have it…or you don’t!)

I can write fifty blogs highlighting outrageously deceitful behavior I have encountered from recruiters over the years, and maybe one day I will tell those tales.

But for now I guess the point is that it’s this kind of activity, that plenty of people in our industry believe “competitive” means.

Many of us in recruitment today are like pin-balls in a pin-ball machine. We bounce around without pattern desperately trying to hit the jackpot.

We are not sure we have the tools to compete, so we live in fear of every new development and then we try to copy it or do it faster or do it cheaper. But those old tactics are no longer working. In fact they are sending many of us out of business. Please note, “competing” does not mean copying.

So how do we thrive in a competitive world?

Well, stay tuned to next week’s blog entry where I will try and pin some of that down.

It has been a while since I had a really good laugh reading something on the internet, but apparently this item caused me great mirth, because even people on the other side of the office came over to see what all the fuss was about.

Yes, the article on Skrentny Speaks where I am described as having ‘large metallic balls that most in the profession can’t even touch‘ cheered me up for its political incorrectness as much as for the implied compliment.

Skrentny was referring to Aquents’ drive to improve the customer experience, and our new strategy where we survey customer satisfaction every quarter and reward consultants on customer feedback. He is a fan of our initiative, and goes as far as saying ‘This attention to our buyers is why the best of us have survived year after year against the big boys’.

I continued on the theme of the appalling state of customer service across the recruitment industry in my latest blog, and the comments on the blog, via twitter and in the recruitment press, have been lively and mostly favourable.

At Aquent, we have a whole raft of internal customer service delivery agreements, but for us, or indeed any recruiter, I feel there are several key ‘moments of truth’ where candidates can be turned into raving fans (or lifelong critics). So many recruiters get this so wrong. Plenty in the staffing business think finding a candidate a job covers up all other sins. This is patently not correct, and I know many candidates have been found new roles by recruiters they subsequently despise for their arrogance, lack of respect and non-existent communication. What the candidates who are not found new roles think, I hate to ponder.

And the reverse is true too. My good friend Graham Whelan, who founded a company with me in the 1980s called Recruitment Solutions (which we subsequently took to an IPO, after building it nationwide) is a case in point. Graham is probably the best recruiter I have ever known. He had such a high quality attitude and service delivery to his candidates, that we worked out that Recruitment Solutions were taking two to three new job orders a week from previous candidates of Graham, who were now in a hiring position. Interestingly, the vast majority of these were people he had not placed! Why? Well, it seems that returning phones calls, giving honest advice, empathy and doing what you say you are going to do, so differentiated Grahams’ service to candidates, that they never forgot him, and sought him out when they were in the client role.

Seriously, ponder the implications of that for a moment.

And it’s not that hard. Key ‘moments of truth’ we are focussing on at Aquent include;

• The period of time between initial interview with us and the first temp assignment (or perm role referral). This is critical. The talent has taken time to come and see us. We have spent an hour together. A relationship is established. Communications expectations are set. This is when the recruiter must deliver. The candidate is vulnerable and keen to hear next steps. The recruiter needs to actively engage with the talent whether there is an assignment on offer or not. Keep them informed. Advise on the market. Advise on progress with their job search.
• The post first interview stage after a permanent role interview. This is a burning moment of truth. The candidate has seen the client. They are “dying” to know more. Many recruiters leave them hanging. This is especially true if the recruiter learns that a particular candidate is not favoured by the client. That is the time to communicate with the talent and manage their expectations.
• On a long-term temp assignment. It is an irony, but a long term temp will make more money for the recruiter than the biggest of perm fees. But often the temp is never contacted by the agency who placed them. It’s a major criticism of the staffing industry. And it’s dumb business. That contractor is generating income for you every day. Nurture them. Keep in touch. Show appreciation. They can be your biggest advocate or your most vocal critic… to your client.

So in our view ‘customer experience’ is the key differentiator for recruiters going forward.

Do YOU have the balls for it?

Last week I blogged on the importance of customer service in the recruitment industry, and how Aquent is surveying customer satisfaction, and rewarding our staff based on customer feedback

My story was picked up by recruitment journalists in Australia and the UK, and I have been fascinated by the feedback this concept has received. Comments on my blog are all favorable, but I have also had feedback that the concept is flawed because our staff ‘will be worrying about satisfying customers instead of focussing on making money’. In particular, some critics regard spending too much time on candidates as foolhardy because, in the words of one individual, ‘Candidates don’t pay your fees’.

Frankly, this kind of comment gives me tremendous encouragement. That competitors in the staffing industry can be so naive, and so blind to the power of referral, recommendation and repeat business, driven by satisfied customers, makes me very confident about the future of Aquent, and the careers of our staff.

Two days after my blog, came an article in the Australian on-line newsletter Recruiter Daily. Robert Godden, a HR consultant with People Magic conducted research that involved collecting 85 job ads (50 with agencies, 35 with employers), all of which invited potential applicants to call a specific person for more information.

