After yesterday's blog highlighting the groundbreaking work of public and third sector services in supporting families with multiple problems and challenges, I couldn't help but return to another service related theme.
In August I wrote about the appalling quality of a mobile 'phone product of Nokia that had blighted part of my life and business. Not opinion - fact, based on a personal experience. I also reported a while before that on Nokia's collapsing market value, i.e. from £200bn to £15bn in ten years. I made connections between the quality of their product and this collapse.
Now, some of that value collapse will also no doubt have been due to the panicking 'markets' - another bete noir of mine, i.e. the 'red braces' of the City who are incapable of managing their portfolios and our pensions on time horizons of more than 24 hours. Their inability to regulate their own emotions and make the rest of us pay, is simply the flip side of the venality of the bankers whose packaging of toxic debt has left us with a £60bn+ debt burden now being taken out of the hide of the public and third sectors (and tangentially from the private sector as well).
Where is this leading? Well, my eye was taken by a small side-bar in the press on 30.9.11 which simply read:
"Nokia is axing a further 3500 jobs on top of the £871m cost-cutting plan announced in April. Nokia will cut 1300 jobs from its location and commerce division, which makes maps for Nokia 'phones, and close its Cluj factory in Romania, resulting in 2200 job losses (which must be catastrophic for that city in one of Europe's poorest states - SL). The redundancies, which will not affect the UK (phew - dodged a bullet there then, didn't we - SL), follow a year of upheaval at Nokia. In April Nokia said it would cut 4000 jobs and transfer 3000 employees to Acccenture, as Stephen Elop, the new CEO, restructured the company to focus on smartphones."
All I would say to Stephen is this - if your company concentrated more on improving the quality and reliability of its products than a particular market segmentation, and spent a fraction of its almost £1bn restructuring costs on reliability, it might not have the reputational cache of a city trader (whether wearing red braces or not) and the future prospects of the Greek Government.
I was also tickled to read in an article side by side with the Nokia piece, that Santander's UK banking arm was suffering a profit hit due to slow economic growth, low interest rates and regulatory costs. As a result, a floatation of the UK arm was being delayed until 2013. Whilst I have not shared this before, my company had a long and fruitless dispute with Santander as a result of it peremptorily freezing an account of ours. Despite several rounds of appeal we were never able to extract a simple and courteous reply to two questions:
Why we were not informed the account was about to be frozen?
Why we were we not informed immediately it had been frozen?
Simple enough questions one would think and if posed of many public sector bodies would receive a reply and in good time. Not from Santander though. Britain's second (?) most complained-about bank simply quoted, or should I say parroted, its regulations in each response. In effect we were told "we did this because we could and we don't have to tell anyone we're going to do it or when we have done it'.
And this is the so called 'commercial' approach to service delivery that the public sector is exhorted to replicate? Well obviously not, but you get the point. I hope the two new CEO's of these organisations will finally attend to not only the strategic direction of their organisations, but also the experience of individual customers s upon whom their future economic and reputation prospects rest to a greater or lesser extent.
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