Yes HR must be talking to marketing and marketing to customer service ,and to operations, and all of them must be talking with each other - and about their customers!. Customers expect seamless delivery and care not a jot for the internal silos that still permeate too many organisations. It is refreshing for us when we hold our Directors Forums and we do indeed have execs from marketing, HR, customer engagement, et al in the same room.

So we are naturally delighted to announce our new partnership with the Direct Marketing Association, one of many affiliations we enjoy with organisations who have the customer as a key part of their remit. These kinds of partnerships make more sense now than ever before and we will continue to do anything we can do to promote an organisation-wide appreciation of the need to focus on their customers - who still and always will have all  the money. The more we can help break down the barriers to service that organisational silos bring the better and to that end we are looking forward to developing further our relationships with organisations such as the DMA. We are excited about the partnership and its signifcance.

Watch ths space for further news of affiliations with like-minded organisations and please do come along to one of our Directors Forums. We are also running a two day Engage Summit in the autumn and of course at all these events you will be rubbing shoulders with your peers from across the organisation who all have one thing in common - the customer.  To borrow a phrase from the current UK Government we really are all in this together, at least when it comes to our customers. More details on all of this can be found on our website.

Recent research suggests that most organisations have some form of 'voice of the customer' strategy. Sounds good doesn't it? But  where a lot of organisations are falling down is that while they may have an all singing all dancing VOC strategy they are not taking meaningful steps to actually listen to that customer voice. And some others, while thay may be  listening to that voice, are doing precious little to  take real action based on the feedback and insight they are gaining from their most important single asset - their customer base. We are all customers in our everyday lives and we know that organisations have more data and more realinsight into us and what makes us tick than ever before - enough to be able to take a single view of us, including on the feedback we give them.

So there really is no excuse now for organisations not to get their feedback act together. Those that do will benefit in the long run because a customer who feels understood and who feels that their comments and views mean something to the organisation they are spending their hard earned money with will inevitably give more of that hard earned money to the organisation that proactively asks for their opinion and then takes appropriate action. 'Closing the feedback loop' is  another favourite industry phrase, but along with 'voice of the customer ' there is a real anger that we are doing little more than a box ticking exercise. The one I prefer is 'feeding back on the feedback' where we act on the feedback we receive and let our customers know that we have done so and give them real feedback on what resulted from them investing their time and energy with us.

This will be one of the key themes in our upcoming Customer Engagement Club Directors Forum around Customer Feedback  in London on March 21, where there will be some hot case studies looking at organisations who are walking the feedback walk andf talking the feedback talk. It would be great to see you there. To register just go the the home page of our website www.customerengagementclub.com

2012 promises to be an exciting while at the same time hugely  challenging year for all of those who operate in the customer space and we intend to be perfectly positioned  to offer our 'network' everything  they need to devise and implement successful customer and employee engagement strategies. So watch out for our new look and our new offering coming soon.

Meantime our next Directors Forum on Thursday January 26 will take a long hard look at the changing face of the contact centre as organisations interact with their customers  through an ever increasing number of offline, online, social and mobile channels. If you want to get a handle on the contact centre of the future then our Multichannel Customer Engagement for Contact Centres Directors Forum is the place to be. Go to www.customerengagementclub.com to register. 

In the frankly dire economic climate being faced by consumers today - and where even the mighty Tesco has just seen sales fall for the first time in two decades - it is those organisations who focus continually on their customers and gain the insight they need to give them what they want when they want it  and through the channel that suits them who will survive and indeed thrive. This week board members will sit in on calls to their contact centre, there will be celebrations  of great service in offices and retail outlets and call centres and perhaps even through social and mobile channels, up and down the country, but what about next week?

Because next  week and the week after, and the month after are just as important as this week, infact more so. Nothing wrong with NCSW, nothing wrong at all, but we  must just be sure that it doesn't  turn into an annual box ticking exercise and where lip service is being paid to customer service for the rest of the year. The way to make sure that happens is for organisations to focus on and understand the real competitive and performance advantage that comes from giving great customer service and, dare I say it, effective customer engagement. 

That understanding has to come from the very top, and while  board execs sitting in on contact centre calls once a year can be an eye opener for them and make them feel relieved when they get back to their shiny office, if it is no more than that, and the context and the lessons are not being learned, then it is frankly a once every year waste of bloody time. Customer engagement and measurement strategies must become part of the very fabric of how we do business - the DNA if you like that puts profitable customers at the centre of everything. And of course the best way to work out the current and potential future value of customers is through the understanding and insight that comes from  meaningful engagement through feedback and feeding back on that feedback.

