Environmental sustainability: how committed are we?
Explore Communications is currently editing an environmental sustainability report for one of our clients, so our attention was caught by a news item on ABC Radio this morning – about delays to the construction of a koala underpass in south-west Sydney due to a stand-off between two developers. According to the ABC, there has been no progress on the construction for almost three months.
We know this area very well and have followed the history of the Mount Gilead Estate and Figtree Hill Estate development closely – we’ve driven past it regularly for the last ten years. We had concerns from the outset about the impact the housing estate would have on the local koala population, which at the time was prime koala habitat, supporting the only disease-free and growing colony of koalas in Greater Sydney.
The development threatened not only destroy a significant portion of that habitat and an important East-West koala corridor through land clearing; the increase in traffic volumes along that route would lead to more koala deaths and injuries. The ABC reported that more than 50 koalas have been killed by vehicles since 2022.
Lendlease, the original developer of the site, made a series of commitments about koala conservation at Gilead; which were necessary for the development to be given the green light by the NSW Government. That included building koala underpasses.
Those commitments are now shared by Stockland, who purchased Figtree Hill Estate from Lendlease in November 2024.
We thought we’d dig deeper into both Lendlease’s and Stockland’s commitment to environmental sustainability, to see how it aligned with the current situation as reported by the ABC.
There was a professional interest as well as a personal one. In the work we are doing right now on our client’s environmental sustainability report, a critical aspect of this is to be sure that what we are writing about isn’t just window-dressing. It needs to accurately represent the organisation’s actual environmental commitment and sustainable behaviour.
Here is Lendlease’s leading statement about biodiversity for its Gilead project:
“Our commitment to conservation is fundamental to our vision to create the best places for people today and for generations to come. The Figtree Hill and Gilead precincts will be defined by the conservation areas and green open spaces that are integral to the project.”
In its overall position on nature and biodiversity, Lendlease acknowledges the damage being caused …
“The world is experiencing an accelerating loss of biodiversity due to human activity, with nearly one million plant and animal species at the point of extinction.”
… and also that, as an organisation, it still has work to do:
“In response to the scale of the nature crisis and the need for global action, we are undertaking a Nature & Biodiversity strategic review. The purpose of the review is to better understand the ways in which our business activities impact and depend on nature, along with the opportunities we have to enhance nature and slow down biodiversity loss.”
In its FY25 Environmental Management Approach, Stockland includes a section on biodiversity, with this introduction …
“We recognise the important role biodiversity plays in sustaining healthy ecosystems and supporting human health and wellbeing. We also understand the intrinsic value of biodiversity and the global significance of Australia’s unique flora and fauna, as well as its importance to the culture of First Nations people. Our Liveability Index survey results tell us that our customers value green space and access to nature, so integrating developable land with conservation and the enjoyment of biodiversity is critical to the overall success of our communities.”
… and its management approach to biodiversity:
“To minimise our direct impact on biodiversity we apply the mitigation hierarchy through our assessment and consideration of design and management options. The mitigation hierarchy includes 1) avoiding impacts, 2) minimising impacts, 3) restoring cleared or degraded areas and finally 4) offsetting impacts to significant biodiversity.”
In Lendlease’s press release back in November 2024 announcing that the construction of the first koala underpass was officially underway, Brendan O’Brien, Head of NSW Residential Communities, Lendlease was quoted as saying:
“We’ve wasted no time in starting construction of important koala safety measures following approval from Transport for NSW. This first fauna underpass at Noorumba Reserve will be the first safe east-west connection for koalas between the Nepean and Georges Rivers.”
At Explore, we tend to let the words do the talking, so we will just leave all this with you to come to your own conclusions as to where Lendlease and Stockland stand on biodiversity and sustainability.
Some order please!
We’re not going to pass comment on the wisdom or otherwise of Trump’s reciprocal tariffs announced today against more than 180 countries, but what has been bugging us in every news report we’ve seen so far is the lack of order to the lists of countries provided. Can someone explain why the list Trump holds up to the camera goes ‘China – European Union – Vietnam – Taiwan – Japan – etc.’? Also, why are news outlets everywhere publishing this in that same order?
We’ve taken it upon ourselves to create the full list of countries, sortable by country, tariffs charged to US (according to the US Govt) and new US reciprocal tariff. It wasn’t hard – just 10 minutes work. Please see below!
Here’s the link to the read-only Google Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Phq5UavSwVvdO9CrqeQH9dHmSGAfkYZm9O9790JREWo/edit?usp=sharing
* Photo above by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-choosing-vinyl-record-6827245/
Have we created a monster?
