One of my big learnings from last year was actually something I didn’t learn at all.

Yes, I know, it sounds odd, but hear me out.  Sometimes you learn something that, with hindsight, is completely obvious.  It was right in front of your nose.  For me it was about mobile and the importance of mobile in the future of marketing.

Where is the first place consumers read email?  Answer: 50% of the time it is on a mobile device.  A great stat, yet marketers just don’t seem to have understood this. Still.

The other day I took a screenshot of my inbox on my mobile.  On the screen were 5 messages.  All of those messages had completely forgotten that 50% of their audience will have a different experience as they’ll receive it on their mobile.

My 5 emails all started with the phrase “If you can’t read this email” or “you have been sent this email“.  The first few words of the email have been eaten by the Compliance Department, who don’t seem to use mobile devices or care for a consumer’s experience.

If you couple this with the epidemic of shortening attention spans, you end up with RDS, or Rapid Delete Syndrome.  This syndrome is where a user looks at their inbox and just deletes emails based on:

1. Who sent them
2. The first 30 characters of the header.

Yup, that’s right. All that work by the Design and Usability teams is for nothing, because your mobile device stripped it all out and the user deleted the email before even reading any of it.

Genius.

Now this has been pointed out to you, you will begin to see yourself do it, and research we have done backs it up.  The problem here is not whether you are mobile, it’s whether they are mobile.  And they are.  Very much so.

So it’s time to rethink your world for mobile, make sure you are on the seed list and look at your email not as you intended it to be but as it was filtered by your mobile device.  Then, and only then, will you stop wasting the time of both your company and consumers.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.

First of all, an apology for being quiet for so long, but I figure you shouldn’t say something just for the sake of it. I was also a little preoccupied as December and January are always big months for us. One ends the year and the other one starts it (see if you can guess which is which) so we really focussed on starting with a bang.

However, something did happen recently that piqued my interest and was worthy of a mention.

We had a couple of tussles with software companies and it helps underline the points about operations and service that I make over and over and over again.

The first software company supplies part of our platform. Late on a Friday afternoon on 1st February we were having a problem with capacity. To buy more capacity on most cloud-based platforms (like Amazon, etc.) they actively discourage you from having any contact, they manage the human out of the process with great engineering and online processes.

This company does no such thing; they make it so the only way you can buy is by calling them up and placing an order that then has to be e-signed. This means that someone at their office needs to be there. And on this day (on a Friday) they weren’t. We tried to phone them. We tried to email them. We tried their social media support profiles. After hours of chasing we finally got through on the phones at about 6pm in the evening.

Why was it so difficult to give them money? It was the first day of their financial year and everyone had taken the day off. Genius! Starting with a whimper then.

The company’s name? Salesforce.com.

The second company, QlikTech, is trying to organise their global conference and had an early bird discount that ended strictly on 1st February. We have been before and it is really useful so we wanted to send 3 members of staff. However, the online system wouldn’t let us. For 3 weeks we wrestled with their incomprehensible system. We kept calling them and they kept telling us we should try their website and buy online.

Finally my toys fell out of my pram and I started writing emails higher and higher up the company. I received responses but they still insisted that the only way to buy was online. They couldn’t take the order over the phone.

Which is odd as they were using a familiar platform to process the order. You guessed it. Salesforce.com.

This isn’t a tech issue. This isn’t about the platform. This is about good, old fashioned service design. Businesses get lazy when technology is involved, forgetting that the customer and the way the customer wants to transact is the most important issue, not making their own workday easier.

If customers want to give money to you, it makes good business sense to let them.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.

Steve Ridgeway is the outgoing CEO of Virgin Atlantic. He won’t remember me but way back when Virgin was the world’s best airline I worked with his team on building Virgin Freeway and met him a couple of times.

Steve has brought Virgin from just one aircraft to being a credible international airline. Along the way he has endured many ups and downs, but now he must be leaving. How do I know? Take a look at this email I received from him.

(Before you do, if something doesn’t ring true then don’t worry, I will explain afterwards)

Dear Ian,

We are excited to announce that we have been offered all of the Heathrow short haul remedy slots available following the International Airline Group’s acquisition of bmi.

We have fought hard for the right to fly short haul and take a strong challenge to British Airways within these shores. For 28 years both airlines have battled for customers all over the world and it has meant that British consumers have ultimately had some of the world’s best flying and lowest fares.

