Rory Sutherland

So there would be districts and areas where, you know, every single first-class letter arrived early the following day, extraordinarily reliable levels of service, and Royal Mail wasn't particularly held in affection or esteem.

There are other areas where the service was frankly a bit ropey and people seemed to love it.

Now, this obviously upset them because they thought that all the billions or certainly hundreds of millions they'd invested in service quality improvement should translate into customer satisfaction and therefore, you know, some sort of brand voltage.

And someone had a theory and they said, I think something else is going on.

And the theory, which was put to the test and proved absolutely right, was that the major determinant of whether you liked royal male or not was whether you liked your postman or postie, technically, to be used the gender neutral term.

So people who had a rather unreliable service, but the postman did the odd favor for them, left things in the porch, had a chat with them, those people thought it was a brilliant organization, regardless of the actual metrics that were being pursued.

And I think that's very true in any service organization.

There's an electricity company, a gas company, a water company, a utility.

You may interact with them online 95% of the time, but the one or two occasions where you interact by telephone or face-to-face disproportionately affect your perception of the organization.

And I've argued for quite a time, if I were being completely honest, I've worked in advertising for 36 years, and if I were a wholly honest person without fear of annoying my colleagues,

Probably 50% of the time I would advise to a client take 10 to 20% of your marketing budget and spend it on upgrading the call center.

Pay the people too much.

Get the best practitioners.

I think it's perfectly legitimate in some organizations there should be the very best call center people should be on six figures.

Because if you're good and nice, that's how much difference it makes.

In other words, it more or less drowns out all your other stuff, all the other noise.

If every time you have a personal experience, you have a good experience, then broadly speaking in the human brain, that's a good organization which I can trust.

And when you think about it, I suddenly realized why this probably is.

We don't really have much evolved experience in evaluating postal efficiency, do we?

We have...