Category Archives: customer experience

customer experience, customer strategy, Strategy

Sports Direct: the Ryanair of the High Street?

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Sports Direct store in Crown PointPile ’em high, sell ’em cheap

Ian Golding, the customer experience consultant has an enviable CV and an excellent blog (which I strongly commend). Last month, he posted a great article about the customer experience offered by Sports Direct, a UK budget sporting goods store.

The point of his post was that Sports Direct offer a poor customer experience because, in effect, their goods are so cheap the customer experience doesn’t matter.

Ian also suggests that Sports Direct are effectively playing the same role in high street retail as Ryanair play in air travel.

A conscious choice

As regular readers of this blog will know, I have written about the Ryanair customer experience here and here.  I think that there may some significant differences in the ways in which they think about the customer experience when compared with Sports Direct.

I suspect that the biggest difference is that Ryanair understand the things which make the biggest difference for their customers.  As a result, they manage their customer experience to be good along a very few dimensions (on time, seen to be low-cost) and explicitly limited in others (no refunds) in order to to support its business model.

Sports Direct, however, appear not to manage the customer experience, but instead to allow it to be an unconscious side-effect of their low-cost operation.

Is simply cheap sustainable?

Because they seem to compete solely on cost, Sports Direct may be vulnerable to another company offering a similar cost proposition with a better customer experience.  Ian muses if Sports Direct’s low-customer-experience is sustainable in the face of new competition such as that offered by French sports shed operator Decathlon.

Ryanair, on the other hand, I don’t think are so vulnerable to attack on this front.  Two factors argue for this.

The first is that Ryanair actively manage their customer experience and know which aspects of the experience make the biggest difference to their customers.  As a result, if they needed to dial elements of the key parts of the customer experience up or down, I am sure they could.

The second factor is more pragmatic. As I mentioned in my post, Ryanair: Kings of the Customer Experience, Ryanair compete as a low-cost airline because their business model is ruthlessly designed round the limited customer experience they choose to offer. Other operators do not seem to have the single-minded strategic will to make similar choices – and so they live with business models which are intrinsically more expensive to run.

What you pay attention to, you get

The takeaway, I think, is this:  every business, whether it thinks about it or not, offers their customers an experience which reflects the things to which the company pays attention.  If a company focuses solely on least cost supply and appears to pay little attention to the customer experience, then customers get an experience akin to the ‘dark cave’ which Ian describes as being offered by Sports Direct.

Such companies are vulnerable to competition from others which do pay attention to the customer experience and design their low-cost operation around the experience they actively choose to offer.

In short, if we don’t pay attention to customer experience in the boardroom, we shouldn’t surprised if, in return, customers stop paying attention to us.

Image credit: Betty Longbottom under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

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Big Data, complexity, customer experience, customer strategy, Lean, Marketing, Strategy

How Big Data will change marketing (part 2)

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Big Data imageBig Data is coming. It will change Marketing, but not necessarily in the ways we might expect.

In an earlier post (How Big Data will change marketing (part 1)) I wanted to introduce the idea of Big Data in practical terms. My take on Big Data is not in terms of volume, velocity or variety, (as coined by Gartner analyst Doug Laney) but in terms of what it is in practice and how it might encourage action.

In my view, Big Data has seven characteristics:

  1. Big Data is not (just) big data.  Big Data is more than data warehouses and structured data repositories.
  2. Big Data is unstructured data. Big Data is messy, error-strewn and has fuzzy edges.
  3. Big Data is behavioural, not attitudinal.  Big Data is about what people do, not what they think
  4. Big Data is about small interactions. Big Data comes from the simple stuff we do, often without realising it
  5. Big Data changes.  All the time.  Big Data is never still. It is always being added to.
  6. Big Data is online, mobile and the real world.   Big Data is coming from all kinds of activity, on- and offline.
  7. Big Data is informational debris. Big Data is a side-effect of other activity – it is mainly not the information we as customers enter consciously when we think we are sharing personal data.

For marketers, the looming presence of Big Data is likely to change many things, including these:

Scientific method  The scale and nature of Big Data are making marketing a rigorous, experimental discipline.  We are getting the means to interrogate very complex data sets very quickly to decide which marketing idea works best.  This is already happening online.   Disciplines such as A/B testing and the thinking embodied by Eric Ries’ excellent Lean Start-up are already in action in many places. Examples include Amazon offering A/B testing as a free service to android developers and Barack Obama using it to raise $60m.  (See also my post, ‘Let’s go hippo hunting‘). This thinking is rapidly moving offline.   Marketers will have to master strict, efficient scientific method to succeed in this new world.

Attitudinal marketing is dead  Well, if not dead, then it’s about to enter life-support.  The  quantity and predictive value of behavioural and activity data means that what people think or feel about a product or brand will become increasingly irrelevant.  We are already finding this on the web.  If A/B testing shows us that consumers prefer to press a red button, and not a blue one, then we are better served by changing all our buttons to red than spending a fortune trying to understand why. This thinking will soon apply everywhere.

Prepare for the segment of one   Big Data will enable us to direct contextual, customised marketing directly at individuals based on such things as (say) their mobile GPS history, online and social media activity, and offline behaviour.  In effect, a marketing campaign for one person.  One implication of the segment of one is that a consumer marketing operation may well need to deliver a million tailored campaigns a year.

This is not just an automation problem.

To run at this level, with minimal errors, cost-efficiently, means the winning marketing operations will be those which adopt and implement the Lean manufacturing disciplines which enabled car manufacturers to deliver a batch size of one, with a cycle time approaching zero. (See my earlier post – SMED: The secret sauce of customer experience, for a related discussion).

We are all going to become Lean, people.

Create platforms, not campaigns  The role of the creative will change. Increasingly, we will need our creatives to design communications platforms, rather than individual campaigns. These platforms will have to flex in innumerable ways to meet the contextual demands of the segment of one.

Brand as algorithm   Brands will be formulated into heuristics – rules which can drive real-time decisions to enable real-time marketing.  The automated brand is coming.

Source, don’t build, your data  By definition, Big Data is a mix of different data sources.  Very few organisations have the capability to assemble, structure and support such heterogeneous sets of data and stay sane (and profitable).  Ignore the Big Data hype about the need to build Hadoop clusters and recruiting data scientists. This isn’t how it is going to go.

Here is how it might.  Companies are going to realise soon that they will be better off working with trusted data intermediaries rather than trying to build their own Big Data. They will pose questions to these intermediaries, such as “….what is the best way to segment the market to identify the people most likely to buy our stuff?…”, or “…when in the customer’s day are we most likely to get positive attention for our proposition…?”  or “…who could be our next customers….?”

