Culture – Page 7 – The Consulting Artist

Viagogo Vianono

Apologies in advance – this post may feel a bit like pulling teeth…if it does, then think yourself lucky you’re not Carole.

Prologue

In the summer of 2012 Carole made arrangements to go and see Jessie J live at the O2. She spent over £300 with Viagogo to buy four tickets, and having done so, Keira and a friend plus two mums looked forward to the gig. A few days before the event, the tickets had not arrived so Carole contacted Viagogo who told her that the gig had been postponed. Note: Carole contacted Viagogo, not the other way around. Everyone was a little deflated by the delay and Carole understandably wasn’t happy that Viagogo made no effort to contact her with the news.

The Main Event?

The concert was rescheduled from a Saturday in March to a Wednesday in October, in the middle of school half term holidays – phew! A few days before the concert, the tickets arrived, all systems go! On the day – everyone headed off to London by train, took the Thames Clipper to the O2 arena and enjoyed an early dinner before heading in to see the support acts.

Except the gang didn’t head in, they were refused entry at the gate, something about their tickets being duplicates. The O2 staff refused to go with Carole to check and see if these seats were indeed already occupied, and on checking further, the O2 confirmed the tickets weren’t in Carole’s name and there was nothing more they would do about it. You can imagine how the news went down. The kids kept a stiff upper lip and Carole went off in search of a Viagogo representative, and found them sat at a desk in the O2 bar.

The Viagogo people at the venue refused to leave their station to help and they acknowledged they had made errors in the ticketing process. The only thing they were willing to do at the time was offer a 50% refund and replacement tickets in the standing only area, for over 16s. Keira and her friend are 10 and 11 respectively, and as much as they aspire to be a little older, passing the girls off as 16 year olds wasn’t going to happen. To the gang’s credit – they tried!

Eventually Carole obtained tickets elsewhere and they got into the arena just a few minutes before Jessie J came on stage. The team persisted, and they had a great time, no thanks to Viagogo.

Refund?

The following day Carole spoke with Viagogo who confirmed their errors and offered a full refund. Carole was told the refund would be processed immediately. Since that day – Carole has had to chase and chase and chase. Viagogo started offering excuses around our bank refusing to accept the refund, saying it would now have to be processed manually and would take two or three weeks. All the leg work in chasing this up came from Carole – Viagogo staff refused point blank to transfer her to previous people she’d spoken with, refused to put her through to the finance department and more. Promised call backs weren’t kept and the situation went from bad to worse.

Every time Carole spoke with Viagogo another excuse for the delays was dribbled out. We need your bank IBAN number. We need your bank SWIFT code. Your bank has refused to accept the payment. And so it goes on. We’ve written three times to Ed Parkinson the UK CEO, so far nothing from him. We’ve had numerous recurring unhelpful exchanges on Twitter too.

All talk, no money. I posted my frustration on Facebook yesterday and a couple of good friends suggested that as Viagogo are in the business of music, or at least in the business of preventing fans from seeing it live, they might like a song from me about their now legendary poor customer service. I haven’t written a complaint song for months, not since Fancy A Curry, which the team at Currys responded wonderfully to.

Will Sing for Refunds

Yesterday evening I hastily wrote, recorded and uploaded the punk ‘classic’, Viagogo Vianono. Keira watched the finished product and said, how do you manage to sing so many words without breathing? Later on, after watching the video, my friend Kev Wyke said, ‘You don’t need breath when you’re fuelled by fury’. Love it!

Where Are We Now?

Last night sometime after 11pm Carole received a text from Viagogo with another promise that the refund would be processed immediately. We’ll see… you’ll forgive us if we don’t have a lot of confidence in this latest promise, we’re not alone it seems.

While We Wait

Putting to one side all the hassle and wasted time that Viagogo have inflicted on Carole et al, what does this tale tell you about the culture of service in Viagogo? Carole’s observations are mainly around the lack of response and the complete unwillingness or inability of the front line to act, beyond making vague unfulfilled promises.

If you work in HR, as some of my readers do, I think it’s your responsibility to help ensure that your colleagues come to work and are given the tools they need to do their job well. And if that job is customer satisfaction, which let’s face it, is a part of everyone’s job, that means giving front line staff the ability to solve problems quickly and effectively. If you’re in HR and you’re not asking your colleagues across the business, ‘How can I help you deliver better service?’ when you meet them everyday, then I don’t think you’re doing enough of the right stuff. Be restless, be curious, serve, serve, serve.

Interwoven

If you are based in the UK, you’d have to be living under a particularly large rock these past few days to have failed to notice the way The Daily Mail has laid into Ed Miliband’s late Father, and the subsequent repercussions. This response on the BBC Question Time show from Mehdi Hasan has to be one of the most articulate reactions I’ve seen so far. Additionally, as reported here in The Independent, Ed Miliband has called on the owner of the Daily Mail to examine the culture of his newspapers, after a reporter snuck into a memorial service for his uncle.