So let's all have a purposeful National Customer Service Week - and then redouble our strategic focus on our customers, both internal and external, next week and beyond. Here at the Customer Engagement Club we believe in practising what we preach - and to this end we will be addressing some of the issues and challenges I have highlighted in this blog  in our upcoming Customer Engagement Club Directors Forums on October 13, November 3 and December 8 - be great to see you there, and for more details and to register simply go to www.customerengagementclub.com  and our home page where you will also find the latest digital issue of Customer Engagement magazine. Enjoy.

We are constantly hearing  - and talking - about how the dynamic of the relationship between organisations and their customers has changed, and here is a living, breathing example of just how fundamental that change is. Historically organisations have been used to dictating the channel(s) of service and finding enough compliant customers to make it a viable business model. But that's not the case any more and savvy organisations have not only woken up to the fact, they are leveraging their customers' behaviour for mutual benefit by faciitating their ability to choose a channel that is good  for the customer and also good for the business.  Without going all Brave New Worldy about it, I believe  the future for successful customer relationships is  through meaningful two-way dialogue and collaboration between provider and customers when and where that is relevant - with the channels for that collaboration being on the customers' terms. More organisations are now taking their customer engagement measurement capabilities more seriously and that is going to be one of the areas we look at in our upcoming Customer Engagement Measurement Directors Forum in November (details of all our forums can be found at www.customerengagementclub.com and in our Customer Engagement digital magazine on the home page of the website)

We are not called the Customer Engagement Club for nothing - and here 'engagement' is indeed the pivotal word. If we can engage our customers through dialogue and collaboration, and they feel they are helping shape the way we do business with them and the products and services we provide, then the emotional triggers that control buying decisions will be satisfied - an engaged customer is a loyal customer and in these dark days of economic gloom and doom, retaining what we have is core to survival and success.  A customer 'retention' strategy should be a customer 'engagement 'strategy and if customers are comfortable with the channel they are using with us, and have the ability to choose the channel that is best for them in any given circumstance, then we are well on our way to gaining the engagement that is the key to competitive advantage. That's the bottom line!

Our Cover Story in this issue is all about customer insight, that is understanding what our customers want, being able to predict their future behaviour and then using that insight to leverage their service offering to maximise profitability. It's a hard edged thing is customer insight, one that gets down to the nitty-gritty of our relationships with customers and allows us to concentrate on those who deliver to the bottom line. Nothing fluffy about it, it's  delivery of service excellence to profitable customers to create business benefits and that's the way it should be. The key business imperative underpinning customer insight is that the whole dynamic of how organisations interact with their customers has changed and we now need more than ever to have a clear understanding of our customers and how we can realise their full value to us by keeping their business. The analytical technology that enables customer insight means organisations can now develop a much clearer and more delineated picture of their customers, enabling them to predict profit-impacting behaviours, propensity to churn, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, campaign planning and segmentation, customer loyalty and satisfaction and the all important customer lifetime value.

We are all customers in our  everyday lives and we like nothing more than to feel we are understood by our suppliers and dealt with by them through the channels that best suit us and with a service offering that provides the consistency that builds trust. Customer insight can deliver on these wants and needs and those organisations that have strategies to gain that insight through whatever mechanisms -  engaging in customer feedback across channels being a critical one - will experience the bottom line boost that is at the heart of business at large.

The bottom line is something that will be very much to the fore in the next of our Directors Forums which lifts the lid on the Future of Customer Engagement in the Financial Services sector.  This forum on October 13 promises to be a lively event in the light of this week's far reaching Vickers report on banking reform, and with the FSA delivering a keynote on the state of the marketplace and the regulatory changes that are impacting the sector's relationships with its customers.

And customer insight will be a critical factor in our Directors Forum on Customer Engagement Strategy and Measurement  on November 3. We have a  stellar speaker line-up for both these events and more details can be found both on the home page of our website www.customerengagementclub.com and also in the new digital issue of Customer Engagement. They are free to attend for our end-user members and it would be great to see you at least at one of them, I can guarantee you will find it time well spent,.