These intermediaries will orchestrate data sources quickly to get the best answers to these questions. They may already own some data, some data they may rent, some they may commission and some will come from their clients – but such tasks are best left to specialists.  There is no need to build your own data engine. Spend your time instead trying to understand the questions you need to answer to get to market most effectively.

Of course, for companies which specialise in data harvesting, brokerage, mashup and orchestration, this intermediary role will be a lucrative opportunity. For the rest of us, being able to use such services intelligently will become an increasingly important skill.

Big Data is going to change marketing. But those marketers who do embrace this change will become hugely more effective, productive and  influential.

It will be marketing, Jim, but not as we know it.

complexity, customer experience, customer strategy, Marketing, Strategy

Ryanair’s customer experience revisited

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Ryanair passenger numbers
Ryanair passenger number growth, CAPA Centre for Aviation

I wrote Ryanair: Kings of the Customer Experience to challenge the blind orthodoxy that offering a perfect customer experience should be the aspiration of every business.

This may be true if you run a seven-star hotel complete with customer butlers, but it does not apply, I believe, for most companies. Most of us need to trim our ambitions to focus on things which cause customers most pain or friction and on those things which customers most value.

An excellent response

Jim Lucas of Lucavia read my post about Ryanair, the Irish-based European budget airline,  and wrote an excellent article in response: The Real Ryanair, Please Stand Up.

Jim and I violently agree that Ryanair have set out strategically to offer a service based on the core things which their customers value: “…Low cost, on time, with bags, that’s it.”

Jim, however, then goes on to say:

‘…To me, Ryanair hasn’t, “…Designed a customer experience to compete strategically.” Their customers don’t care about it and they know it. Instead, Ryanair has chosen a low-cost, high-efficiency strategy vis-à-vis their competition to meet the needs of the utilitarian traveler. (Jim’s emphasis)  In that space customer “service” is all that is required and an experience isn’t a consideration.’

I think Jim’s view is one that many customer experience practitioners share: that customer experience is something separate from the service a company designs and offers.

The whole of the experience

I don’t share this view. I believe that everything that we do which affects the customer is part of the customer experience.  This includes offering the service, yes, but also the things we do which affect how this service is perceived: (I refer to this in another post when I refer to the qualia of customer experience).

Hence my use of Ryanair as an example. What they seem to do, explicitly and intentionally, is manage the customer experience to diminish expectations around anything which lies outside of their core offering.

Get you there on time? Sure.

Cheaply? Yes.

Refunds? Don’t bother.

This setting of expectations is, I believe an absolute part of the customer experience, which Ryanair actively manage in order to support their highly successful business model. This is a strategic choice which, judging by Ryanair’s business success, seems to be working very well.

Good is better than nice

From this choice came the other point of my earlier Ryanair article: “Customer experience is not about being nice, it is about meeting strategic goals.”

Talking to some marketing folk the other day at the IQPC CMO Customer Exchange Event a couple of weeks ago, I found myself reframing this statement so that it became:

Customer experience is not about being nice; it’s about being good.

I think this is profoundly true. Customer experience is not simply an offshoot of the customer service skills industry, as many people seem to believe.

As an air passenger, for example, I value getting to my destination on time, with my bags, more than I value a customer agent’s smile if my bags have been lost.

Yet many organisations, judging by the way they run their services and where they direct their investment, seem to put this the other way round. Yes, being nice is, well, nice – but it is less important than being good at the things for which the customer is paying.

What Ryanair do, better than any other organisation of which I am aware, is to deliver on the stuff that matters to their customers while at the same time actively managing down customer expectations – and delivery – of other stuff.

They are, I believe, managing the customer experience, and doing so very well.

Which is why, while I may not like Ryanair,  I have to admire them.

(My thanks again to Jim for his cogent and considerate response to the original article. His blog is well worth a read).

Image credit: Ryanair passenger growth numbers: CAPA – Centre for Aviation

complexity, customer experience, Legal, Marketing

The bank customer experience that’s 3 times better than Apple

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Red TapeBanks offer a specific customer experience three times better than that offered by Apple, because, it seems, Apple have let lawyers dictate it.

Red tape redux

I want to buy a house. I need a home loan for £250,000.  I approach First Direct, a direct retail bank in the UK, owned by HSBC.   I know that I will have to accept from them a comprehensive and rigorous set of terms and conditions.  After all, I am borrowing a quarter of a million pounds and mortgages in the UK are highly regulated.

First Direct’s terms and conditions for my mortgage are a comprehensive, rigorous and exhaustive 4,480 words.

To have some music to play while I move house, I want to download Our House by Madness, on iTunes.

And here is where things get cockeyed. To download the nutty boys’ masterpiece, I have to read and accept iTune’s terms and conditions.  These run to 14,451 words.

Apple expect me to plough through 3 times more verbiage than was needed for my £250,000 mortgage, just for a 99p song.

This can’t be right.

A novel experience

Legally, I am supposed to read Apple’s terms and conditions before I can install iTunes. But, like most of us, I haven’t.

Who has the time to read lawyer-speak that runs almost the same length as the first third of Kurt Vonnegut’s great novel, Slaughterhouse 5?

If I have that kind of time available, I’ll read a book.

It gets worse. Every time Apple updates iTunes, every couple of months or so, they require that I read these conditions again. This is neither practical nor reasonable.

Lawyers: enemies of customer experience

So First Direct, a UK retail bank, is offering a customer experience three times better than Apple’s. What’s going on?

The most obvious explanation is that Apple has let their lawyers off the leash. This is bad for the customer experience because most general counsel are required to think of the customer as the enemy. Corporate lawyers stay awake at night making sure customers don’t sue or rip-off or defraud or have grounds for compensation.

Giving the customer a good reading experience is not top of their insomnia list.

Something better

Someone, however, is doing something to make this particular experience better for customers of a range of companies, including, they say, Apple.

Terms of Service: Didn’t Read (ToS:DR) offers a free plug-in to browsers that rates terms and conditions on a five point scale (A- Green to E- Red) depending on the degree to which a particular set of terms and conditions require us to sign away our rights. It ‘s like a Reader’s Digest version of the terms and conditions to which we have to agree.

This seems to me to be an eminently sensible solution to this problem. I will sign up to ToS:DR straightaway – just as soon as I read their terms and conditions (409 words)…

So it goes.