Whenever I see things like this being exposed, particularly when they are followed by attempts to defuse the situation by attributing the actions to an individual, or a handful of people, I’m reminded of a couple of excellent blog posts by FlipChartRick. The first one looks at Barclays trying to blame shortfallings on a few rogue traders and the second one looks at the same sidestepping tactic, this time courtesy of the now defunct News of the World. ‘The way stuff gets done around here’ goes beyond the few to the many.

In addition to what Ed Milliband is asking, people are calling for a boycott of the newspaper, and I’ve also seen calls to boycott the many companies who advertise in the newspaper. There could be an interesting conversation with the corporate social responsibility departments in these advertiser companies. They like to talk about how they monitor the companies they do business with, their supply chain credentials. Does this kind of behaviour fit that in that space?

One thing is for sure, it’s a tangled web, and beyond the newspaper, and the links to those businesses who advertise in it, what about other companies in the Daily Mail Group? To what extent should people choose, or not choose to engage with them?

For example, the same company publishes The Metro, which I think is one of the lamest excuses for a newspaper going. Yet go it indeed does, with north of a million people consuming this rag every day before leaving it strewn across train carriages and stations. The Metro is free of charge – and for the most part, free has no value.

So – if you’re a commuter, outraged by the Daily Mail, are you going to stop picking up a ‘free’ Metro every day and maybe think about investing 20p in a copy of The i (other newspapers are available) instead? Will people’s anger extend that one step beyond?

Beyond the print and online news world there are many more connections you could consider. The online recruitment company Evenbase, owner of the massive recruitment job board Jobsite, is also owned by the Daily Mail Group. If you’re looking for work, are you really going to take the time to look behind each job advert to see where the company ownership crumb trail takes you? I’m not for one second trying to suggest that all companies in the same stable are all culturally the same, but the success of these brands ultimately benefits the same people at the top of the Daily Mail tree. And according to The Guardian – that tree is looking in pretty good health right now:

But so far not one advertiser has pulled its business from the paper and DMGT’s share price has hardly budged. Indeed DMGT, valued at almost £3bn, is in rude health. Group revenues were up 2% in the 11 months to the end of August. Monthly unique web browsers of its Mail Online website are up 30% year-on-year to 138 million. DMGT’s newspaper operations, of which the two titles form the bulk, produced profits of £101m last year. The company has astutely ploughed the money from its cash cows into online ventures such as property website Zoopla and coupon company Wowcher.

As information becomes more and more available I suppose we should be grateful that it is now easier to spot these links and in so doing, make an informed choice about who you choose to do business with. And the truth is, the more you look, the harder it becomes to make a decision to boycott or avoid something in isolation.

Price Versus Value

Fantastic Value

I’m a member of The Tate, a wonderful British art institute. To visit one of the many special exhibitions The Tate stages typically costs around £15. I happily pay £90 for my annual membership and in return I can visit any of the four Tate galleries in the UK with a friend, as often as I like. There’s also a member’s room at Tate Modern which is a great place to sit and enjoy a view of London, have meetings and get a bit of work done. Fantastic value!

Our recent family holiday included a trip to The Tate St Ives, and The Barbara Hepworth sculpture garden. Prior to our visit we felt more keen to see the gallery than the garden, but having visited both, the garden proved to be the real knockout for all of us (our collective artwork ‘Swimming In The Sea’ which we made at Tate St Ives notwithstanding).

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Earlier in the year I passed by Tate Britain and on the spur of the moment, popped in to see a fantastic exhibition of Kurt Schwitters’ work. I’d not heard of Schwitters but the exhibition was one of the best I’ve seen in a long time and it made a strong impression on me.

I revisited Tate Britain this week to see ‘Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life’, an exhibition of landscapes by JS Lowry. I was disappointed. I knew some of Lowry’s work before my visit but with a handful of notable exceptions, I found the works in this exhibition repetitive and pretty depressing.

Price versus Value

If I had paid £15 to see the Lowry exhibition, I would feel like I’d wasted my money. I didn’t enjoy the exhibition enough to ‘justify’ the expense. However, the value I gain from a greater initial commitment to The Tate means I happily take the good and bad as a part of the journey. Perhaps even more importantly, I would almost certainly not have paid £15 to visit the excellent Schwitters exhibition, as he was completely unknown to me.

Neil Morrison references cost and value in his 10 point change agenda for HR. Specifically he says:

We need to stop focusing on cost and start focusing on value. These two things are not the same. Even if cost reduction is on the agenda, look at the value you can get from the budget, the resources. Cheaper and faster do not equate to better.

You’ll not be surprised to learn I think Neil is spot on about this, and yet it is harder than it first looks to shift from cost and price towards value. The ‘problem’, particularly for businesses that have chosen to list themselves publicly on the Stock Exchange, is that their results are pored over ceaselessly by analysts and others who have a need to interpret value in purely pound/dollar/euro terms.

Another challenge is that often, the value of an interaction is not felt in the moment of exchange. Indeed it may not be felt in any meaningful way at all, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try stuff out.

So what is the answer? I don’t think there is one single solution, but Tim Harford writes about the power of experimentation in his book Adapt, and I think we can all learn from this approach if we want to make work more about collaboration and cocreating value, and less about cost.

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