Many years ago when I worked for British Telecom I was responsible for public relations for public payphones - very much BT's unloved orphan. Payphones in the UK at that time were legendary for being regularly out of service, vandalised, used as urinals, covered with graffiti and robbed of cash. They really were disgraceful, and of course PR on its own could do little or nothing to change that. For BT the red boxes were symbols of a past it wished it could leave behind. The company had recently been privatised, competition was hotting up, BT wanted to be seen as at the cutting edge of new technology, and yet it was obliged to carry with it this old-fashioned, costly and exposed baggage. The company was investing slowly in card (rather than cash) phones to deal with the problems of theft, but management really wished they could be free of the whole embarrassing operation, which of course as the national phone company they were obliged to retain. The approach adopted was therefore to focus on the other stars of the business - big corporate installations, mobile telephony, datacomms, fax (remember when fax was the new thing?) - and leave payphones to slip into obscurity.
Why did that change? What turned management attitudes completely around was the discovery that their dismal treatment of payphones had a significant impact on how their (commercially extremely important) corporate customers viewed BT. Apart from the phone at home and at work, payphones were the bit of BT that everybody saw, and they were BT's own phones. These business buyers - understandably - saw payphones as exemplifying BT's attitude towards all of its operations; payphones made an important and very public brand statement. And by ignoring their own public face BT was sending out a strong "don't care" message to the people it really wanted to impress and do business with. Once management realised this, payphones started getting some much more serious attention and investment.
It's very tempting to see a company's customers from a business-only perspective, and any interaction with them somehow being neatly defined within that same transaction-specific context. But of course it doesn't work like that. Any experience a person has of a company anywhere and in any capacity can influence their attitude towards it, whether it is a company's van driver behaving stupidly on the road, the inconsiderate way a restaurant leaves its rubbish out for collection, the unruly behaviour of a school's pupils on an outing, or - neglected payphones.
Why did that change? What turned management attitudes completely around was the discovery that their dismal treatment of payphones had a significant impact on how their (commercially extremely important) corporate customers viewed BT. Apart from the phone at home and at work, payphones were the bit of BT that everybody saw, and they were BT's own phones. These business buyers - understandably - saw payphones as exemplifying BT's attitude towards all of its operations; payphones made an important and very public brand statement. And by ignoring their own public face BT was sending out a strong "don't care" message to the people it really wanted to impress and do business with. Once management realised this, payphones started getting some much more serious attention and investment.
It's very tempting to see a company's customers from a business-only perspective, and any interaction with them somehow being neatly defined within that same transaction-specific context. But of course it doesn't work like that. Any experience a person has of a company anywhere and in any capacity can influence their attitude towards it, whether it is a company's van driver behaving stupidly on the road, the inconsiderate way a restaurant leaves its rubbish out for collection, the unruly behaviour of a school's pupils on an outing, or - neglected payphones.