PS Some may think that I am singling out Apple unfairly.  Perhaps, but by way of comparison, Google’s terms and conditions of service come in at 2,966 words, Facebook’s are 4,643 and Amazon, 5,269. (Word counts come courtesy of my browser’s cut and paste function and MS Word’s word count facility).

PPS This post comes in at 539 words.  If this was iTune’s terms and conditions, you’d be only 5% of the way through by now…

Image credit: Rosser 1954, released into the public domain.

Big Data, complexity, customer experience, innovation, Marketing, Strategy

Big Data is already here

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vorratsdatenspeicherung-540x304In my earlier post, How Big Data will Change Marketing (part 1),  I offered a definition of Big Data.  Here is a brilliant example of what it looks like.

A life revealed

Malte Spitz is a member of the Bundestag, the German parliament.  He sued mobile operator T-Mobile to get their records of his cell phone activity for a six month period in 2009.  It came in an Excel spreadsheet with 35,851 rows.

Zeit Online, the digital imprint of Germany’s top-selling weekly newspaper, Die Zeit, combined this data with other information about Hr. Spitz’s life which they gleaned from social media and publicly available online sources.

The result was illuminating.

To quote Die Zeit:

“Each of the 35.831 rows of the spreadsheet represents an instance when Spitz’s mobile phone transferred information over a half-year period. Seen individually, the pieces of data are mostly inconsequential and harmless. But taken together, they provide what investigators call a profile – a clear picture of a person’s habits and preferences, and indeed, of his or her life.

This profile reveals when Spitz walked down the street, when he took a train, when he was in an airplane. It shows where he was in the cities he visited. It shows when he worked and when he slept, when he could be reached by phone and when was unavailable. It shows when he preferred to talk on his phone and when he preferred to send a text message. It shows which beer gardens he liked to visit in his free time. All in all, it reveals an entire life.”

To model what they mean, Zeit Online produced this interactive map.

This is Big Data in practice.

I will leave it to other commentators to discuss the political, legal and ethical issues raised by Big Data.  I am going to assume, instead, that it is here to stay and that it will increasingly affect our lives.

In my next post, I will develop further some ideas about how Big Data will affect Marketing.

Tip of hat to Roland Harwood of 100% Open for the original Die Zeit article.

Image credit: Zeit Online

complexity, Contact centre, customer experience, Transformation

Contact centres – the end of 28 days later

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28 DaysContact centres aren’t perfect, but they are better than what went before.  They are here to stay, even while we continuously improve their performance.  Contact centre transformation is easier when we don’t lose sight of the core reason for the centre in the first place: to enable customers to talk to our company, buy things and get help.  

28 days.

Nowadays it has a different association (see illustration) but many of us in the UK still associate this timeframe with a familiar phrase:  “Please allow 28 days for delivery.”

It was a routine part of the terms and conditions for mail order.

A serious customer journey

Mail order, of course, meant not just receiving goods by post, but ordering them by post as well.  Find the product you wanted in a newspaper (or magazine or catalogue), fill in a paper form, cut it out, write out a cheque for payment, put them both in an envelope, address the envelope, put a stamp on it, go to a post box, post it…

…and wait.

For up to 28 days.

Almost a month.

Then when the parcel arrives, open it and see if what you have received is anything like the black and white image in the original advertisement.  Or the right size.  Or if it works properly.  And has not been damaged in transit.

And if it’s not right, begin the whole rigmarole again. In reverse.

Not, by any measure, an ideal customer journey.

Contact Centres make it better

Contact centres changed all that.  Want to buy something? Call up, place the order and it will be dispatched quickly.  Problem with a product or service? Call up and the agent will handle your problem or help explain what we need to do to resolve it.

Sure, none of us like being put on hold or to have to navigate through endless sequences of IVR numbers; and many of us have service disasters we can recount about when we got to speak to the agent from hell, but we forget, sometimes, how much better it is than it used to be.

Oddly, the internet hasn’t killed off the contact centre. Despite that we can now order things and services online from our laptops and tablets and mobiles, many of us still want to call up and talk to someone. And when things go wrong, while email, customer forums and online chat are all very well, many of us still want to call up and talk to someone.

Why?

Because our lives are complicated and what we want is complicated and our problems are complicated and sometimes we need to explain to someone – a person – what we want, and have them confirm that they have understood what we want, and that something will be done about it.

And a website can’t do that.

Sometimes, of course, it doesn’t work this way, and every one of us has a horror story to tell. But most of the time it does, and often, it works very well indeed.

Contact centres enable this experience.  And they continue to do so: while most now also handle customer communications across a range of channels, the customer telephone call tends be the heart of the operation.

Keep sight of the purpose

The challenge facing all of us who work with customers, however, is how we equip our people in contact centres to deliver a service which is consistently good, and consistently cost-effective – while  customers remain complex people with changing needs, and the technologies available to customers and to us develop constantly.

I believe that the only way to succeed in meeting this challenge is to remember one thing:  the core purpose of the contact centre is to enable customers to talk to our companies, to buy and get help.

Everything we do in a contact centre is about doing this better.

And when it gets hard to do this – and it will – we can console ourselves with one fact: even when things aren’t great, for most of our customers, things are much, much better than they were.

Contact centres revolutionised how we engage with customers and vice-versa. People complain about  them, sure, but how many of us remember what it was like before they were commonplace? I, for one, don’t want to wait 28 days again…

customer experience, customer strategy, Lean, Strategy

Ryanair: kings of the customer experience.

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Image of Michael O'Leary 2/06/2011Silver tongued charmer

“You’re not getting a refund, so **** off. We don’t want to hear your sob stories. What part of ‘no refund’ don’t you understand?”

“People say the customer is always right, but you know what – they’re not. Sometimes they are wrong and they need to be told so.”

“Mother pays £200 for being an idiot and failing to comply with her agreement at the time of booking. We think Mrs. McLeod should pay €60 [just] for being so stupid… Thank you, Mrs. McLeod, but it was your ****-up. We’re not changing our policy.”

“We already bombard you with as many in-flight announcements and trolleys as we can. Anyone who looks like sleeping, we wake them up to sell them things.”

Michael O’Leary is the CEO of Ryanair, a European budget airline headquartered in Ireland. The quotes above are some of the things he has said at press conferences and results announcements over the years; this thinking is reflected in the uncompromising ways in which the company operates. In many ways, he is the antichrist of orthodox customer experience thinking.