One LinkedIn post recently inadvertently summed up the challenge we are facing around generative AI. It’s opening line was: “Reckon AI can help you with homework and make you cry?”
The post went on to describe how this person’s daughter was doing a school research project about World War 2, and she decided to help by asking ChatGPT to write her daughter a letter from her great grandfather who served in WW2.
I was struck by two things about this; why did she ask ChatGPT to help in the first place, and how can something that you know was created by a machine make you cry?
Apparently, a recent study found that AI poetry rated better than poems written by humans. So what? Is there any point at all to use AI to write poetry, or any form of creative writing? It’s just going to be a computer-generated amalgam of words that might read well on the surface, but beyond that there is nothing. No heart, no feeling, no perspective, no emotion, no individual’s view on the world. Do we really want to fill our lives with content created by the machine?
The ‘helping with the homework’ aspect to the post is equally disturbing. Why didn’t she spark her own daughter’s creativity and imagination by suggesting that she write that letter from her great grandfather? A University of Melbourne tutor wrote about this. Fifty-two percent of her students were detected as using AI to complete some or all their first written assessment of 2024, and that only got worse over the year. She asks what is the point of university education and a degree at the end of it:
“… a degree in many faculties is a waste of money in terms of everything but earning (rather than learning) potential.”
I’m no saying that there is no place for AI. Absolutely there is! I use it every day. I use the automatic background removal function in Canva, and the background extension function in Photoshop to touch up photos. That saves so much time from the old days of deep etching. I can’t imagine going back to having to transcribe my own interview recordings. Now I can use Otter, RingCentral and a host of other AI tools to do that for me.
We just need to draw the line. Or multiple lines in lots of different fields. Don’t even get me started on the impact that the proliferation of AI is having (and going to have) on the environment. AI data centres’ growing demands for power and water are alarming to say the least. Professor Kate Crawford illustrated the problem clearly: each interaction with ChatGPT was the equivalent of pouring half a litre of water on the ground. The article also states that GenAI has “tripled the energy requirements of the entire tech sector in just two years”.
* Pictured above is an early Photoshop AI experiment of mine that went horribly wrong …
In danger of eroding the foundations: SaaS and AI
As a long-time user of Adobe software, Explore Communications took some time to get its head around Creative Suite moving to a subscription model (more than 10 years ago!).
We soon realised it was a good thing. We had been buying the gargantuanly-priced software package, knowing that it started becoming obsolete from the moment we installed it. Now we have access to applications and features that are constantly updated, albeit with little control on how and when we spend our money on the software.
What is happening, however, is that the foundations of the software industry and intellectual property are being eroded — and that erosion is accelerating thanks to the widespread adoption of generative AI.
When we purchased boxed software and ran the instal discs, the first step was to agree to the terms and conditions of use. Sure, most of us just scrolled to the end of the document and clicked ‘accept’, but the point is that these terms were fixed at the time the software was released and stayed in place until we chose to upgrade.
With a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, that’s no longer the case and, as a result, we need to be far more vigilant about the changes that are taking place with these terms of service (TOS). While we have largely lost autonomy in how we consume software, we are in danger of losing control over the content and IP we are generating when we use those applications – and that’s not on.
If it’s not enough for the social media giants to ‘own’ all the content we post on their platforms, now we have the likes of Adobe looking to do the same to feed their AI models by updating its TOS to include that “we may access your content through both automated and manual methods”. (See further in The Verge: ‘Adobe’s new terms of service aren’t the problem — it’s the trust‘.)
It used to be that the software industry was focused on creating the features and functionality that businesses and users either wanted or needed — and there was a clear distinction between this and the work and output we generated using these applications.
Those borders no longer seem to be in place – and it’s critical we re-establish them.
* Pictured above: Photograph © Andrew Dunn, 04 November 2006. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
With the 71st Sydney Film Festival starting next week, Giving Culture, the corporate gift voucher program we launched in December 2022, is bearing some unexpected consequences.
Giving Culture was created in response to the COVID-19 restrictions and the impact that had on our arts and cultural institutions.
With shows and performances limited or cancelled during the pandemic, every on of these organisations and the people connected with them were negatively impacted in multiple ways.
We wanted to establish a program that would assist in the sustainability and vitality of the not-for-profit arts sector and potentially open these organisations up to new audiences and new revenue streams.