In the course of making 85 phone calls, Godden was only able to reach seven of the nominated contacts, all of whom were from agencies.He left 76 messages for the remaining recruiters (after two numbers rang out).The “unbelievable” result of the experiment was that only seven recruiters returned Godden’s calls — less than 10 per cent.

After ringing 50 of the numbers again a week later, he got through to two recruiters and only a further four (out of 48) returned his messages – again, less than 10 per cent.

As a career recruiter, proud of what we do, I find this result supremely depressing. We run expensive ads and invite people (customers in my view) to call us. Then we ignore them. It is disrespectful. It’s a sad indictment of the way recruiters are managed and coached. But it is also a supreme opportunity. An opportunity for forward thinking recruiters to differentiate and provide a level of service that leaves customers “wowed,” Frankly right now, it seems just returning a call might ‘wow’ most candidates replying to ads.

Talent is the only real currency a staffing company has. It’s what clients pay us for and it’s going to get increasingly difficult to access quality talent as the recovery takes hold. Job boards will become less effective and in any event they only tap into the active talent market. The recruitment company that owns the talent market.. will own the market

Candidates as customers? It’s a no brainer surely!

At Aquent we have a global strategy to improve the client and talent experience. We know we have much work to do. But we are tackling the task with gusto. We plan to stand out by hiring people with the right attitude, coaching customer service standards, measuring our customer satisfaction independently, and then rewarding staff according to what the customer thinks.

Read the websites of any ten random recruitment companies. From any country. In the ‘About Us’ or ‘Our Services’ section, you will almost certainly find glowing and poetic prose about ‘customer service’ and the ‘customer comes first’ and ‘exceptional standards of service delivery’ and many other cliche-ridden phrases. But these claims were not written without sincerity. The companies professing to provide flawless service intended that to be the case I am sure. The desire to be excellent is real in most cases.

It is the delivery on the service promise that is the problem. All companies, in all industries, find it challenging to consistently deliver top service across a broad customer base. Indeed, it takes a very special business to do that.

But recruitment is in a class of its own when it comes to over-promising and under-delivering.

Recruitment and staffing is a special case because we ask our recruiters to deliver on the customer experience, but then we reward them largely for the dollars they individually generate, regardless of how many candidates and clients they burn along the way. So there is a mismatch of message and of motivation.

At Aquent, one of our key global objectives is to demonstrate the best customer service and loyalty in the staffing industry worldwide. But that lofty goal can’t be measured by self-acclimation! It has to be empirical and unbiased. So we have engaged Inavero, a specialist customer-satisfaction survey firm – focussing in the staffing and professional service arena – to survey our customer base, in every one of our 70 offices, every six months

We have introduced a customer service charter across our business, set up local task-forces to drive response times for talent and clients, and now we survey what our customers think of us on a regular basis. And trust me when I tell you it’s a scary thing to do! People don’t hold back, and some individual remarks via the survey can sting! And in some cases, where we have let our customers down, it’s well deserved. But the key thing is that we are able to quickly move into service-recovery mode. Even more telling, we get an overall customer satisfaction score for each business unit, and we can track quarterly improvement and change.

And that is super cool! But we have gone one step further

From January 2010 all Aquent Agents (consultants) in the International business now have a big chunk of their compensation linked to improvements in these customer service scores. So at Aquent we compensate people with a fair base salary, and exceptional results attract meaningful bonuses, as is true of most of our industry. But now our recruiters can earn a 25% “kicker” on top of their bonus, if their Inavero customer score meets the set benchmark of improvement and excellence.

Of course Aquent is a commercial enterprise. Revenue and profit is our lifeblood. But so is brand and reputation and self-esteem of our own staff. And frankly, providing exceptional customer service is directly linked to commercial success anyway. Great recruitment firms will differentiate their offering in two distinct ways, I believe. Firstly, by specialisation and depth of knowledge, and secondly through exceptional customer service.

But talking about customer service can become a stream of so many cliches. Meaningless spin without substance and without any grunt behind it to actually drive better customer experience.

At Aquent we will not be duped by our own PR. We measure what the customers think. We cop what they tell us on the chin. We work out ways to fix the problems.

And then we reward our staff when the customers are happy

We are recovering from this downturn, and when we do, the talent shortage is going to be more severe than anything we experienced a year or two ago. Finding talent, connecting with those talent and building talent communities is going to be what separates the winners from the losers in the recruitment industry, in my opinion.

Sourcing talent will become far more fragmented in the future, and candidates will be accessed from an ever increasing variety of channels including social media, blogs, specialty sites, as well as user and special interest groups. Job boards will play a role, certainly, especially niche boards, but increasingly they will become less effective, particularly when it comes to connecting with the elusive passive candidates.

At Aquent we have taken what I believe is a bold but decisive decision to remove all job search or job board functions from our website, completely.

Aquent.com attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, and many of our best talent are captured this way. But we are are entering a brave new world of talent management I think, and now we must focus on connectivity at a human level with our candidates.