The Ryanair Customer Experience Paradox

According to much customer experience orthodoxy, Ryanair should be in serious trouble. Poor customer experience should result in customer dissatisfaction, disloyalty, social media backlash and poor brand reputation.

And it does.

In spades.

But here’s the thing.  The customer experience Ryanair offers does not  affect the bottom line. In fact, one might argue that it is a major reason for Ryanair’s consistent, spectacular bottom line growth.

Ryanair has just announced yet another set of stellar annual profits. To March 2013, the airline made  operating profits of €718m ($924m) on revenues of €4.88bn ($6.28bn), up 11% from last year.  And this is no flash in the pan: Ryanair consistently grows revenues and profits every year. Ryanair is a company that likes recessions.

Something is amiss.  And on the basis of the company’s sustained growth and returns, it doesn’t look like it’s Ryanair. So is received customer experience wisdom mistaken?

And if so, does this mean that we should abandon our efforts to improve the customer experience?

Just the opposite.  Ryanair succeeds (and its CEO is noteworthy) precisely because it is one of the few companies to have understood exactly the customer experience that it needs to compete strategically – and then makes sure this is what it delivers.

Ryanair proves the strategic case for customer experience

Ryanair is a lean, low cost airline.  It sets expectations for customers about how it works and what it will and (and particularly) won’t do.

It does not burden itself with the very high costs associated with exceptional customer service, because it offers very little by way of customer service.  This is why O’Leary is so uncompromising about refunds – because if Ryanair compromise on this once, they will have to do it again.  And then they will need to employ people to manage refunds. And they will get more complaints, because customers will think that they might get something by complaining.

So Ryanair will have to staff a complaints department.  And this will lead to escalations, and reporting, and budgets, and bureaucracy, and management’s attention will get distracted by customer issues, and this will take their eye off the ball of running things very cheaply and efficiently.

And at that point, their cost base will have ballooned and they will no longer be competing on cost.  (And then their competitors will kill them by competing on service).

Instead, Ryanair are very explicit about the customer experience they offer.  They are low-cost. They will get you there, on time. With your bags.  That’s it.  No other promises. They deliberately limit the customer experience and manage it tightly because doing so is essential to their strategic success.

And against these things – the things which, because they really understand their customers, they know are most important to them – Ryanair are among the best in Europe.

And this is the lesson Ryanair teaches all of us about the customer experience.

Customer experience is not about being nice,
it’s about meeting strategic goals

We must not fall into the trap of blindly accepting that our goal is to make things a great as we can for customers. This is not the purpose of customer experience transformation.

Our purpose is instead to specify, build and deliver the customer experience we need in order to meet our organisations’ strategic goals.  And then we must drive this experience as ruthlessly and singlemindedly as Michael O’Leary drives Ryanair to succeed.

Ryanair and Michael O’Leary are, in effect, posing each of us a very challenging question:  what is the customer experience our companies need to offer so that we can best meet our strategic goals?

PS I hate flying by Ryanair, but I do so when I have to. 

(Image credit: ilovemyirishculture.com under a Free Art License)

customer experience, customer strategy, Strategy

The customer experience is about more than fixing things.

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Perusing books at Selfridges 1942It’s about employees

At the start of the year, Forrester Research‘s Kerry Bodine and colleagues made some predictions about the areas which will grab attention in the customer experience space this year.  One prediction was that employee engagement will be “…white-hot…” in 2013.

They may be right.  The good folks at HCL have been making this point for some time and attribute their startling growth to an “Employee First, Customer Second…” approach.  In 2010, their CEO, Vineet Nayar, even wrote a book about it in 2010.

Unusually for a CEO these days, at the time of writing some three years later, Mr Nayar is still in post and the HCL stock price appears to be doing very well. Perhaps there is something in what he says.

The core idea, I think, is this: employees are the company.  They make the difference for customers.  If they are happy, motivated and enabled to succeed, then a good customer experience may be possible.  If employees are unhappy, unmotivated or not equipped to succeed, then nothing we try for the customer will really make much difference.

It is in our control

For those of us interested in customer experience transformation, this perspective offers another potential bonus: while we cannot manage our customers, we can and should manage our people. The challenge of working with our people to make things better for customers is in our hands, no-one else’s.

I believe that how company drives its people to make things better for customers indicates whether a company regards the customer experience as an overlay on their “core business’ of selling, shipping and service – or if their approach to customers reflects serious strategic intent.

As Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, said in his letter to stockholders a couple of months ago:

“One advantage – perhaps a somewhat subtle one – of a customer-driven focus is that it aids a certain type of proactivity. When we’re at our best, we don’t wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to.”

Proactive customer experience is a strategic choice

This idea of proactivity is the whole game, right there.  Organisations which are serious about the customer experience proactively drive their people to seek to make things better before customers see reasons to complain.

Sure, there are companies which are doing good things by listening to customers and putting in improvements to fix things which customers don’t like.  This work is valuable, and good, but it does not address the real challenge.  If we simply fix things about which customers complain, then we are  playing catch-up. We are saying, in effect: “we aspire not to make customers unhappy.”

The difference is in the bottom line. Jeff Bezos again:

“Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align.”

Customer experience is much more than fixing things for customers. It is about making a strategic choice to be proactive in making things better for customers, it is about reflecting this choice in the ways we guide and enable our people to make things better for customers – and it is about doing so because it is the most effective way to grow and sustain the bottom line.

How do our companies measure up?

(Image credit: Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

CRM, customer experience, customer strategy, innovation, sales, Strategy

CRM can be fun. No, really.

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Finish line.Thinking about CRM (Customer Relationship Management) from the sales team’s point of view has stimulated some interesting new possibilities.

I once oversaw the transition of a B2B CRM system from a locally installed brand name system to a market-leading cloud-based competitor.  The old system had limped along with inaccurate data, incomplete records and resentment by the sales team.  People saw it as something that could not be trusted, an overhead that  got in the way of sales and marketing.

We were not alone, as Ben Meredith points out in a recent post.

When we came to implement the  new system we had one primary principle: it had to work for the sales team.  This meant that it had to be exceptionally easy and attractive to use, relevant to their roles, with clear triggers for when and how it was to be updated. All other requirements were secondary.

The outcome? An almost seamless transition within six weeks and excellent adoption.

Results? Better accuracy of data, trustworthy analytics and sales forecasting. Better marketing, easier sales, improved customer relationships. Everything we wanted our CRM system to deliver.

These results happened only because we paid attention to the core challenge: whose job are we trying to make better?  For most CRM implementations, this will be the sales team. Get it right for them, and things will get better for the customer too.

