A good PR consultant is a good communicator. To do that well we have to understand all our audiences. What do they want from our brand and when. Its not what we say to them its what they hear.

We have a society that is less deferent. They don’t want to be fobbed off with a script and they don’t want to be talked down to. Yet this what so many public and private sector organisations do, increasingly so as so many retreat from talking to customers or service users in physical locations.

I had a ding-dong with a Virgin Trains call centre person who refused to give me their advertised complimentary first class ticket, as an apology for leaving me stranded for hours and hours and hours on the West Coast mainline, during the Network Rail fiasco in the new year. I qualified, I endured the pain and had the ticket stamp to prove it, I have spent thousands with Virgin over the past few years and could prove it through my online account…..but applied for the offer after the deadline. It was entirely possible for them to adopt a human, commonsense approach based upon the degree to which they valued me as a customer. But Computer Said No!

OK, I won’t exactly take my custom elsewhere but in my job, I speak to politicians, journalists, regeneration professionals all the time. I used to always remark how great the West Coast upgrade was in conversations. Now I’ll remark on Virgin’s rubbish customer approach.

However at least this wasn’t a life or death situation. I was appalled to read the harrowing account, by Jenni Russell in the Guardian, of her inability to reach her elderly mother, living many miles away in a rural location, desperately trying to help her elderly father who was having a stroke.  There was a fault on the BT line. When she called BT’s customer ‘help’ centre to fix it they couldn’t help because it wasn’t in the script, the right person had gone home for his tea, computer basically said no!

This is wrong on so many communications, professional and humanitarian levels but like Jenni says, the response from consumers should be to vote with their feet and reward a brand that treats its customers like people rather than a cost. I hope to be advising the comms of organisations like that. I’ve got a few ideas………