So what of the future for financial services and its relationship with the customers it has so consistently let down? How can banks and insurance companies and the like win back the trust they have so deservedly lost? Well they could try putting the customer first but  - with a few notable exceptions - that's a forlorn hope in my view and it's obviously also the view of the  industry regulator the FSA who over the next two years, and starting as soon as next month, is bringing in a raft of regulations aimed at ensuring the sector mends its ways.These new regulations range  from changing the way complaints are dealt with to the whole structure of the sector, doing away with the commission based set up that was largely responsible for the economic meltdown of a few years back and replacing it with a more transparent fees based structure.

I welcome these changes and the FSA's insistence that customer outcomes should be the driving force going forward rather than the narrow interests of the organisations concerned - it's telling that for example  three in four customers of Santander in the UK are unhappy with the way they are being treated - whether they answer calls in India or the UK!  There is a genuine opportunity for the financial services industry to use these initiatives as a catalyst to improve their own operations and focus outwardly on their customers rather than inwardly on their perceived self interest - and there is also a gap in the market for  new entrants  such as Metro Bank who take a more customer centric approach.

Here at the Customer Engagement Club we are going to be looking at the future for customer engagement in financial services at  a Directors Forum being held in London on October 13. Delegates to that Forum will hear directly from the FSA about the upcoming changes and what it means for the sector and its customer relationships and Metro Bank will also be there as will Towry the  leading firm of IFAs who did away with the commission structure years ago and replaced it with a fees based structure, a move that the FSA is now imposing on the whole sector. For more details of our financial services Directors Forum and our complete autumn 2011 schedule go to www.customerengagementclub.com

If the nation holding the Olympics is not fully engaged with the process then we have very little chance of engaging the millions of people who will be coming from overseas. You can draw an analogy here between employee engagement and customer engagement where engaged employees are far more likely to engage their customers - and this will be the subject of one of our hugely successful Customer Engagement Club Directors Forums later this year (go to www.customerengagementclub.com for more details of our Directors Forums and to register). The eyes of the world will be on London and the rest of the UK in 2012 and if  those that live here feel disengaged they will not deliver the welcome and service levels that are needed for the games to be a success. Getting the stadia and infrastructure ready on time is one thing - delivering on the passion and the excitement and the 'engagement' is quite another.

Of course only time will tell but I still think we have a long way to go to ensure that London 2012 is a success and that the welcome we give to the millions of new  and existing customers coming to our shores and the levels of engagement we provide come up to scratch. It's not just about next year, Olympic Games tend to have a lasting legacy and a successful event will have longer term benefits for our economy - and the way we engage our customers will play a key role in qualifying that success. We can all play a part here and its certainly a theme here at the Customer Engagement Club that we will be returning to regularly over the next year.

Here at the Customer Engagement Club we held a Directors Forum on Multichannel Customer Engagement a few weeks back and the changing role of the contact centre was a theme that ran through the day  - and it is indicative that presenters at the event included the Customer Contact Association who have just this week released research that points to the very changes I am alluding to. I remember many years ago listening to presentations forecasting how contact centres would change, become multichannel operations dealing with ever more complex customer issues while self-service transactional matters would be dealt with separately. Well it's taken a while but that is finally coming to fruition - and here there is a 'red herring' link because call centres staffed by people who understand the cultural and emotional challenges faced by customers and who are able to work across channels will be better placed to deliver these services.

For too long - and I really have lost count of how many times I've said this - contact centres have been seen as cost centres rather than profit centres and some of the recent 'back from India' decisions are further substantiating this misguided strategic view. Contact centres that are able to operate across the channels their customers want to do business on are perfectly placed to become major revenue and profit generators for organisations. They are the face of the organisation, the living brand, the difference between retention and defection, between acquisition and losing an opportunity, and the sooner corporations get this stunningly simple fact and act accordingly the better for them. So let's hear it for the future of contact centres and long live the revolution.

So is gaining that single view really so hard? Well it's certainly not easy and while of course there are lies, damn lies and statistics, its interesting to note that just three per cent of  senior execs at 500 organisations surveyed recently desctibed the multichannel service they provide as excellent - that's just 15 out of 500. The issue was raised once again during the panel debate at our Directors Forum and the general concensus is that while there is arguably the technology available to obtain that single view, the operational, cultural and day to day delivery issues are so complex that we really are talkking about the Holy Grail here.

Of course we are all customers in our everyday lives and more than most we are acutely aware of the changing nature of our relationships wiith organisations. We want to operate across more channels and we want those we give our custom to to be able to serve us on those channels consistently. Contact centres are undergoing radical change to keep up - and doing a very mixed job of it -  and with close on half the population now owning a smartphone the mobile channel is proliferating like daisy.  The rapidly changing behaviour of customers and their interactions with organisations was bought into sharp focus in the final presentation of the day by Dr Nicola Millard who presented some of the findings of her 'autonomous customer' research - and Nicola is right when she says that the pace of that change is accelerating!