This is the beginning of an exciting new era in Virgin Atlantic history and we now feel a responsibility to everyone that has supported us in this challenge. You can look forward to a great short haul service with us but most importantly reap the benefits from the re-injection of vital competition we can provide on these routes.

Over the next two weeks, we will work to finalise our plans for utilisation of the available remedy slots and to confirm a flying timetable. We will primarily focus on flying between Scotland and Heathrow, running multiple daily flights from Edinburgh and Aberdeen to London Heathrow.

Flights will commence around 31st March 2013 and complement the new Heathrow to Manchester route that we are also introducing next year. We will be working with a wet lease partner to provide narrow body Airbus A320 aircraft to operate these short haul flights.

We will be revealing specific details of our short haul product and famed onboard customer experience in the coming months, so watch this space!.

We look forward to seeing you onboard soon.

OK, did anybody spot where Steve left the building? Let’s go back over it, this time with my inner voice narrating:

We are excited to announce that we have been offered all of the Heathrow short haul remedy slots available following the International Airline Group’s acquisition of bmi. (Can someone please tell me what a short haul remedy slot is? And why do I care?)

We have fought hard for the right to fly short haul and take a strong challenge to British Airways within these shores. (But so did bmi and they went bust or did I miss something?) For 28 years both airlines have battled for customers all over the world and it has meant that British consumers have ultimately had some of the world’s best flying and lowest fares. (Yes, but not comfy reclining seats in Upper class, I preferred the early days when you really wanted to be different and so treated me the Virgin way, not the BA also-ran way)

This is the beginning of an exciting new era in Virgin Atlantic history (but it’s not the Atlantic though. What happened to the short-haul Virgin Express?) and we now feel a responsibility to everyone that has supported us in this challenge. You can look forward to a great short haul service with us but most importantly reap the benefits from the re-injection of vital competition we can provide on these routes. (Last time I checked you can also fly London-Edinburgh and Glasgow on Easyjet, Ryanair and a host of other airlines. The issue is not competition, it is Heathrow)

Over the next two weeks, we will work to finalise our plans for utilisation of the available remedy slots and to confirm a flying timetable. (So are you writing to me now, why didn’t you wait until you had the timetable?) We will primarily focus on flying between Scotland and Heathrow, running multiple daily flights from Edinburgh and Aberdeen to London Heathrow.

Flights will commence around 31st March 2013 and complement the new Heathrow to Manchester route that we are also introducing next year. We will be working with a wet lease partner to provide narrow body Airbus A320 aircraft to operate these short haul flights. (Enough now, I don’t care about whether the lease is wet, dry, shaken or stirred. It isn’t relevant to me how you finance your aircraft)

We will be revealing specific details of our short haul product and famed onboard customer experience in the coming months, so watch this space!

We look forward to seeing you onboard soon (Well I live in Bristol and so if I want to go to these places I will travel from there, but thanks anyway…)

The bottom line is, dear reader, that this email is not intended to excite me. It is written with someone else in mind. Maybe Virgin were making a statement to BA, maybe to regulators, maybe to someone who cares, but not to me. If you were writing to me to rekindle my love affair with your brand and part with my hard-earned money to join you on your new short-haul routes, focus on the benefits that are relevant to me and not the features, otherwise you’ll be left on your lemon.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.

A few months ago I wrote a blog piece about my favourite coffee shop. In it I bemoaned the departure my favourite barista and I postulated about a terrible future without her.

The passage of time has brought me to a new coffee shop and I think that some of the lessons learned would also be useful to the mobile giant Vodafone.

My early morning coffee is a bit of a ritual for me. Ever since I lived in the USA, I have become used to having coffee from a coffee shop first thing. On my way in to work I stop off for an Americano in Clifton Village, a part of Bristol where every other shop seems to be a coffee shop. I was finally won over by one in particular where the manager would recognise me and deliver me my drink in a speedy and friendly way.

My traditional way of evaluating at things is on Quality, Service and Price. You can have two out of the three, but never the third. If you want great quality and great service, well you won’t get a cheap price.

For me, it’s coffee; almost all the companies charge the same so the big difference is service. It’s early in the morning and I am going in to work. I won’t be made to queue while one of the 3 assistants is making porridge, another is cleaning tables and the third is still on till training. My tolerance level is miles too low for that.