Which is why I like the thinking of app developer LevelEleven. Their newly rebranded Compete app adds game elements to Salesforce.com to help drive sales team performance. Their real trick, of course, isn’t the app, but the psychology: good sales teams thrive on competition.

CRM as fun? That can’t be bad.

customer experience, customer strategy, Stuff I like

The qualia of customer experience

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Red rose in snow picWe cannot truly understand what our customers experience. But we can understand how they behave. If we want to make things better for them, we will be better off observing what customers actually do, not trying to work out what we think they are experiencing. 

I can’t get into Joe’s head

My friend Joe cannot see the colours red or green – he is colour blind. My colour vision is normal. Science explains this by saying that some of the cone receptors at the back of Joe’s retina are different from mine.

But when I try to understand what Joe sees when he looks at, say, a grassy meadow, I am unable to do so.  His experience of the greenness of the grass is different from mine.   I cannot put myself into his head.

Qualia are what we experience

Philosopher Clarence Lewis in 1927 coined the term qualia to describe the distinct subjective experiences we each have when, for example, we smell a rose, see the white of snow or taste a lemon.

Qualia (singular: quale) are the essence of experience.  They are also pretty much inexplicable by science.  Science – cognitive psychology, neuroscience, physiology – has pretty much nothing to say about what Joe experiences when he sees a blue sky and how that compares with what I experience when I see that same sky.

If you don’t believe me, imagine trying to explain the greenness of a meadow to someone who is blind from birth.

Scientific methods

This is, in part, why understanding the customer experience is tough.  Each customer’s experience is different. If we ask them about their experience – to describe the qualia of buying – we can only get a limited understanding of what they experience.

How does science address the problem of qualia?  It ignores them. Instead of seeking to understand what we experience, scientists instead focus on what they can observe. In particular, they focus on behaviour.  Rather than investigating what  people experience, scientists explore instead what people do when they experience X or see Y.

This is a good principle to adopt when working on customer experience.  Trying to understand the experience of customers is likely to be less valuable – and less effective for guiding our actions – than observing what they actually do.

The perfect, but useless, manuals

This is shown by the PC manuals fiasco. A few years ago a major PC manufacturer took great pains to consult with customers so that  the manuals for new users to set up their PCs were as well-written, user-friendly and accessible as possible. For several years, users rated the manuals as the best in the business – they even won awards.

But it wasn’t until the company undertook some studies into what new PC users actually did that the truth emerged.

More than 95% of users never opened the manual at all.

They turned on their PC and assumed that the start-up process on-screen would take them through set-up. And if it didn’t, they got very unhappy indeed.

The company had made the mistake of asking customers what they thought, instead of  observing what they actually did.

The colours of marketing

Leo Widrich of Buffer.com has written a great article for Fast Company on the science of colours in marketing. In it, he explains how colours can influence customer behaviour.  He also describes an experiment by Hubspot to understand if customers prefer to press a red or a green button on-screen (read the article to find out which button won :-)).

The folks at Hubspot just needed to know which colour encouraged more customers to press the button. They did not need to know why.

As Leo Widrich says in his article: “…data always beats opinion, no matter what.”

And if we are to make things better for customers, it is probably best for us to adopt the same attitude. Let’s worry less about understanding the customer experience and worry more about observing the things customers show us they prefer.

(If you want to find out more about qualia and why they pose a problem for science, the best source is Daniel Dennett, a terrific writer on philosophy and cognitive science.  His 1991 book, Consciousness Explained is a good first port of call; a more technical discussion can be found in his article, Quining Qualia, (in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds, Consciousness in Modern Science, Oxford University Press 1988)).

(Image credit: Paulis under Creative Commons Attribution license)

customer experience, customer strategy, Multi-channel, Strategy

Your competitors are not who you think they are

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bad_spellers_untie_postage_stamp-p172016310883664861uuftb_216Customers don’t compare the online experience they get from us with that from our competitors. They benchmark instead against the best they have seen, regardless of sector. We have to understand this if we are to use customer experience to help us sell and keep customers.

Don Peppers is one of the pioneers of the customer experience industry. In a recent LinkedIn post, he  tells the story of a bad customer experience a colleague had with Stamps.com when trying to unsubscribe from their service.

The customer horror story, however, was less interesting to me than that he (like we all do) compared this experience with Stamps.com with that offered by another company – and found Stamps.com wanting.

That company was Amazon.

Amazon does not sell anything which Stamps.com sells.  Amazon is not seeking to take customers away from Stamps.com. I would be astonished to find that Amazon features in any strategy document which Stamps.com use to understand their competitive landscape.

In the traditional sense, they are not a competitor.

But when you think in terms of the customer experience, are they a competitor?

Damn right.

Customers do not compare the online experience they get with one company with the experience offered by competitors in the same sector. Instead, they compare their experience with the best experience they have had online, regardless of sector.

If we do not offer an experience  which measures up to the best experience which our customers have had elsewhere, then we will have unhappy customers.

It’s not fair, I know.  Customers are not even comparing apples with pears; they are comparing stamps with books.

This really matters.  Because if we aren’t aiming to be cheapest (and very few of us can, in the long-term) and if our market is crowded with me-too products with pretty much the same features (as in almost every consumer market sector), then how do we compete?

The experience we offer our customers, that’s how. When we make it easier, faster and more pleasant to buy and use our products, we win and keep customers.

If this is how we choose to compete, we need to understand that our ‘competitors’ aren’t our competitors.  As far as our customers are concerned, our competitors are everyone who is offering a service, or a sale, or an experience which follows the same grammar of customer engagement that we do. And if we aren’t competitive when compared with these, we won’t get or keep the customer.

Worse, as Don Peppers is showing, they will tell the World about how unhappy we have made them.

But, as Amazon demonstrates, if we choose to compete in this space, with the right attention and commitment, then maybe we could become the benchmark: and that is a very powerful place to be.

(Picture courtesy of Zazzle.com).

customer experience, Strategy

How to tell if an organisation is serious about the customer experience

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Richard Branson serving customers on a Virgin flightThe best way to improve the end-to-end customer experience is to pay attention to it.  This is much less trivial than it sounds. The more senior this attention, the more chance we have of success.

A lot of blather has been written about companies offering a good “end-to-end” customer experience. Most of us can agree that it is something to which companies can, and probably should, aspire. Yet for most companies, it is something which remains resolutely beyond the horizon.  This is not for want of trying.

