Your brand is not your logo, your name, your tagline. Your brand is what people think and say about you; it’s “a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company,” says Marty Neumeier. So every single interaction between a person and your product, service, or company, shapes and defines your brand.
Sloppy
A sloppily-written e-mail…
- sent from webmaster@eircom.ie,
- but signed “Dave Manning” (whoever he is),
- referring to the company not by name, but by its domain,
- not bothering to link to or attach the bill (the only subject of the mail),
- not bothering to even mention the value of the bill,
- but mentioning said domain four times throughout the message (in case you forgot),
- and having the gall to advertise in said sloppily-written and thoroughly, uselessly shit e-mail
…tells the world that if this brand represented a person, he’d be an idiotic, bumbling, selfish fool that you’d rather not know and certainly not do business with.
13 Comments
All perfectly valid points but how do you operate a monolith company and not resort to McService? Standardisation with personality - has anybody ever done it right?
Posted by Name at 12:42 pm on 13 February, 2009.
I seldom defend Eircom, but I’m not sure all of your criticisms are reasonable:
* This is an automated email (or looks like it) and its tone and content is largely consistent with that.
* I wouldn’t want the amount of my phone bill, nor the bill itself contained, in an email archived at Google. I’d want to login to see that.
* Most of the mentions of the domain are links to specific features of the site Eircom site, although the linking style is inconsistent.
Posted by TonyB at 1:24 pm on 13 February, 2009.
Great bunch to deal with!
We have been talking to eircom over the past week. One of the guys got a message from an eircom employee, in which he was asked to call the guy back on a direct number. On ringing back, the call redirected to voicemail, then a ‘voicemail inbox full’ message was played, and then he was informed that the call was being terminated
Posted by Ciaran Lee at 4:22 pm on 13 February, 2009.
This is the perfect example of why companies should look at and treat everything that goes out the door with the same respect as a promotion or ad - I call it the outbound marketing department:
http://www.marketing.fm/2006/08/17/do-you-have-an-outbound-marketing-department/
Posted by Eric at 4:55 pm on 13 February, 2009.
Good article again highlighting how the big boys slip up so often. I would have to agree with TonyB’s sentiments that nothing about the bill should be included in the email.
The email itself flows poorly and is difficult to digest. What they should do in my opinion is say something along the lines of ‘You have a new phonebill for the month of February 2008. Click here to sign in and pay it.’ and that’s it.
The golden rule is if you need to give your users explicit instructions, you have fucked up somewhere in the design of your interface.
Posted by Matthew Finucane at 7:41 pm on 14 February, 2009.
Good post eoghan and chat soon
conor
Posted by Name at 7:50 pm on 14 February, 2009.
just letting you know it is conor from connector who passed through !
Posted by conor lynch at 7:52 pm on 14 February, 2009.
I dont get this blog at all. Every post has this underlying sense of a techie programmer who has recently woken up to the world beyond their dev environment.
Yeah, telecoms companies send out email and not everyone does it right, but branding has been around for years and years and a lot of people do it well. It sounds on this blog that a techie has read a book about it and now everything is new and fresh and they can comment on what they see. But its invariably a bit dull listening to this.
Posted by Name at 4:00 pm on 17 February, 2009.
I just got a worse email from one of your flagship projects.
Take it easy… I know it didn’t come via his trendy web app agency
But, still…
Posted by James at 6:09 pm on 20 February, 2009.
And now to wake up marketing. There’s still a lot of work to do! “Techies” feel at home on the web. They can give good tips on interior decorating.
Posted by Florian at 11:47 am on 22 February, 2009.
Thanks for all the comments!
“Name”:
“how do you operate a monolith company and not resort to McService”
I’ve no idea, but I know that it can be done.
Tony:
It’s automatically sent, but not automatically written; the human that wrote it was sloppy.
Most bills are sent on paper through a shoddy postal system; I’d sooner trust e-mail. But if you don’t want your bill details in an e-mail, then don’t use this service.
The domain is mentioned four times as either http://www.eircom.ie or http://www.eircom.ie.
Matthew:
“if you need to give your users explicit instructions, you have fucked up somewhere in the design of your interface”
Totally agree.
James:
Re TaskFive e-mail: I know and I’m sorry. You know what happened there.
Posted by Eoghan McCabe at 10:15 pm on 25 February, 2009.
how do you avoid mcService? You get a robot to do a robot’s job. Otherwise you end up with that SouthPark where Cartmann dresses up as a robot and infiltrates Butters’ family.
Posted by da bishop at 6:01 pm on 21 March, 2009.
“how do you avoid mcService?”
I don’t claim to know that. I’d say it’s practically unavoidable.
But this is not McService, it’s shit service. MacDonald’s restaurant service is actually quite good and exactly what you expect: “Can I have a Big Mac?”, “Yes, €5 please”. I’ll take that flat, standard tone any day of the week before eircom’s bullshit.
Posted by Eoghan McCabe at 7:20 pm on 25 March, 2009.