We also wanted to replicate for the wider community the experiences our small Explore Communications team enjoyed using our staff ‘Christmas bonuses’ each year. This bonus took the form of an arts subscription, giving us tickets to performances during the following year.
Last year we gave culture vouchers as Christmas gifts to all the people who had worked for us during the year. Four of those vouchers were recently redeemed for SFF packages and then something quite surprising and special happened.
We knew that Giving Culture’s product made a unique and meaningful gift for individuals, but what we didn’t counter for was the bonding and collaborative experience these four vouchers created.
By redeeming culture vouchers for an SFF experience, it gets put towards a Flexipass – where you can purchase tickets for multiple films, booking up to four tickets per session. As four of us had redeemed for a Flexipass, we all got together to discuss which films we wanted to see and then each person used their own Flexipass to book multiple tickets to the one session based on who else was keen to go.
As a result, together with our partners, I know for sure that we are all going to Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film Kinds of Kindness, and different combinations of people are going to a selection of other films across the two weeks of the festival.
What’s great about this is it’s moved the idea of Giving Culture beyond just an individual experience to a collective one, and extended the connections our team have beyond the workplace – in a way that is also contributing to the health of our cultural sector. For a number of our voucher recipients, it will be the first time attending the Sydney Film Festival, and I’m sure they would love to repeat the experience for years to come.
I decided to get on the bandwagon and test out ChatGPT with a self-referential piece on the futility of using generative AI for any form of meaningful creative expression. It wasn’t quite an ‘if you type “Google” into Google, you can break the Internet’ moment, but I was pretty pleased with the outcome. It’s good to see ChatGPT arguing for its own restricted use.
Here’s ChatGPT’s response (no changes made!):
Generative AI has come a long way in recent years, offering impressive capabilities that have the potential to revolutionise numerous fields. From generating realistic images and videos to producing natural-sounding speech, the technology has proven to be incredibly versatile and useful for a wide range of applications.
However, when it comes to creative expression, generative AI falls short. While it may be able to produce impressive works of art or music, these creations lack the depth, individuality, and meaning that only a human can bring to the table.
Art and music are deeply personal expressions of the human experience. They are not just products of technical skill or a set of rules; they are the result of an individual’s unique perspective, emotions, and experiences. When a person looks at a painting or listens to a piece of music, they are not just observing a set of colours or sounds – they are experiencing something that resonates with them on a deeper level.
Generative AI may be capable of producing something that looks or sounds similar to a piece of art, but it cannot replicate the human element that makes that art truly special. Without the human touch, a piece of art or music is simply a collection of pixels or notes, devoid of any true meaning or emotion.
Moreover, generative AI lacks the ability to understand context, which is crucial when it comes to creative expression. A human artist or musician can draw inspiration from their surroundings, their culture, and their personal experiences, all of which influence the way they approach their craft. Generative AI, on the other hand, is limited to the data it has been trained on and cannot incorporate new experiences or emotions into its work.
Another limitation of generative AI is its lack of intentionality. When a human creates a work of art or music, they do so with a specific intention in mind. They may be trying to convey a message, express an emotion, or evoke a particular feeling in the viewer or listener. Generative AI, on the other hand, lacks this intentionality and simply produces a piece of art or music without any underlying meaning or purpose.
Of course, there are some who argue that generative AI can still be useful in creative fields. For example, it can be used as a tool to help artists or musicians come up with new ideas or to automate certain parts of the creative process. However, even in these cases, the final product still relies on the human touch to bring it to life and give it meaning.
In conclusion, while generative AI may be great for a wide range of applications, including image and speech recognition, it falls short when it comes to creative expression. Art and music are deeply personal and meaningful expressions of the human experience, and they require the human touch to truly come to life. While generative AI may be able to produce impressive works that look or sound similar to human-created art or music, they lack the depth, individuality, and intentionality that only a human can bring to the table. So, the point of a person reading an article, looking at a painting, or listening to a piece of music is not just to observe a collection of pixels or notes, but to experience something that resonates with them on a deeper level and touches their soul.
Pictured above: ‘uktv-it-crowd-finale-moss’ by TNS Sofres, shared under an Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) licence
Launching Giving Culture
In December 2022, we launched Giving Culture®, a corporate gift voucher program that gives people the opportunity to enjoy artistic and cultural experiences across dance, film, music and theatre. Our three foundation partners in this venture, which is initially focused on activities in Sydney, are Australian Chamber Orchestra, Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP) and Sydney Film Festival.
Our cultural institutions, artists and performers faced incredible difficulties in 2020 and 2021 through delayed and cancelled events, venues closed and travel restricted. Giving Culture was conceived and established as an innovative way to support our local arts community and help with the long-term sustainability of the sector. We were inspired by our own experience as regular subscribers and we see this as a way to to open up cultural experiences for more people to enjoy the arts. Crucially, it’s another avenue for organisations to support our vital arts sector.
Rather than limiting organisations and voucher holders to just one field of the arts, the magic of Giving Culture is that it opens up the opportunity for experiences across a wider array of dance, film, music and theatre – and potentially more in the future!
Giving Culture gives your organisation a unique and meaningful product that you can use for staff reward and customer incentive programs – one that has a dual benefit of supporting our local not for-profit arts sector.
We’d love to hear your feedback about Giving Culture, and also to talk to you if you’d like to find out more. Please go to www.givingculture.com.au for more information on our program. You can also follow Giving Culture on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
To pay or not to pay
Medibank’s very public decision not to pay a ransom for the return of sensitive data on 9.7 million current and former customers has created a lot of debate, and for good reason.
On the one hand, being very transparent and vocal on not paying is a clear message that might deter would-be cyber extortionists from taking that path in the future; on the other hand, you are now virtually guaranteeing that this data will be exposed with untold harm to millions of people – which has already started to happen.
It’s a no-win situation for Medibank, regardless of the decision it had have taken. Ultimately, someone or some group committed a crime in hacking Medibank’s systems and stealing the data in the first place, so you can’t hold the company liable for somebody else’s illegal actions.
Sure, Medibank probably needed to do something more to ensure the security of its data – an obligation that’s not without precedent. In most Australian States it is illegal to leave your car unattended and unlocked. Why is that the case? A vehicle is a dangerous thing that can cause a lot of damage in the wrong hands, so making it easier for those wrong hands to use it should be discouraged.
Our personal data is no different. In the wrong hands, it can cause a lot of damage. Especially financial information and health data. The biggest threat from the exposure of personal health information is identity theft, but it “could also open some people up to blackmail if it were released — or make them less open with healthcare professionals, says Dr Rob Hosking, who chairs the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners’ technology committee.” (ABC News – What do criminals want with our health data — and what could they use it for?)
Taking the unlocked car analogy, we need to be doing a lot more at a regulatory level in enforcing greater security and protection of our personal data – so it’s good to see the Federal Government acting quickly on this.
Putting corporate security obligations aside for a minute and looking at the pros and cons of paying the ransom, they are pretty clear. A typical ransomware case involves a cyber adversary breaching an organisation’s systems and either locking up or disabling core applications or encrypting the data, then demanding a payment to undo the damage. If you can’t quickly recover to full operations (or recover at all!) the economic cost and reputational damage of not paying the ransom is likely to be too great – so it’s better that you pay.
That isn’t too far removed from an old-fashioned kidnapping. Once the ransom has been paid, there is no point in the kidnapper harming the victim, so more than likely they will be returned safely to the family. You could argue that paying the ransom makes sense – as long as you can be sure that your systems are now secure and the adversary is not able to repeat the dose.
How do we try and stop ransomware attacks altogether? I remember being in Italy in the early 1990s when kidnapping was still rife. It was a common sight walking around a city to see police armed with sub-machine guns guarding residential buildings protecting specific families living there. It forced Italy to take a very tough stance. According to Decode39, “after years of high-profile kidnapping cases and ever-larger sums being paid to criminals, in 1991 the Italian government took a decisive step. It enacted a law that established the freezing of the financial assets of the captive’s family and loved ones, i.e. those who could have been coerced into paying. The somewhat brutal reasoning held that it was necessary to destroy the incentive for criminals to kidnap people, eradicating the possibility of a reward.”
Freezing the assets of a corporation (or instituting harsh financial penalties) to prevent a ransom being paid might work in discouraging typical ransomware attacks – but it won’t work for an extortion demand where data has been taken. That’s because the criminal group has an alternate source of income to the ransom demand. It can sell the data, or use it in other ways to make money. So, for Medibank, that’s why it’s been left in a no-win situation. If it paid the ransom, there’s still no guarantee that the data won’t be exposed or sold to other parties. It’s a criminal entity Medibank is dealing with, after all.
If we really want to stamp out ransomware, we’ve got to tackle the core issue – cryptocurrency. As npr puts it, the rise of cryptocurrencies has resulted in a surge in ransomware attacks because it has solved the problem that “has long plagued bank robbers and drug smugglers: how to transport and hide huge sums of ill-gotten gains without getting caught?”
The anonymity and difficulty in tracing some cryptocurrency transactions has made it so much easier for cyber criminals to execute successful ransomware attacks. In the Optus data breach, SmartCompany states that Monero was the crypto of choice for the Optus ‘hacker’ because it is “near-impossible for law enforcement to trace crime-related Monero transactions.”
Law enforcement agencies either need to get much cleverer at tracking down cryptocurrency payments (like the US Department of Justice (DOJ) was in seizing $715,000 in Bitcoin from North Korean ransomware actors) or, as cryptocurrencies become more mainstream, there needs to be a much stronger global regulation of cryptocurrencies … which opens another can of worms …
Injecting marketing input for winning tenders
In most large IT businesses, responding to RFPs and tenders is the domain of the sales and bid management team. The marketing department usually doesn’t play a direct role – which is a shame, because there is a lot of value they can add!
At Explore Communications, we were a little bit surprised when a request came out of the blue some years ago to assist with an RFP response for a major IT contract. However, it really shouldn’t have been a surprise; after all, the role we play is to help articulate the value of our clients’ products and services to the market. There can be just as much benefit (if not more!) in articulating that value to a single customer, especially when that could result in winning a multi-million-dollar deal or a highly strategic engagement.
Since then, we’ve helped out on a range of strategic bids for a few different clients, with our focus primarily on the executive summary and supporting content, including presentations and videos.
We’ve found that there are some really effective areas for marketing input in this process.
First of all, it’s great to be engaged early on. It’s much more difficult to have an influence on the overall direction and focus of the response just a week or two out from the submission deadline. By engaging early, you can better understand the motivations behind the RFP or tender, and have greater context based on the initial discussions that have taken place with the customer and also internally amongst the sales team. This in turn helps to distil what’s important to the customer, and to understand the core strategy and approach the sales organisation plans to take for the bid.
Second, having a marketing lens involved ensures that the bid response process maintains an external perspective, and doesn’t become too internally focused. Marketing can stay at arm’s length from the technical, logistical, financial and contractual elements of the bid – which are critical to ensuring the response meets the tender criteria but can also take it away from the overall theme and value you want to convey. By not being heavily involved in putting together the detailed response, marketing can have a much more objective perspective on the content and approach.
Third, it’s vital to get the executive summary just right. This is the one piece of content that every customer stakeholder will read, before they delve into their area of specialisation in the detailed response (which is potentially hundreds of pages). It’s also the content they will use to support their justification for their final decision when they need to convince the senior executive or board that they have made the right choice. Ultimately, anything you can do to make the job easier for the customer’s stakeholders in winning internal approval for their decision, the more likely you are to win the deal.
Three steps for getting the executive summary ‘just right’
In writing the executive summary, do it with the specific audience in mind – something in which marketing specialists excel. You also need to take a hierarchical approach with the content, prioritising what is of the most value to the customer.
First, clearly articulate what you see as the customer’s most critical objectives to be gained and problems to be solved with your solutions and/or services. You don’t need to repeat every one of these from the RFP or tender – that’s the job for the more detailed response behind the summary. What you are demonstrating is that you have not only listened to the customer, but you have thought deeply about their business and how you can help. It’s marketing’s role to challenge the sales team on what these most important elements are – if you get this right, the customer will immediately sit up and take notice of your response. Marketing’s early engagement in the process really helps here because these ‘nuggets’ might not necessarily be present in the tender documents themselves; they might have been gleaned in earlier conversations and meetings with the customer.
Second, tie these outcomes to the value that your solutions or services can provide, and be more descriptive on how they will achieve those outcomes. At the end of the day, the customer is buying something from you. This will also be the critical component supporting how the customer will sell their decision internally. Here it’s worth keeping in mind what will differentiate you from the competition.
Third, and this is particularly relevant to significant multi-year or multi-million-dollar contracts, articulate why your company is the right one to choose. Again, this needs to be tied to the customer’s objectives and concerns, but the criteria are more likely to be general in nature – risk, security, profitability, competitiveness, longevity, viability, etc. This content will also be relied on to justify the decision internally.
Finally, it’s not a bad idea to challenge the customer’s thinking at the end of the summary. If they have read this far, then it gives you an opportunity to plant a seed in their minds – something that might influence their decision on the proposal. It might be a different way of tackling the project, an additional offering that you think will add value, or it might be related to a future opportunity that you know is coming up with that customer, where you can already start the sales process. It shows that you have gone over and above the constructs of the original tender or RFP, taking into account the customer’s broader organisation and needs.
Explore Communications has had a high success rate on the bids we have worked on over the years, but we certainly can’t take credit for the wins achieved – there is so much more that goes into a successful tender response! However, it is worth taking that extra bit of effort on those contracts that you really have to win (or should win!) and that will really make a difference to your business. If the one document that every customer stakeholder reads is not up to scratch, that puts you behind the eight ball at the very start.
(Photo by Waseem Farooq from PxHere)
While interviewing a client for a whitepaper about recruitment last week, the concept of “candidate care” came up:
“Your reputation as an employer is critical, so it’s also important to be practising ‘candidate care’ throughout the recruitment process. That means treating your unsuccessful candidates just as well as you treat the successful ones. A bad experience is more likely to be shared than a good one, or that candidate might end up being your customer one day.”
That resonated strongly for me, for a couple of reasons.
One of my close relatives had a very poor recruitment experience applying for a job at a major supermarket chain. After completed two rounds of interviews and then a medical, he didn’t hear anything further in relation to his application. I thought that was odd for a couple of reasons.
First, why make him undergo a medical if you are not going to be offering him a job?
Second, why was there no notification at all that he was unsuccessful?
Anyway, that didn’t deter him, so he applied for another job opening at the same company again a month or two later. Once again, he completed two rounds of interviews and then a medical.
Apparently, in the second interview he was told that the reason that he didn’t hear back the first time he applied was due to the area manager who interviewed him leaving suddenly. That’s not a good sign about the processes in place to effectively manage recruitment.
Despite all of this, he was unsuccessful again. At least this time he was notified – via an automated rejection message.
So, once again, why put him through a medical if there is no intention of hiring him? And where is the sensitivity in managing the rejection given the poor recruitment experience he had the first time around – let alone the amount of personal time and effort expended in going through the interview rounds and medical, twice.
Now, I don’t think this is a one off. Another close relative just had an almost identical experience. This time, it was for a graduate position at a large technology company. She made it through two rounds of interviews, then to a third interview – a “coffee catch-up” – as one of the final three candidates.
After that, crickets. So she assumed that someone else was offered the role. I told her that wasn’t good enough, and she needed to call them out on it, so she contacted them to confirm that she had been unsuccessful.
The company was effusive in its apologies – apparently, there was an automated system to inform unsuccessful candidates, and there must have been an error.
An automated system to let one of your top three candidates know they had been unsuccessful? After meeting your team face-to-face over a coffee? It’s astounding.
Even if the process had worked, and she had received that automated rejection email or SMS, it’s still a lousy way to close off the interaction.
If your recruitment process is based on an interpersonal connection between your hiring panel and your candidate, there’s a jarring dissonance when all of a sudden it’s switched to an automated response.
As an employer, you just need to think about the cumulative impact that has on your brand. Imagine that same negative recruitment experience, replicated hundreds if not thousands of times by unsuccessful candidates for job roles at your organisation. These are people who are already or are likely to be working in the same industry or field as your business; they might not just be your potential customer in the future, they might also be a potential future candidate, business partner or supplier.
Looking at it from a classic customer experience (CX) perspective, as a customer if you’ve engaged with an organisation via one channel, you expect that you will continue to engage that way. Automation is fine, but only if you as the organisation have set the expectation that you will be using it for any response.
CX is just as applicable to business suppliers
At the start of this post I said this resonated with me for two reasons.
The second is my own experience as a provider of marketing services. Most of Explore Communications’ work is through industry word-of-mouth, recommendations and referrals, so potential clients generally approach me first. I rarely make any ‘cold’ approaches or respond to tenders or general requests for proposal. In those instances, I’m OK with someone ignoring me, or sending an automated response – I do the same when it happens to me!
Most of the people who approach me will call, send an email or a LinkedIn message, which then leads on to an introductory meeting and chat, usually followed by a quote or a proposal. I’ve had a few instances lately where, despite that initial interpersonal engagement, and despite a few follow up emails and calls, I never receive a response back at all.
To me, that’s just as damaging to your brand as giving an unsuccessful job candidate the brush off. I’m OK with the fact that Explore Communications isn’t always the perfect fit and you choose to work with someone else – I’d just like to know, so I can move on.
Your corporate brand is reflected in everything you do, and it can be either strengthened or weakened by the way you engage with your wider business community. That includes your prospective candidates, partners and suppliers – and it’s just as important to show respect to those you say ‘no’ to as those to whom you say ‘yes’.
explorecomms.com.au 