Aquent.com now encourages job seekers to search directly for an Agent (our name for Consultant) who specialises in the area that the candidate is interested in. The candidate can now connect with a personalised Agent URL (PURL), and from there can connect with the Agent directly via phone, email or social network.

We believe it’s time for a fresh approach to candidate communication. Talent are tired of applying for jobs via a job board, and never hearing back or getting a “Dear John” standard response. Ironically, our research suggest recruiter websites are the very worst offenders in this regard.

Now Aquent is taking the concept of connectivity and visibility to a whole new level, embracing the social medial model as an intrinsic way of doing business.

Lack of personal interaction is doing our industry no favours. In fact I consider it one of our deepest flaws. Many recruiters use technology to avoid connecting personally with talent, when in fact the real advantage of technology is to get much closer to many more quality candidates.

On our agents’ profile, a job seeker will see the Agent’s face and their contact details. The job seeker will know what our Agent specialises in, and what they are passionate about. They can read our Agents’ testimonials from talent and clients, and then connect directly.

We want to turn the tables on the recruitment industry. Many recruiters go out of their way to make themselves uncontactable, hiding behind job reference numbers and generic email addresses.

All of this is just dumb business, because increasingly the recruiter who owns the talent market…will own the market!

Aquent’s processes are now transparent and gives total responsibility to our business – mature, specialised recruiters to satisfy talent enquiries. It puts the pressure on us to actually do what we say we do, and I love that.

Besides, the reality is that job boards don’t find people jobs. People find people jobs.

(Last year, Aquent won the 2009 WebAward for Outstanding Achievement in Web Development” in the “Employment” category. More information on this can be found here)

I see a lot of the inside of planes. Being responsible for a recruitment business in upwards of 25 cities, in 15 countries, takes care of that. And I have been a Qantas “Platinum Frequent Flyer” for 8 years straight as a result.

Lately I have been assessing why I usually fly Qantas, as I have been getting more and more aggrieved at the airlines pricing policy. Seriously, Qantas regularly have Business Class seats at TWICE the price of comparable airlines to places like Shanghai, Tokyo, Mumbai or London. Some of my business is going the way of Singapore Airlines as a result.

So why do I automatically tend to fly Qantas? Well it’s a tiny part patriotism I suppose. Qantas is the ‘Australian national carrier’ after all. It is definitely partly due to the great safety record, because we all have that nagging fear when we get on a plane. But mostly, it’s the reassuring sound of an Australian accent as you get on the plane with a kangaroo on its tail after a week or two in the US, Asia or Europe. That, and the chance to read Aussie newspapers and drink Australian wine! Seems strange, but it just makes you feel “home” before you get home.

But as I mentioned Qantas has been flirting dangerously with losing me as customer (not that they care, I am sure) because of their outrageous pricing and their inflexible Frequent Flyer redemption system, both of which can make your blood boil.

So to be fair I must report a very small, but very nice piece of customer relationship building from Qantas, that resonated with me recently.

Last week I was flying to Perth from Sydney, a domestic flight in Australia, but still nearly 5 hours in the tin can, so not much fun, particularly if you are flying economy class as I invariably do in Australia. I was crunched up in what felt like row 500 Z, knees against the seat in front, jacket on my lap, and laptop awkwardly perched on the tiny tray table, when the immaculately dressed ‘purser’ (flight attendant in charge) emerged from behind the Business Class curtain and discretely made his way down the back, to me.

“Mr Savage nice to see you again. Welcome aboard”

Me (nervously wondering if they saw me pocket the magazines in the lounge), “Err yes, thanks”

Purser: “Mr Savage, I notice you are a Platinum flyer. Thanks so much for choosing Qantas again. May I hang up your coat in the front locker?”

Me: “Err sure, that would be helpful”

Purser: “And would you like a newspaper Mr Savage.”

Me: “Yes thanks. Financial Review”

Purser: “ And of course wine is complimentary on this flight Mr Savage, but I do have a particularly nice Shiraz in Business Class, if I can get you a glass or two”

Me: “Well, yes, thanks very much”

Purser: ”Pleasure sir. Let me know if you need anything else. Just want you to know we greatly appreciate your regular flying with Qantas”

Me: (dumbstruck). “Err right. Thanks”

All this was done very quietly and discretely, without alerting any other passengers, which I would have found most embarrassing. He did it with such charm and sincerity, that even I, a gnarled old cynic, felt a warm glow of appreciation.

It cost Qantas little I am sure to make this happen. Their system will flag Platinum flyers, so it just takes the effort, and the training, I suppose. And I have to say as a wavering customer, this small gesture went a long way to bringing me back into the fold so to speak.

Everyone likes to be recognised. Everyone likes to feel appreciated.

As I savoured my Business Class Shiraz, I thought about customer service and customer relationship building and how we could do it better in recruitment. Do we take the time to thank clients for their custom, at a personal level like this? And what about our long term temp workers? Do they feel appreciated?

Sometimes it’s the smallest gesture that makes the biggest impact.

I am going to be thinking hard about that for Aquent and our clients and talent.