Now I have a new coffee shop a few doors down. No one seems to go in there, the price is 10% cheaper than those around it, they give a free Croissant (even though I don’t want one) and the coffee is good. But crucially the speed of service is lightning fast. I am the only customer in there at that time of the morning so I can get in and out in no time. Result.

So how does this relate to Vodafone? Well it’s come to the point where we need to say goodbye to them. Over the years I have watched our company phone bill spiral upwards to the point where Vodafone are one of our key suppliers. They are important to us. However, we are not important to them. I’ve lost count of the number of account managers who have come and gone. As they have struggled for profit, the service has slowly been stripped back.

In this modern age, a reduction in real customer support staff is normally accompanied by delivery of service on-line. This self-service piece normally adds value to the customer and also to the company.

Not for Vodafone, though. No portal here.

Service has gone down, price has gone up (still small fry for them, but massive for us). The only thing I can truly recommend is that their quality is excellent. But 1 out of 3 is not a good negotiating point.

So we started shopping around and, needless to say, we found a cheaper price and better service on networks that probably aren’t as good quality. But that’s 2 out of 3.

At this point I write to Mr Vodafone UK to tell him I am off and why.

A day later I get an email from our account manager wanting to restart a conversation and get a sales manager involved.

Too late. Surely the time to try and save us as a customer was about a year ago? Not after the horse has declared that they are going to bolt through the open stable door. The trick would have been to keep the horse happy, healthy and snug in a stable that was secure.

In the same way as it would have been easier for my coffee shop to keep me a loyal customer before I left. They won’t even notice I am gone and neither, in the greater scheme of things, will Vodafone. I’m just a stat.

At some point a senior manager (maybe even the CEO) will run around shouting, “The sky is falling, our customers are leaving us, how can we get them back?”

And the answer will be, start about a year ago, and start by understanding that the time to focus on customer loyalty is when you have loyal customers who love your brand. Not just after they left you for somewhere else.

It’s not an answer that pleases the accountants in the short term, but it is the only answer that delivers long-term growth in a service industry.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.

On my computer I have 187GB of photos and videos.  Each photo is tagged with the camera settings, date, time and place it was taken along with some information about the people that are in the photo.

If you were really smart, you would be able to deduce from this where and when I take my holidays, who I go with, what other places I visit and a lot of other information about me.

My first PC had a hard drive of just 10MB. That means that you would need more than 18,000 of my first PCs just to store my current photo collection, at a rate of just 2-3 photos per computer.

That’s a lot of stuff.  If you were to analyse my photos further you could probably uncover a lot more information.  If you were to append other data about those photos from other sources you might be able to tell what the weather was like in Disney when I went there and it might be possible to tell how much money I spent at Disney.

In short, you can take my 187GB and probably turn it into thousands more Gigabytes.

Collectively that’s called Big Data.  And the world is going Big Data crazy.

At the recent DMA Conference in Las Vegas the title was Big Data and a series of highly paid (and quite boring) people were trotted out to tell their stories.  None of which defined big data in the same way or gave any answers to burning questions.

Everywhere you look people are adding bigness to their data, appending all sorts of information to their records.  For instance, I have an add-in for Outlook that shows me a photo and profile of the person who has sent me an email pulled from LinkedIn or Facebook.

But, be careful what you wish for. Big Data is precisely that. It’s a load of numbers and letters all rammed together from different places.

Big Data does not mean big insight. It does means big consulting bills and probably a big headache.

Why?

Well you don’t need more data, you need more answers. Answers to questions you have never been able to ask. Answers to questions you haven’t thought of. Answers that will give you an edge.

All this focus on Big Data is great, but I am not convinced that this is anything more than a ploy to sell you hardware and consulting, and not solutions that your business needs.

I think the challenge should be to find good answers from using regular sized data to its full potential. I mean, what’s the point of making your data “big” in the future if you never used “small” data effectively in the present?

To my mind, you don’t need to focus on the size of the data or the tools that you get to analyse it, but on the quality of the insight that you can gather as a result.  And, so far, I haven’t heard anyone talk about how they have dramatically moved their business forward as a result of big data. We help businesses do just that, but with insight, every day.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight