In fact, increasingly, adding more 'engagement' will make it worse.

Spend a moment considering the problems Steve's had with Virgin.

So, the problems here are:

1. Steve's broadband doesn't work.

Obviously if that could be fixed all this goes away. I have no idea how you fix that, hopefully Virgin do, but, I imagine it's hard or one of the 12 engineers would have done it.

2. The system for dealing with Steve's broken broadband doesn't work.

There seems to be no coordination between engineers, bits of Virgin, no CRM, no ticketing system that works, none of that. That's a service design problem. Relatively trivial in a start-up, notoriously hard in a big sclerotic incumbent like Virgin. The only hope for a user stuck in this system is to escalate to someone who can escort you round the back of the broken process. Which is why people resort to social media...

3. But the social media team can't do anything to help.

Not only do they start on the problem fresh every time they hear of it, clearly all they can do is 'pass it on' to a system that can't fix it.

As Steve points out, this is can't be a profitable way to carry on. And it can only get worse - as people start to realise that the only way to solve this is to get escalated to the CEO.

I bet this explains a huge proportion of the productivity gap.

How did so many organisations end up here?

Because they've spent money on making their marketing digital, not their processes. They've got good at social media rather than service design.

They've invested in conversations, not services, so now they spend their whole time having conversations about how shit their services are.

They've done the easy stuff, not the hard work to make things simple.

They're just making it worse.

They're raising expectations ("we're listening!"), they're providing a focus for frustration and they're forcing their own people (normally good, smart, engaged people) to choose between being complicit with the users and slagging off their own organisation or, stonewalling or lying.

So what's engagement for?

The priority, of course, is to start building services that actually work. That's where you should be spending your money. Do that and you can use 'engagement' to help people find and understand the service.

Basically, do what Lucy says.