Yet given these seismic changes afoot,  as customers who make our buying decisions on emotional rather than rational judgments (and there was an excellent presentation from ed O'Boyle at Gallup Consulting onthis very topic!) if we feel that our provider understands who we are and can deliver conistency then we will give them our loyalty  - and customer loyalty in the current economic climate when retention can be far more important than acquisition is what we are all striving for. So the stakes are high and the ability to hold a single view and to use that as a conduit for joined-up multichannel service delivery can make or break an organisation - there is a thin line between success and failure.

All we have to do is look at  the retail sector for an example of where that thin line is being drawn.  Those retailers who understand their customers and are delivering the right products and services across the channels most appropriate to them are succeeding - those who don't are simply failing. The high multichannel stakes are being fully understood by the new CEO of one of the UK's -and  the world's - most successful retailers, one with a reputation for understandng who its customers are and what they want. Tesco CEO Richard Brasher says one of his key aims in his new role  is to integrate the Tesco in-store and online offerings to make it a seamless multichannel experience - because that's what customers expect! Straight from the horse's mouth.

Smartphones are undoubtedly the future  and while many organisations are still largely ignoring the mobile channel (maybe in the vain hope that it will go away!) the ones who are taking note have the potential to gain competitive advantage. Early adoption is the name of the game here and those who get it right now will reap the benefits going forward. Most organisations recognise the growing value of the mobile channel but only a tiny percentage are actually doing anything about it. Infact the 'Reducing Customer Struggle' report  from Econsultancy  that reveals the low levels of customer service on the mobile channel makes pretty sobering reading for the whole online experience - and in particular where it fits in - or to be more precise does not fit in -  with multichannel customer strategies. And here's the rub. Simply adding another channel when the service you are giving across existing channels is not up to scratch is not going to be good for business. Maybe that's why the uptake is so slow.

According to the research just 3 per cent of businesses rate the multichannel customer experience they deliver as excellent, while one in four rate it poor or very poor, yet less than half have any plans to rectify the problems that their customers face online. Actually the report should probably have been called Increasing Customer Struggle as it does paint a pretty sorry picture of the way we serve our customers in an increasingly multichannel world - mobile included. Here at the Customer Engagement Club we recognise the difficulties being faced by organisations who are to some extent playing catch up with increasingly savvy customers who want to choose their own channels for service. In fact our next Customer Engagement Club Directors Forum at the end of June will look at the very issues and challenges thrown up by the Reducing Customer Struggle report. Our Multichannel Customer Engagement Directors Forum is aimed at providing at least some of the answers to what is obviously a major challenge for organisations struggling to get their cross-channel customer strategies right. For more details of our Forums - which are free of charge to qualifying end users -  and to register simply go to the home page of our website www.customerengagementclub.com 

This Brave New World of cross-channel engagement does have its downsides though. Some organisations are seeking to manipulate the 'Google it' generation to their own ends through what is euphemistically called 'reputation management' - which literally means burying bad news. This is how it works. Online 'reputation management' agencies  promise to suppress negative search results on Google by driving them down the rankings. They typically use thousands of social networking profiles on the likes of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn which are set up using false names and operated using computer software to simulate the behaviour of a real person. These are then used to talk about and link to more positive results pushing them above the negative stories in the Google rankings. In other words they are a confidence trick.

The reputation management agencies are largely employed to bury the bad news by public figures, but are being increasingly used by blue chip companies who are unable to resist the temptation to manipulate the now ubiquitous social media channels for their own ends. In the Times newspaper this week there is a report on how a safari park in the UK used such a tactic  to negate what it called 'unfair and inaccurate' information about alleged animal mistreatment. The whole ethos of social media is about transparency and trust, yet it seems that some organisations are determined to try to manipulate and control the medium for their own shabby ends. The fact is that 90 per cent of Google search users look only a the fist page of results and just a tiny fraction go beyond the third page, so well buried results are hardly seen. Reputation management itn would seem is then a god ay to bury bad news - but there really is no hiding place any more and the culprits will be increasingly found out - and quite right too.

I make no apologies for rattling on about social media and mobile engagement and organsations who do not begin to implement these channels into their overall B2B customer engagement strategies should really have another look at what they could be missing. The real trick here is to remember that social media and mobile are channels like any other in that they need to be integrated with shall we say more traditional customer service and engagement channels to work most effectively.

At our event last week the Carbon Trust gave an excellent example of how engagement across channels including social media can pay dividends and achieve new levels of B2B customer engagement. This theme was reinforced from the likes of Interactive Intelligence and Google. One stat that stood out for me was from Google's industry head of B2B marketing Richard Robinson who revealed that almost half (47%) of B2B enquiries from elite organisations came via the mobile channel.

If you think about al this it makes sense. We are human beings first and customers second and if we are engaged and emotionally involved with and ,most importantly TRUST  a brand and the people who represent that brand you are far more likely to do business swith them - the old adage that people buy from people still stands. Feedback from those atending our Directors Forum last week has been fantastic and we owe a debt to our excellent line up of speakers for that as well as hosts Gallup and sponsors Interactive Intelligence and mardevdm2. Our next Directors Forum is coming up soon on June 29  at Gallup's superb conference centre when we will be looking at Multichannel Customer Engagement. We have once again - and I would say this wouldn't I - lined up a fantastic array of speakers and I urge you to come along as I know you will find it of value. The event is free of charge to qualifying  senior execs working across the board in customer service, marketing, sales, HR, IT and the like and it's easy to register on our site www.customerengagementclub.com where you an also feast your eyes on our speaker line up. Look forward to seeing some of you there on June 29

The whole experience I have had at the hands of Thomas Cook with their inability to offer consistent service over one channel let along over many, chimes interestingly and quite jarringly with the coments made in the editorial foreword in the Thomas Cook inflight magazine from one Manny Fontenla-Novoa (crazy name, crazy guy) who has this to say, and I quote: "At Thomas Cook we are obsessed with customer service and pride ourselves on doing our utmost  to perfect the holiday experience wherever and whenever you come into contact with us - in our stores, online, over the phone, onboard or in resort. We know how important your holiay is to you and we are determined that you leave with the very best memories of your trip and Thomas Cook." Pull the other one Manny old son, and tell that to the people sitting at the back of your second flight to arrive at a small airport within a couple of minutes - not to mention myself and all the hassles I had back in the UK.

Anyway it was a great holiday despite the best efforts of Thomas Cook (thankfully I had not booked accommodation through them). On arrival back at Sanford airport for an overnight flight home check in was a doddle (only one flight going out that night) and I happened to get into conversation with the Thomas Cook 'rep' just before we went through security. After exchanging  opening pleasantrries he said ' to be honest with you I will be glad to see the back of you lot' - with the 'you lot' of course being Thomas Cook's and his customers. Nice one Manny, an interesting take on your 'obsession with customer service'. I suggest you try your own customer experience some day.

Tickets arrive in the post OK - with the opportunity to check in on-line to avoid queuing at the airport. - or so their paper plane ticket and website says. Checking in online is one thing in theory and another in practice. No problem getting seats reserved (at a price if you want a decent one) but no chance of getting the boarding passes needed to get through security and avoid the queues of people who have not checked in online. Back to the store to see if they could help - no they couldn't, they have had other passengers with the same problem, the website is rubbish and badly designed (the words of the in-store team not mine). Well if that's the case Thomas Cook - DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. It's called failure demand guys - sort it out.

Meantime fantastic currency offer for priority travellers who have booked a flight through Thomas Cook with the inducement of a 'cash passport'  where you load up and are able to pay for stuff using the passport rather than cash, all at the same rate , and avoiding having to change up money and carry large sums around with you - great idea. Yes I will go for that thanks sounds good, just fill in this form and come back to see us - arrange to go in store to load up on the cash passport - to find out  when I get there THEY DON'T HAVE ANY IN STOCK!!!  Piece of advice for Thomas Cook - if you call a customer and ask them to come in to receive a service make sure it's actually available when they get there!!!

OK so we're off to Florida - must get some Disney stuff sorted. Lots of options to go for - I ask for a pricing on those options before I decide exactly what to buy. Next thing I know two and a half grand has been taken off my credit card without my authorisation - and I find that out via a voice mail left on my mobile after store opening hours  -along with an apology for not getting the quote in writing to me. So that's the way Thomas Cook does business take the money first and ask questions later. I am actually going on the holiday soon - wish me luck.

Oh I almost forgot - arranged car hire through Thomas Cook and asked them to make sure the car hire pick up and drop off times coincided with THEIR FLIGHTS  .. you can guess what happened can't you?