Most companies begin their thinking about end-to-end customer experience by “mapping the customer journey”,   identifying the things which make it go wrong and putting in things to fix these. This is relatively easy and results in some improvements – for a while.

Some companies (often those infected by consultants) try to redesign such processes to create a coherent whole. They back these changes up with a painful project, like corporate root canal, where they implement new systems (consultants again), have lots of workshops (consultants once more) and (probably) put some posters on the wall exhorting staff to Think Like A Customer, or some such.

Thousands of hours and millions of pounds spent – with, usually, very little long-term difference, because, most of the time, such efforts fix the symptoms, not the real cause, of poor customer experience.

Why do organisations grow up, develop, and operate without putting the customer at the heart of the business? For one reason only: they have being paying attention to other things.  The drivers of the business, the things on which organisations focus day-to-day (and the things which, more often than not, have been the basis of the organisation’s success) have been things other than the customer.

In other words, the organisation, especially at the top, pays attention to things other than the customer and its metrics, numbers, activities and reward systems show this.

Customer initiatives have the best chance of success when the CEO and her top team pay attention to customer performance in the same way, and with the same regularity, as they pay attention to revenue or EBIT. We know they are serious when they accept, for example, a hard customer metric in their bonus package. When they pay attention to the customer as routinely as they do to the production numbers, the rest of the organisation does too.

Inevitably, this means that customer experience improves.

As do revenues.

As do costs.

As do profits.

If we want to fix things for the customer, end-to-end, we need to make sure that the people in our organisation who have overall responsibility for our business, end-to-end, are paying attention to the customer, with the same priority, as the other aspects of the business to which they pay attention.

Otherwise, we are going to find life very hard. Because, when push comes to shove, hard numbers drive out soft.

People have only so much bandwidth and they will focus on those things which organisational behaviour reveals as the most important – those things which get senior attention. And while most organisations claim to want to put the customer at the heart of their business, the things to which the business truly pays attention – the hard numbers, if you like –  push other priorities to the side.

Customer experience is rarely in this top list of priorities unless it has been baked from the start as part of the core ethos of the company. So, if we want our organisation to make things better for the customer properly, the first step is to make sure that the top team really pays attention to the customer.

Get this right, and everything else becomes much, much easier.

 

customer experience, customer strategy, innovation

Clayton gets it right

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Clayton_Christensen_World_Economic_Forum_2013In this interview, Clayton Christensen spells out some ideas which are so right that they almost have the force of Laws for Business.

Clayton Christensen is the godfather of innovation. His books define how people think about innovation, education and disruption (and more recently, values).  Strategy + Business, the management journal from Booz and Co., published a great interview with him here.

In it, he says two things that ring so true that I think they deserve to become laws of business, especially when looked at through a customer lens.

The first concerns decision-making:

“When you make a decision based on expediency—because you think you can get away with paying only a smaller, marginal cost—you always pay the full cost in the end.”

He’s talking here about our personal lives, but it applies in spades in the customer world.  The contact centre which drives agents to keep calls as short as possible for cost purposes almost always pays a higher eventual cost in terms of customers calling again, customer dissatisfaction, agent retention and customer churn.  The website which skimps on early customer testing during the design phase will almost certainly have to spend a fortune in redesign once it goes live and customers don’t like it.

So, if I may, Christensen’s First Law:

If you skimp on things early, you pay much more later. Every time.

The second quote is more substantial, but even more fundamental:

“You might also ask, “What is the job to be done?” Every company needs a robust theory of the job that it’s facing. At the fundamental level, most jobs don’t change very much, even though the technology does. When he was the emperor of Rome, Julius Caesar had to exchange messages rapidly with his far-flung governors. He used horsemen with chariots. Today, we have FedEx, but the job hasn’t changed. If you’re focused on the job that has to be done, you’ll be more likely to catch the next technology that does it better. If you frame your business by product or technology, you won’t see the next disruptor when it comes along.”

Who is doing “the job?” The customer.

And so to Christensen’s Second Law:

Focus on the job to be done or you’ll be beaten by someone who does. 

It’s a short interview, but full of good things.  Read and enjoy.

(Tip of hat to Petrina Alexander, who first drew my attention to the article).

(Image credit: Remy Steinegger, World Economic Forum under Creative Commons License)

Ambition, customer experience, cycle time, innovation, Lean, Stuff I like, Transformation

The customer revolution begins…at start-up

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Customer rockLean Start-Up methods offer an overwhelming case for working with customers as early in the product cycle as possible. This lesson applies to all of us, not just start-ups.

Eric Ries, the author of Lean Start-Up, worked with Steve Blank while he was forming his ideas.  Steve has just posted on the HBR blog a phenomenal summary of the lean start-up approach and why it, as he says, “…changes everything.”

Lean start-up relies on a number of tools – experimental design, minimum viable product and so forth – but if I read him right, one of the central concepts which makes it work is this: the only authority is the customer.

This idea runs through the process like a name through a stick of rock.  Involving the customer in the design process, getting to customers early, behavioural (A/B) testing – the whole lean start-up gamut begins with the customer and how propositions can only succeed if they are designed with and for the customer from the get-go. At all stages, the primary decision driver is what the customer tells us (or better, shows us).

Build it like this, and the customer experience is not an overlay to be applied afterwards, nor is it something ‘fluffy’ or intangible or unimportant – instead, the proposition and the customer experience become the same thing.

Even more interesting is the lean start-up promise that doing things this way will get our propositions to market MUCH more quickly and (probably) more cheaply than the alternatives.

Thinking this way changes everything.

Does it apply only to start-ups?

I don’t see why. Are there really any barriers stopping the rest of us from applying these ideas in our organisations right now?

I didn’t think so.

customer experience, innovation, Multi-channel, Stuff I like

The Case of the Cashless Customer

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ImageAs some of you may know, I have spent a little time in the arcane world of mobile payments.  Dave Birch is one of the good guys in this space (an excellent mix of enthusiasm and scepticism in equal parts).  In this piece, he shows (with tongue firmly in cheek) what happens when new technologies hit the market but the preferred customer experience is still being worked out.

All you need to know is that he doesn’t want to pay with cash. If you like this kind of thing, read on…

 

customer experience, innovation, Multi-channel, sales

What’s the difference between sales and service? Nothing.

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Call centreWhen a customer expresses a need, then a failure to sell to that need is a failure of service. Thinking about sales as a service opens the door to genuine alignment of customer experience.

A long time ago, I spoke to someone who helped set up the contact centre for a new retail bank.  He explained that the philosophy of this bank was different from any other than in operation in the UK. Its aim was to help customers and give them a good experience.

I was intrigued when he explained that for the contact centre this meant not distinguishing between sales and service. The same agents handled all customer queries, including selling new products to the customer .

“Surely,” I said, “this has to compromise the customer experience?  When I, as a customer, need help, if agents try to sell me stuff when I call I will get annoyed very quickly.”

“Not at all,” he said. “Our agents are bonused on customer retention and advocacy, not sales.”

I said, “So won’t that mean, instead, that your agents won’t sell to customers for fear of hacking them off? Won’t that damage your revenues?”

He smiled. “Just the opposite. We train our agents to understand that their role is to help customers with their needs as much as they can. Each customer who calls us needs help – or else they wouldn’t pick up the phone. Most of these needs we can help directly: make a payment, check a transaction and so forth. But sometimes a customer’s need can only be helped with a new product.

“For example,” he continued, “a customer might want a better return on the surplus money sitting in their zero-interest current account. The best way we can help them is to explain the kinds of additional services we can offer such as savings accounts, bonds or ISAs. We then give them a chance to buy.

“If we don’t have this sales conversation, we will have had a customer with a need and we have not helped. That failure to sell is a failure of service.”

This philosophy seems to have worked. From its founding, this bank has balanced solid customer and revenue growth with a reputation as the UK bank with the most satisfied customers.

This principle seems to me to lie at the heart of the term ‘customer-centric’.  It connects sales and service with the same goal: helping the customer.

It means that agents have to believe that what they are selling is of genuine value to the customer: as they have to service the customer afterwards, there is no incentive to sell them a pup. And it properly positions sales as part of a positive customer experience – which is as it should be.

For those of us who are striving in our organisations to make things better for customers, this story poses two challenges.

First, how is the way we sell genuinely part of a joined-up philosophy of customer service – or are sales ‘pushed’ on customers regardless of value?

As for the second challenge? Customers now have many more channels for service. These include email, chat, forums, web sites, mobile or social media.

This challenge, it seems to me, is not the technology. Nor is it the need to design for the interactions we might have with customers (and which customers might have with us) (and with each other).

It is instead to do with how well, when trying to give customers a consistent, seamless, multi-channel experience, we apply a key principle:

How do we make sure that every customer touch point adds value to the customer, helps them with their needs and, yes, sells to them as part of the service?

As my friend with his contact centre showed, if we can meet this challenge and begin with this principle, the results, for our customers, and for our business, can be phenomenal.

complexity, customer experience

Stop complexity from killing the customer experience

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Complexity mazeComplexity kills good customer service. We can use the rule of 50/5  to cut through this complexity and  transform the customer experience.

I once worked for a multi-national technology company with a turnover of tens of billion of pounds. The organisation’s processes and systems were so complicated and intertwined that any improvement efforts were doomed, if not to failure, then to mediocrity.

Any new customer fix – a system, a process, a metric or a behaviour change – was just another complication in an already complicated environment. Sooner or later, those in the customer front line would make mistakes because complexity introduced by the new fix made errors more likely. Their normal tasks might often take longer, as the new fix might need new skills or new thinking. It might increase complaints, perhaps through teething problems, or because expectations for improved performance were too high.

In short, because corporate sclerosis was gumming up the customer experience veins, ‘improvements’ were likely to make things more error-prone, slower, less easy, and, almost certainly, substantially more expensive.

This is because of one of the infallible laws of business, something I was fortunate to learn early in my career, courtesy of George Elliott: complexity ALWAYS increases costs, and by much more than we think.

Paradoxically, however,  how complexity drives costs offers a powerful way to enable customer transformation. This is because (again as George explained in my youth) these costs always appear in the same way: they follow the rule of 50/5.

50% of your costs are associated with 5% of your activity, and vice versa.

In the almost one hundred companies with which I have worked, while some the precise numbers have varied a little, I have never seen this rule to be wrong. It is a cast iron law of business.

What’s brilliant about this principle is that it applies in so many ways. Here are some I have found useful:

  • 5% of customers account for 50% of service costs
  • 5% of customers account for 50% of revenues
  • 5% of our customer enquiries yield 50% of our sales
  • 50% of our people’s time is spent working on issues raised by 5% of our customers
  • 50% of escalations come from 5% of customers

For each one of these, the complementary statement is also true: as well as 5% of customers causing 50% of service costs, so 50% of customers cause only 5% of service costs.

Why is this important? Because it means we have a practical way to focus our improvement efforts to deliver effective transformation, reduce complexity and make things genuinely better.

So for one tech company for which I worked, we found that 3% of escalations were consuming 38% of engineer time. We identified and eliminated the causes of almost all these escalations. This enabled the organisation to free up a quarter of their engineers to work on proactive services,  adding value to their customers. At the same time they kept some engineer capacity in reserve to handle the many fewer new escalations which inevitably would still arise.

For another company, recognising that 4.5% of their customers yielded 53% of their revenues drove them to offer premium services to these customers – increasing revenues and retention.

At the same time, they reduced services to the 48% of customers who contributed only 4.9% of revenues, but offered them the chance to upgrade. Result? Some of these unprofitable customers left, some stayed, but cost less to serve – but enough upgraded to make this customer segment twice as profitable.

This thinking works.

But beware. Standard accounting cost models don’t give you a true picture of these costs (because they assign overhead costs uniformly across the board as opposed to how the costs are actually being consumed) .

So let’s begin using the rule of 50/5, but not by looking at budgets and costs on a spreadsheet. Let’s get out from behind our desks to see what is really happening. Let’s look, not at the cost numbers, but where our people are putting in the work with our customers. We’ll soon see where the rule of 50/5 works in our business, and how we can use it to cut through complexity to make things better for our customers.

 

customer experience

Let’s go HiPPO hunting

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Hippo“Most websites suck because HiPPOs create them.”

– Avinash Kaushik,  Web Analytics 2.0

HiPPO? “The Highest-Paid Person’s Opinion.” In organisations the tendency is to make decisions based on what the highest-paid person thinks is right. While they are often very capable, their judgement is no substitute for testing concepts and ideas with real customers in the real world.

This applies beyond website design. When we consider the  procedures and policies which we use to serve the customer, how many if these have genuinely been designed to be ideal for the people who buy from us? Compared with how many have been designed to optimise the process for the organisation instead?

To talk to my telephone operator provider, for example, I need my “customer number” and my “area code”. I keep these in the cloud. Which means that I can’t get them when my telephone (and internet) line is down. Which is, of course, why I want to call in the first place…

Some highly paid process expert, or worse, a CEO, (a HiPPO) will have designed these processes, not for the customer, but almost certainly to optimise the internal technical operation, probably on the grounds of cost and efficiency.

If they had worked with customers to get behavioural data to help them design and test the these processes, they might even have been able to turn contacting the service operation into a positive experience.

Yet I am sure that instead, the costs in agent time, customer frustration and, ultimately, customer churn will almost certainly outweigh any savings made by using a special “customer number” to identify customers.

For this is one of the great secrets of customer experience. A good customer experience is almost always more cost-efficient than the alternative.

Fewer customers complain, sales become easier, and we spend less money and time on workarounds and fixes. In turn, this frees up our resources to spend on positive things that matter to our customers so we can sell more. Cost reduction, revenue growth – a better bottom line.

And this is one of main reasons we need to go HiPPO hunting. Because if we listen to the HiPPO, as opposed to our customers, then pretty soon our customers won’t be our customers any more.

Next time you find yourself face-to-face with a HiPPO, go armed with the most potent data of all: how customers really want to behave.

(If HiPPO hunting is new to you, then this Wired article is worth a look, and I also commend Avanish Kaushik’s blog, Occam’s Razor).

customer experience, Transformation

Release the brilliance of your colleagues

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Team GB Olympic Track Cycling teamGood customer experience is a result of great people doing great things. Luckily, your colleagues are great.

Think about the people you meet in the workplace. In almost every case, from the janitor to the CEO, two things are true. The first is this:  your employer believes this individual is the best person for that role whom they can get. If they weren’t, your employer would get someone else. Second, this person believes that this is the best job for them. If they didn’t, they would go get a better one.

That’s right: pretty much most of the time, you are working with great people in great jobs.

I have been lucky enough to have worked around the World with almost a hundred companies and in my experience this is overwhelmingly true: your people are brilliant.

But so many companies don’t believe this.  They seem to expect that their people are unmotivated and are doing mediocre jobs. So that’s how they manage them and guess what? That’s what they get.

But mediocrity is not what we promise our customers.  If we want to do things better for customers, it isn’t good enough.

So let’s not manage for mediocrity.

Let’s manage for brilliance.

How do we this?

Here’s what we don’t do.  We don’t police our people’s activities to catch them doing the wrong thing.  We don’t set up elaborate reporting of pointless metrics which make no difference to the customer.  We don’t have a big kick-off meeting with a motivational speaker and hope that this is enough.

Instead? We set important goals (maybe unreasonable goals?) and standards for performance. We do what we can to make achieving these goals as easy as we can. We give people what they need, pay attention to how well they are doing and look for ways to help them.

Then we keep paying attention so that they continue to  know this matters: to us, to the customer and to them.

Then we get out of their way.

Brilliance will happen, I promise you.

Your people will love making the difference.

And your customers will love what results.

 

customer experience, customer strategy, cycle time, Lean

SMED – The secret sauce of customer experience

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pressSMED proved that if you remove the big bottlenecks which slow down your ability to respond, you can revolutionise the service you offer you customers.  

SMED: one of the reasons Toyota became a powerhouse global auto manufacturer. SouthWest Airlines, Tesco and UPS all apply its principles, even if they don’t know it.  It governs agility, speed, cost and enables the customer experience.

SMED? Single Minute Exchange of Dies.

Say what?

Stay with me as I explain.  It’s worth it.

In the sixties, auto manufacturers had to operate long production runs. They produced the same car, over and over, offering customers a limited choice. If customers wanted more options, they couldn’t get them.  The reason? Setting up a production line to produce different variants of car was HARD.  Machine tools had to be recalibrated, components all along the line had to be replaced, and hardest of all, dies had to be changed.

Dies are the blocks which stamp blank sheets of steel into the shape of the  car body.  They weigh many tons, are very difficult to manoeuvre, and have to be  consistent to within a fraction of a millimetre.

Changing dies typically took  between 12 hours and three days. So changing the line meant stopping production for at least this long. Change them more often than once a week and the factory could spend more of the year idle than making cars.  In effect, too much choice would make the company bankrupt.

Then Toyota employed Shigeo Shingo to help solve this problem. He and his team observed and measured every aspect of the die change process.  They filmed changeovers.  They looked at non-manufacturing examples, like Formula 1 pit crews.

And then they changed things. They reduced human error by using precision metrics.  They prepared each exchange of dies in advance, dedicating and scheduling equipment and resources.  They  clarified roles so everyone involved could, as it were, “do it by the numbers”.

And while they never quite got it down to a minute, they got it down to less than ten. On average, Shingo and his team cut the time to change dies to one fortieth of what it had been before.

The result?  Toyota could offer customers what they wanted, not what the manufacturer hoped they might want.  Toyota could slash costs, as they no longer needed to hold so much inventory and WIP (work in progress). And they could improve quality, as smaller production runs enabled more rapid, cheaper fixes.

It could be argued that SMED enabled the revolution in manufacturing quality, processes and techniques which have transformed our lives since the sixties – what is often referred to today as “Lean”

Most of us don’t have to swap dies weighing tens of tonnes in and off a production line. But many of our businesses have big things which slow down our ability to respond and make it hard to give customers what they want.

Some companies have put in the focused effort necessary to transform these things. Doing so has greatly strengthened their ability to compete both on costs and customer service.

SouthWest airlines revolutionised budget air travel, in part by being ruthless about minimising aircraft turnaround time on the ground between flights.  Quicker turnaround = more flights per day, more customer choice and more efficient customer management.

Tesco dominates the UK supermarket scene in part because they worked out how to get goods (especially perishable goods) from source to store in hours instead of having them languish in warehouses; in many cases, the lorry is the warehouse.  A faster supply chain is a cheaper supply chain, gets fresher goods to the customer and can respond more quickly to customer demand.

UPS has put significant effort into minimising the time a parcel just sits. By putting in more dynamic sorting, smaller dispatch sizes and smarter routing, they can offer delivery times and service quality unheard of even ten years ago.

SMED thinking is one of the keys to customer service transformation.  Think about your business.  There must be one or two ‘big things’ which make it hard to flex the business, take time away from delivery or make it slower to respond to customers. What if you put real, rigorous effort to redesign these things, drawing on thinking like Formula 1 pit crews? What if you gave yourselves an unreasonable goal for improvement – like cutting cycle time by a factor of forty?

Wouldn’t that be brilliant? For your business? For your customers?

Go ahead. SMED.