It's refreshing to see this convergence of opinion and it also makes eminent sense. If your organisatonal culture is not customer focussed - both internal and external customers that is - then  you are going to suffer. But what determines culture? Again these two very different events came to a similar conclusion. It has to be led from the very top otherwise it will fall over. One of my favourite keynotes of the two events was at the ICS conference delivered by the new Director General of the CBI, John Cridland. His was a real scene-setting keynote and he pointed to the lack of trust customers have in many organisations - if the culture is wrong the trust just will not be there and the reputational damage of low trust is immense.

John Cridland's presentation took me back  a few years to when I interviewed one of his predecessors. Digby (now Lord) Jones. I asked him how customer centric an organisation could be  - and he said it will be as customer centric as he CEO wants it to be! This was borne our beautifully by the presentation immediately after John Cridland's at the ICS conference last week - it was from Anthony Thomson chairman of the new Metro Bank, the bank that has customers genuinely at the heart of its business. Thomson spoke passionately about the importance of engaging customers and building your business around them - go into a Metro Bank store and you will see what he means. Thomson is leading from the top and the culture shows. His views were echoed by pesenters at socialmediaforum ranging from Cisco to BT to giffgaff to Henley.

So culture is king and culture is the key. So what's the DNA of your organisation, how's the culture, where do your customers fit in, is your operation built around them or is it built around your company 'policy'? All questions worth asking yourself and of course I would love to know what your answers are!

Just as a footnote the most successful organisations in terms of what customers think at the UK Customer Satisfaction Awards were Waitrose and John Lewis, part of the John Lewis Partnership - no prizes for guessing the company culture at those two sister organisations.

Feedback from last week's event - sponsored by Eptica and Foviance - has been universally positive and with the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn presenting alongside gurus such as Richard Sedley,  course director for social media at the chartered institute of marketing, we feel we had the content spot on. All of our delegates say they have learned from the forum and are now busy implementing winning social and mobile customer engagment strategies of their own. I chaired the event and also the hour long Directors Forum debate on how social media can drive business performance and improve customer engagement and I can tell you I learned a thing or two (or event three) as well!

We did some filming at the Forum  - of both presenters and delegates - and if those of you who did not attend want to get a flavour of proceedings and some of the learnings, then you will soon be able to see the videos on our website www.customerengagementclub.com. Of course those of you who did attend will also want to see them!

The key thing that I got from the day is that  B2C organisations (and increasingly B2B ones too) simply have to have social and mobile customer engagement strategies. In this day and age you engage or you die and thos organisations who do not engage will rapidly find themsleves falling behind their competitors. As Richard Sedley said you must at least have a presence in this Brave New World of customer engagement.

Our next Directors Forum is on B2B Customer Engagement - another hot topic where the goalposts are moving pretty quickly -  and is being held once again at Gallup's HQ and is on Wednesday, May 11. Further details of this Forum are on our website. Be great to see you there.

There's no doubt that Twitter is the sexiest social media channel on the block and it's surprising how much you can say in the maximum of 140 characters allowed. I've been using Twitter for around four years now, and at the very least it's a good exercise in being succinct! Orwell would I am sure have approved. Those 140 characters are at least enough for customers to get the nub of their complaint or comment across and a fast growing number of organisations from sectors across the board, especially in telecoms, boradband and retail, are using it as a listening -  and acting - post. Writing a letter (unless its direct to the ceo) or sending an email just doesn't cut the mustard for the new breed of customers also increasingly using the likes of Twitter via the mobile channel. Power is more and more in the hands of customers and companies have to sit up and take notice.

Brands are setting up dedicated customer service accounts on Twitter encouraging people to interact with them via the forum and this is helping organisations understand, value and recognise the golden nuggets that complaints and general feedback are. And of course while a letter or email are essentially private communications, a tweet from somebody with thousands of followers on an open platform has a much wider impact - there really is no hiding place for poor customer service these days. Yes Twitter is joining, and in some ways usurping, Facebook as a key interaction  point between organisations and customers and  this is not just a fad. Twitter is increasingly becoming a customer service tool in its own right and anything that helps improve overall customer service levels is OK by me. To that end here at the Customer Engagement Club we are running a Social Media and Mobile Customer Engagement Directors Forum on March 3 and if you are interested in attending this event and finding ot more about Twitter, Facebook, mobile customer engagement et al, then simply visit our website www.customerengagementclub.com to register. I will of course be tweeting about the event from time to time, and it would be great to see you there.