Category Archives: customer strategy

customer experience, customer service, customer strategy, cycle time, Implementation, Lean, Multi-channel, Strategy, Trust

54 ways to make the customer experience better

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Happy customer

We were snowbound at a corporate retreat in Princeton, New Jersey.  We had exhausted the formal agenda and were waiting to hear if the snowploughs had freed the I-95 so that we could get to the airport and go home.

So we were having a few beers and having a general discussion about what works for us in business when Kevin, an experienced colleague who worked in our manufacturing practice, said something so true and so simple that it has stuck with me at every step of my career since.

We were talking about creating and keeping customer relationships, and he said: “Every time I’m going to meet someone for business, before I go in,  I ask myself, ‘how can I create value for them in this meeting?’  If I can do this, I know they’ll want to meet me again.  They’ll learn to trust me.  And, when the time is right, they’ll buy from me.”

The snowploughs came and we put down our beers and caught our planes home, but his simple mantra – ‘how can I create value for my customers each time we meet?’ – has served me well since then.

Because this is the secret of customer experience.

If we want to make the customer experience better, it’s simple. We make every customer encounter something that our customer values. Then we repeat for every step of the encounter.

Find this value and maximise it. If the encounter doesn’t add value, don’t do it.  That’s all.

What’s value?  It’s whatever the customer thinks it is. Things like:

Treating them like a person

  1. Displaying courtesy and good manners
  2. Smiling when we see them
  3. Pitching things in their  terms, not ours
  4. Treating the customer as someone who  is valued and not a potential thief or fraudster (Banks, are you listening?)
  5. Recognising them when we see them again
  6. Recognising them and rewarding them for coming back
  7. Apologising (and not with the weaselly “I’m sorry you feel that way”)
  8. Understanding their problem before offering a solution
  9. Making the customer look good (always a good thing to do)
  10. Showing we are thinking about them, and what matters to them,  even when they aren’t there
  11. Being respectful – of the customer, of our colleagues, of the competition
  12. Being kind.

Making it easy

  1. Taking away something that is inconvenient for them
  2. Simplifying the transaction (or better, simplifying the customer’s situation)
  3. Offering control to our customer (of the conversation, of the transaction)
  4. Making it so that there is only one way for the customer to do something – and it’s always good
  5. Being patient
  6. Making it easy to pay
  7. Making it easy to get money back
  8. Pricing fairly
  9. Being consistent
  10. Making it easy to talk to a person (if that is what our customer wants)
  11. Making it easy not to have to talk to a person (if that is what our customer wants)
  12. Making it easy for the customer to change their mind
  13. Welcoming returns with a smile
  14. Improvising if the customer needs it
  15. Anticipating their questions (nicely)
  16. Listening to them. REALLY listening.  (Note: this one is hard).

Being honest

  1. If we can’t do it, saying so
  2. If someone else can do it better or cheaper, saying so
  3. Pricing things in ways that are clear and easy to understand
  4. No surprises – being up front with bad news and what we are doing to fix it
  5. If there is a quick or cheap fix for their problem, solving it for them
  6. Refusing to sell them the wrong thing
  7. Keeping our promises, no matter how small (especially the small ones)

Being interesting

  1. Being funny (but not offensive)
  2. Speak about their problems more than our solutions

Helping

  1. Explaining what is happening and what will happen next
  2. Putting ourselves in their shoes
  3. Giving them meaningful choices
  4. Tailoring what we do to what they want
  5. Keeping their anonymity (if that is what they want)
  6. Reassuring them
  7. Taking responsibility for sorting things out, even if it is not our fault
  8. Solving their problems quickly and consistently

 Giving them something

  1. Offering something extra (a lagniappe, for example)
  2. Giving away  insight or knowledge because the customer needs help
  3. Letting them take the credit
  4. Giving them things because we think they might like them
  5. Making it cheaper because they’ve come back
  6. Accepting that if they have got things wrong, it’s our fault for allowing it to happen

Speed

  1. Being fast
  2. Being instant
  3. Letting them be slow. Waiting for them. Patiently. And with a smile.
  4. Being convenient in ways that matter to them
  5. Asking them how quickly they want it and getting it to them whenever they say

Each of these will make the customer experience better.  Better, customers will value dealing with us. And if there’s value, they’ll be willing to buy from us.  And they’ll want to do it again. And this is the bottom-line reason why customer experience matters.

(Photo credit: adapted from ‘Happy Customer’ by Dan Taylor, https://www.flickr.com/photos/dantaylor/, modified under Creative Commons license) 

customer experience, customer strategy, Game of Thrones, Introductions, Lean

Five things Game of Thrones can teach us about customer experience

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game-of-thrones-logoThis is a bit of shameless puffery on the back of the Game of Thrones (GoT) season finale tomorrow. But I make no apologies: GoT offers a number of useful lessons for those who want to make the customer experience better.

1 What customers like is not necessarily what customers need.

197kv319iaqtcjpgGoT kills off lots of people, including many characters we like. The death of the Red Viper two weeks ago at the end of Tyrion’s trial by combat has left fans reeling, with howls of outrage echoing across the internet.

But this is, of course, one of the reasons we keep watching: because we know that no-one is safe. We may not like it when a character dies, but it makes the show more compelling.

In business, also, we need to concentrate on giving people what they need, and sometimes this comes at the cost of what we want. Virgin media, for example, has designed its business to deliver broadband services at competitive prices.  When something goes wrong, they will do their best to fix it. Drop them an email and they will respond quickly.

But not by phone.

Apparently there are numbers with which to contact Virgin media by phone for support, but I’ve never found them.  And I understand why.  It would add a layer of complexity and cost which would compromise their business model.  Virgin gets it. They give us what we need, but not everything we want.

2 How you do it matters as much as what you do.

game of thrones mainGoT is magnificently shot.  Recent scenes have featured Tyrion languishing in the dungeon while awaiting trial.  Typically, these scenes have opened with a slow shot revealing Tyrion lit from the side, one half of his face in light, the other in darkness; a perfect photographic study and (I daresay) a visual metaphor for his uncertain fate between light and darkness.

Detail.

Richness.

The GoT team are plainly thinking not just of getting through the words that are on the pages of the script, but on how the scene is to be experienced by the viewer.

A relatively recent phenomenon is the rise of YouTube videos which show the unwrapping and unpacking experience of new pieces of (usually) technology.  Luxury goods companies have known this for ever (jewellery is always sumptuously packaged).  Apple is the tech company that pioneered taking this thinking to their products, so now their competitors are doing so as well.

Why? Because packing things nicely makes unpacking them a pleasurable part of the customer experience? Yes, but also because it shows that they care about the details. ‘If they think this much and put so much effort into packaging my product,’ thinks the consumer, ‘the product must be good. They must be good.’

3 Inject some personality and, if possible, fun.

GoT is many things, but fun?  Well…yes.

Earlier this season,  a Meereenese rider was challenging Daenerys’ champion. He shouted an intimidatory, bloodcurdling set of insults in one of the invented GoT languages, Low Valyrian. What he was saying was, in truth, borrowed from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when the French knight pours scorn on King Arthur from the castle walls, saying things like: “Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.”

Meerenese insultWas doing so essential for the customer experience? Not a whit. But fun and enjoyable for the cast, crew and writers (and now the fans)? Of course.

As, for example, Virgin Group demonstrates, if your employees enjoy their jobs then your customers will have a better experience. Happy employees = happy customers.

4 Use lean storytelling:
make your story do some work

A GoT season is only ten episodes long.  For those of us raised on television seasons that last thirteen or twenty-six episodes, this isn’t enough. We want more.

But with only ten episodes to cover the many, many stories typically developed in a GoT season comes discipline: tight editing, quick plot progression and rapid character development. Each scene does at least two tasks – to progress the story but also to deepen (or sometimes end) character.

For example, in episode eight of Season four, Ser Barristan confronts Ser Jorah about a letter that pardons him as a reward for spying on Daenerys. The scene contains little explanation, instead directing the characters’ attention (and ours) to the consequences of the revelation and so helping us to understand what is going on. Not a word is wasted in flabby exposition.

got-game-of-thrones-34466376-500-250

Explaining things to customers is boring for us and for them.  But we often need to do so.  Perhaps we should take a leaf out the GoT writers’ handbook and see what extra value we can add to the message make it more valuable, like Virgin America do here – boosting their brand while explaining the boring stuff.

5 Use a long story arc

GoT has several LOOOONG story arcs working in background at any time. The opening scene – even before the credits – of Episode 1, Season 1, reveals white walkers doing bad things to people.  “Winter,” we hear, “is coming.”Winter is coming

Well, it’s the end of season four and there’s not much sign of snow south of the Wall.

As I said: long.

This means that behind every story line and scene is our understanding that some longer stories are playing out.  It makes for a richer experience and means that if, sometimes, some scenes don’t excite as much as others, we accept it, because we know more is coming.

The holy grail of customer experience so to create an enduring relationship with a customer, where both we and our customer knows that each transaction is part of a bigger story.   This what drives Zappos’ success. They demonstrate complete trust in the customer – help when choosing, unlimited free returns and pretty much endless telephone support. Why? Because Zappos don’t want to sell you a pair of shoes.  They want to sell you lots of shoes. And tell your friends.  So if one pair doesn’t work out, that’s ok: they’re with you for the long haul.

The season four finale is tomorrow. I can’t wait to see what happens and I know I will enjoy it.

Wouldn’t it be great if our customers felt like this when they think about buying from us?

Enjoy the show.

Image credits:

Game of Thrones logo: Geek News Network – http://geeknewsnetwork.net/2013/11/21/rumor-telltale-games-is-working-on-game-of-thrones-game/

Game of Thrones death map: Via Jesus Diaz at http://sploid.gizmodo.com/all-the-killings-in-game-of-thrones-in-one-gigantic-glo-1472181613

Tyrion picture: Via http://nerdapproved.com/misc-weirdness/a-new-game-of-thrones-trailer-means-the-season-premiere-is-coming/

Meereenese rider: Timelord at http://timelord903.tumblr.com/post/85416706750/have-you-planted-any-easter-eggs-in-the-show

Ser Jorah and Ser Barristan: Via http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/game-of-thrones/images/34466376/title/barristan-selmy-jorah-mormont-fanart

White walker: http://imgur.com/gallery/zahDJCr

 

customer experience, customer strategy, Implementation, Lean, Transformation

How to transform the customer experience without a transformation programme

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Welder

Make it better

In my last post, I described ten ways we can make the customer experience better.

Here they are again, framed from the customer’s point of view.

  1. You’re quick.
  2. You are easy to deal with.
  3. You get it right.
  4. You care if something isn’t right.
  5. You prove that I can trust you.
  6. You trust me.
  7. You are honest about what you can’t do.
  8. You act in my interests.
  9. You are professional.
  10. You are honourable.

*Sigh*

That’s a big list.

Let’s get real. We can’t fix everything.

But we do need to make things better.  Customers expect it. Our competitors are doing it.  We need to act quickly, sustainably and now.

And here’s the thing.  It costs very little to make each of these better. Without investing in technology. Without employing expensive consultants.

It just requires our attention.

Our people are already busy. They have to pay attention to the day job and to keep the lights on.  Most folk (and most organisations) can pay attention to no more than two or three things over and above this.

The trick is to choose the things to which we pay attention.

How?

Here is an approach I have found useful. I use it to make a difference quickly for customers. I find it especially helpful when I don’t want to wait for the promised new IT system to fix everything (which it can’t) or for the consultants to transform our processes for the better (which they don’t) or for the programme office to get its act together to deliver its big ‘transformation programme’ (which it won’t).

We talk to our customers. Better yet, we have our people (you know, the folk who actually do stuff for customers) talk to them.

We find out from our customers the things they would like us do better. We prompt them with questions drafted from the set above.  Keep the questions as open and simple as possible.  We’ll get a big list.

It’ll feel bad to see all the things we do badly for customers.

But that’s ok. Because now we can start to make things better.

We talk to our people who are responsible for the things that customers would like us to get better. Have them pick one or two or three things from the list.  No more than three.  Picking one or two is fine.

The criteria for they should use to pick out things from the list are these:

  • We can make it better.
  • We can make it better in ways that make a noticeable difference to the customer.
  • We can make it better within 30 days
  • We can make sure it stays better

Once they have made their choice,  we stand back and give our people license to do what they need to do. We help them when they need it, especially to remove sources of delay. Speed is the key, because we want to pay attention to this to make sure it gets better, and to keep paying attention is hard.

So: speed.

After thirty days, we (or better, the people doing the work) check back with customers about the difference they see.  We share this with everyone.

We test with our people that they can sustain the improvements they have made.  The only real test is this question:  if all our people changed jobs or moved on and were replaced, how do we know that our service would stay improved? If we can’t be sure, then let’s fix it so that we can be sure.

Go back to the list.  Ask customers again.

Repeat the next month. Pay attention to the new thing.

Repeat, repeat and repeat again.

Watch things get massively better for your customers. Let’s give it a go.

What I’m saying here is not original.  It’s just a version of continuous improvement, or Kaizen, or Agile or Lean.

Nor is it intellectually difficult.

And it won’t fix everything (so yes, sometimes, we do need that big IT system or a process redesign, but less often than we think).

But over (say) a year, it will make a huge difference.

And that’s what it’s all about.

So come on.  Let’s make things better for our customers.

(Image credit: USAF photo by Kurt Gibbons III) 

customer experience, customer service, customer strategy, Strategy, Trust

Ten ways to make the customer experience better

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two on the beach LomoYou can’t control the customer experience.

You can’t control customers’ feelings, or their personal circumstances, or how much attention they are going to pay to you.  Their experience of your brand, or your product, or your service is down to how they feel. And you can’t control their feelings.

But you can make it better

You can control how you maximise the chances that the experience is positive.

Here are ten examples of what I mean, described, of course, from the customer’s perspective. If you make any of these better, your typical customer’s experience will improve.

  1. You’re quick.  Waiting is a cost to me, the customer. It’s a cost that I don’t want to incur.  Whatever I want, I want it now. The more you can get me what I want straightaway, the more I like it. (Delay also makes it more likely that things will go wrong, and I don’t like that).
  2. You are easy to deal with.  Whatever I want to do is so easy I don’t have to think about it.  I get the information or the product or the service or the support I want in the ways that I want it.
  3. You get it right. What you sell me is what I want.  And what I want is what I get. And it doesn’t go wrong.
  4. You care if something isn’t right.  If it does go wrong, I want you to know before I do. I want you to fix it with no inconvenience on my part. And I want you to put right anything that went bad because your product went wrong, before I have to ask.
  5. You prove that I can trust you. I want to know, before I buy, that I can trust you. You give me value anytime I engage with you, whether I am buying from you or not. If every encounter with you provides insight, advice or help in ways that matter to me, then I’ll trust you with my money when it’s time to buy.
  6. You trust me. You don’t behave as if I am a thief or a fraudster. You acknowledge, listen and act on what I tell you. If you need to do things to make things secure, you explain why and you do your best to make it easy and trouble-free.  You take my side.
  7. You are honest about what you can’t do.  If you can’t help me then you let me know so I don’t waste time or have incorrect expectations. And then you help me in whatever way you can.
  8. You act in my interests.  If something is better for me than what you are offering or what I am requesting, you let me know and you help me with it.
  9. You are professional. You treat me with respect. You show courtesy and good manners. You treat your employees with respect and courtesy as well, as they represent you (and, of course, it is the right thing to do).
  10. You are honourable.  You don’t hide things from me in small print. You make promises and you keep them.  You don’t make promises you can’t keep.  And you do what’s right, regardless of policy.

Improve any one of these things and you will make the customer experience better. In addition, you will cut your costs of sale and service and make your people happier. Improve all ten, and the experience you offer may well become the stuff of legend.

(I wrote this and then discovered Seth Godin’s wonderful post: Your call is very important to us which covers related ground, but with added goodness (I love the idea of routing delayed calls to the CEO’s spouse…)  Enjoy).

Image credit: Mike Bird

customer experience, customer strategy, Strategy

Why our customer experience is damned

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Hellfire and Damnation

You can please some customers all of the time.
You can please all customers some of the time.
But you can’t please all of your customers all of the time.

(With apologies to Abraham Lincoln and John Lydgate)

Here’s the thing: I hate to be helped in shops. I don’t like it when an assistant approaches and asks “Can I help you?”  That’s just me. Maybe it’s because I live in England.  I want to make up my own mind and seek help from an assistant when I want it.

My friend, on the other hand, likes an assistant to help him. He resents it when he sees staff standing around, not offering to help. He wants them to come up and ask.

What’s a shop to do? The customer experience they offer is damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Many companies try to please everyone. They try to cover all the bases. They attempt to offer an experience that handles their main set of target customers and the others, the exceptions. Result? The experience they offer is confusing. They serve neither set of customers well and both groups of customers become unhappy and leave.

In our businesses we want to avoid this. We must analyse customer data to get insight into what matters to our target customers. We must combine this insight with our own understanding of what we are good at, to think about the experience we want to offer.

Then we must choose to provide the experience that works best for the customers we want to get and keep.

When we do, we know that such an experience won’t work for all customers. But we accept this because we will be confident that it will work for the majority of those we want to serve.

The customers we lose are the price we pay to enable us to offer a great experience for our target market. Why is it worth paying?

Because if we can truly offer a great experience for their target market, then we have a real edge over the competition. We will secure a greater market share. And we can seek higher margins as our customers accept that higher value justifies higher prices.

Even better, we save money. We won’t waste time, resources and attention on exceptions and variations for customers whom we are not targeting and from whom we will get little return.

Of course, the bright reader (and all my readers are bright) will have spotted what has happened here. The quality of customer experience we offer corresponds directly with the quality of our business strategy.

If we have made clear strategic choices about the customers we want to serve, we can confidently provide an experience that they will value.

If our strategy is unclear? Then we can only offer a confused or ambiguous customer experience.

So yes, our customer experience is damned. But it can happen in two ways. It can be damned because we choose to serve our target customers brilliantly and with confidence because we know who they are. By doing so, we are willing to accept that some current customers won’t value the experience we offer and may leave. And we accept this cost, because the payoff for our core customers – and for us – is so great.

In this case, our customer experience is a clear expression of our organisation’s strategic intent.

But the second path to damnation is far, far worse. It happens when we try to please everyone, because we don’t know (or are unwilling to choose) which customers we want to serve. Then we can’t offer a winning customer experience because we have to compromise to try to keep everyone happy.

In this case, the customer experience we offer is equally an expression of our organisation’s strategic intent. But what it expresses is ambiguity and confusion.

Keeping everyone happy may be a good intention, but it is also the road to Hell.

So maybe we have to accept that our customer experience is damned. But let’s choose how we want it to happen. For when we do, we give ourselves a chance to give our customers an experience that will make a real difference to them and to us.

(Image credit: Hellfire and Damnation by Jocelyn under Creative Commons License)

complexity, customer strategy, Implementation, prioritisation

Ignoring millions of pounds – a lesson for 2014

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Hugh Laurie's priority seat

Free money

A few years ago, a client told me this story.  She was the European financial director of a large global technology company. The company had a factory in a deprived economic area in the UK.  New legislation to boost employment meant that her company was now entitled to claim government grants worth £5 million.

Getting the money would involve much bureaucratic palaver and a lot of my client’s time as well as much effort from her team.

But still….

Free money?

£5 million?

Her boss, the global financial director, got wind of this jackpot and sent an urgent email to the effect of…

”…Free cash? £5m?  This has to be your top priority.  Please advise me on the actions you are taking immediately…”

To which my very capable, but very overworked, client responded:

“Delighted to make this my top priority.  Please let me know which activity I should downgrade instead: the £150 million pound organisational restructuring or the £50 million tax negotiations?”

She heard no more about it being a ‘top priority’…

Don’t do it

Most organisations are rubbish at prioritisation. This is because most people think that prioritisation is about deciding which things are most important.

It isn’t.  Any fool can do that – and I’m sure that most people reading this have worked for such a person.

Prioritisation is, instead, about moving the less important stuff to the bottom of the list and then choosing not to do anything about it.

Doing this allows us to  apply our finite time and resources on the things that make the biggest difference, rather than frittering away our time – and more importantly, our attention – on the stuff that is, yes, important, but not as important as the big stuff.

As my client showed, we don’t want to waste time on £5m if we have £150m and £50m to worry about.

The price of success in 2014

In this, I am with Tim Ferriss, author of the Four-Hour Work Week.  As he points out in his article, The Art of Letting Bad Things Happen:

“…oftentimes, in order to do the big things, you have to let the small bad things happen. This is a skill we want to cultivate.”

Most of us are terrible at letting bad things happen.  We worry that important stuff doesn’t get done, that key things will get missed, that we will disappoint some customers.

But the alternative is that we continue to muddle through, to try to do everything, to keep wading through the corporate treacle – and end up doing the really important stuff badly, because we can’t give it the time and attention it needs.

But if letting bad things happen is the price we have to pay to deliver the really critical stuff, if this means that the big, big breakthroughs happen, if this is what it takes to transform the experience of all our customers – then isn’t it worth it?

Many of us are thinking now of our goals for 2014. Perhaps we should also be thinking about the things that are indeed important but which we won’t deliver this year – so that we free ourselves instead to work on the big things that will really make this year a success.

What won’t you do this year so that you meet your most important goals for 2014 ?

(Image credit: Karva Javi  under a creative commons license. His Flickr stream is excellent.)

customer experience, customer service, customer strategy, Trust

If we don’t trust our own people, why should our customers?

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3491629234_bb118fe645_oA gap in trust

When customers complain, they expect that the people to whom they speak will be able to handle it. But this can only happen if our organisations trust customer service agents  to use their judgement, initiative and discretion to do so.

But this is rare.

How do we know it’s rare?

Because too many times the agent has to hide behind phrases like: “…it’s our policy, I’m afraid,” or “…these are the only options I can offer you,” or “…let me speak to my supervisor.”

In other words, our people could resolve the problem, but our policy and procedures get in the way.

Why do we do this?  Because we don’t trust our people.

  • We don’t trust them to do the right thing, so we constrain them by procedures.
  • We don’t trust them to do what is necessary to fix things, so we require them to escalate to supervisors.
  • We don’t trust them to make the right decisions, so we remove their discretion.

Our agents become a barrier between the customer and resolution of their problem. Worse, agents know this, so they feel frustrated and grumpy.

Does the customer pick up on this? Of course they do.

So, instead of making things better for the customer, we make it more likely that we will make an already unhappy customer even more unhappy.

The trust trade-off

Yes, of course, there is a need to have consistent processes so that we can offer consistent standards of service quality.  And, yes, I know that service is a cost and we need to make sure that we manage our costs with discipline and attention.  And yes, of course, we know that if we give our agents free rein, we might incur liabilities and risks which may not be acceptable.

So we accept these constraints. And we require that our people work to them.

And by doing so, we assume that value we gain in meeting these needs outweighs the damage these constraints cause to trust: damage to our trust in our people, and damage to our customers’ trust in our brand.

And yet. And yet…

A different trust model

Is giving agents discretion over customer interactions very different from offering a quibble-free guarantee for returns as offered by (say) Marks and Spencers, Lands’ End or (most famously) Zappos?

Not in intent.  Yes, such guarantees open these organisations up to abuse, but their  success shows that losses through abuse are more than outweighed by the increase in brand perception, trust – and sales.

Perhaps we need to think about this trust thing differently.

So come on. If we want customers to trust us, then maybe we need to think about trusting the people we employ to work with customers to make things better.

Trust is earned – so let’s earn it.

(Image credit: George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress), Senator Atlee Pomerene meets first US Secretary of Commerce, William Cox Redfield, c.1910). 

Contact centre, customer experience, customer service, customer strategy

How we train our customers to go to our competitors

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Angry customer

A customer complaint is a favour

Customers complain about every business.

If we are lucky, customers complain to us.  Then we can put things right, help fix their problem and learn things which make our business better.

If we are not so lucky, our customers complain to their friends, or to people they meet, or to their followers on social media.  The result? Our reputation is damaged,  we  lose revenues and we open the door to competitors to show our customers how much better they are.

We train customers not to complain to us

Why don’t customers complain to us? Because we train them not to.

Huh?

Let me explain some of the ways we do so:

We make it hard to complain
Many organisations seem to do their damnedest to make it hard for customers to complain.  Typically we do this to save money.  Most of the time this is a false economy.  Some examples:

  • We don’t make it clear to customers how they should communicate with us.
  • We make it hard for customers to contact a real person.
  • We require customers to fill in forms.
  • We require them to have their account number / service id number / customer reference number before we can help them.
  • We make them wait on hold.
  • We push them to use email (which is slower) and hide our service telephone numbers.

All of these measures stop customers complaining. Result? They (and their sales revenues) go elsewhere.

We are slow to respond
We seemed to move fast enough when we were selling our product to the customer, didn’t we? So why don’t so many organisations respond as quickly to a complaint? Sure, we may have excuses:

  • Perhaps we don’t want to talk to them before we have sorted everything out.
  • Perhaps we are having trouble working out who should be dealing with the complaint.
  • Or, perhaps, we don’t know who in our organisation has the job of keeping the customer informed.

Customers don’t care why we’re slow.  They just want it fixed – NOW. If we don’t show the same sense of urgency as they are feeling, we are showing that we don’t care.

When a complaint disappears into a black hole, we cannot be surprised if we have lost the customer by the time the complaint emerges.

We respond in ways which do not respect the customer
(Warning: linked article contains profanity)
Customers making a complaint are unhappy.  They are often angry. Often, this is the fault of something we have done or failed to do.  And they have bought things from us in good faith.

At the very least, we should treat them with respect. What does respect for the customer look like?

  • It means listening to the customer; showing that we have heard them.
  • It means we don’t make them repeat themselves.
  • It means we keep our promises  – to look into their problem or to speak to a colleague, or to put it right.
  • It means we don’t make promises we can’t keep.

And, above all, it means treating the customer as a person, and treating them as we would want to be treated.

We treat the customer as a suspect
All too often customer services go wrong because they have been designed from the outset to treat the customer with suspicion.

The result is a customer experience based on one or more of these assumptions:

  • We haven’t made a mistake, you have.
    “No-one else has complained.”
  • Our products aren’t stupid, you are.
    “The instruction on paragraph 6.4.2 of the user manual is quite clear: to restore the service you have to hold the product upside down and press reset button on the underside for between 4 and 7 seconds. You mean haven’t done that?“
  • We think you’re trying to cheat us.
    “Yes, I know that this is our product and it shouldn’t be broken like that, but unless you have your receipt we can’t help you“.
  • We think you’re lying.
    “The system can’t crash like that. Are you sure that’s all you were doing?”

Occasionally, of course, customers do behave badly; but if we start from here, the experience we offer our unhappy customers is very likely to make them feel worse.

Even if we fix the problem, we are likely to lose the customer.

It is much better to think about helping customers on the assumption that they are correct and that they have a valid reason for complaint.

After all, something has  made them want to get in touch, so something about what we are doing must be wrong.

Moreover, a complaining customer is one who is engaged – isn’t that what most of our companies want? Engagement with the customer?

Why not begin instead by designing our service operation from the assumption that we want to help people?

Then, after we have done this, we can put in place some reasonable safeguards, just in case the problem really is on the customer side.

But let’s stop doing it the wrong way round.

Think afresh about complaints

We need to think about complaints differently.  A customer who complains is giving us a gift.

They are giving us another chance to get their custom; they are giving us a chance to restore – or maybe enhance – our reputation; and they are giving us a chance to learn from their experience to make things better for others.

It’s a gift we need to be better at taking.

(Image credit: Lythia Scott Eiler, US National Archive)

customer experience, customer strategy

4 steps to customer performance

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Today, I am very pleased  to present a guest post by Jim Lucas of Lucavia.

US Army gym workout

Top performance is earned

Music, math, foreign language, computer programming. Have you ever wondered whether subjects like these can be learned or if you simply have to be “born with it”? A brief query shows a usual pattern. You’ll find a debate about the role of hard work and dedication versus natural talent, and then a consensus emerges. It takes hard work and dedication to become proficient or to master a subject (think: Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule). But to achieve at the highest levels requires more of the same plus a generous helping of natural talent and luck—where only the truly gifted achieve genius.

From a management point of view, simple knowledge of a subject is not interesting; only its application and performance matter.

Opinion is not knowledge

For example, think about retail customer service. Virtually every businessperson claims to know all about customer service and yet the quality and depth of customer service varies wildly between companies—and even within the same company from store to store and from experience to experience. So, why is it that customer service is so well understood and yet so poorly performed?

The answer is that most retail businesses do not have knowledge of customer service; they have opinions. What’s more, instead of performing customer service they constantly improvise, both as organizations and individuals. It is little wonder when an organization uses their 10,000 hours, practicing customer service 10,000 different ways, that customers perceive it as chaos.

Four steps to customer performance

The remedy to this situation is, as they say, simple to understand but difficult to master.

The first thing is to define customer service from your customer’s point of view.

The second thing is to write down the steps in your customer service experience including the standards of performance you demand for its proper execution.

Thirdly, systematize how you present this information to your staff—and be careful to select candidates for their aptitude to learn and to be passionate about delivering it.

And, finally, rehearse. One doesn’t become an Emma Kirby by performing only in front of a live audience at the Royal Opera House. You have to train, refine, and improve offstage to earn your standing ovations.

Jim Lucas and Lucavìa Consulting are located in the San Francisco Bay Area. They believe entrepreneurs need partners to help them turn their ideas into businesses.

(Image credit: Susan Huseman (USAG Stuttgart))

customer experience, customer strategy, Strategy, Stuff I like

4 pillars of customer experience

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PIllars of Creation, Large Magellanic Cloud, NASA

Four pillars

I set up MikeAndTheCustomer to help companies to make things better for customers.

Four principles which would drive what we do here.  I consider these to be the most important factors in shaping the customer experience.

To me, they pretty much describe the whole customer experience ball game.

  • Do what matters.
  • Do it right.
  • Do it fast.
  • Do it honourably.

Let me explain why I chose these principles to guide what we do.

Do what matters

In my view, no matter what business any of us are in, the customer experience we offer is determined by what our customers value and how we choose to address these.  These are the things that matter. Some examples:

  • If customers value getting in and out of a grocery store fast, then this speed of purchase matters to the customer experience
  • If customers value having a chiropractor talking with them to understand their issues, then perhaps understanding the customer matters more to the customer than speed.
  • And if hungover customers are buying their first coffee of the day, then maybe a quiet transaction with minimal conversation matters more to them than a cheery shop assistant who loudly wants them to have a great day with a bright smile.

This principle means not trying to make every customer experience brilliant, or memorable. It means instead paying attention to those that make a difference and figuring out how make these good for the customer.  And, after all, isn’t this what motivates many of us – to make a difference?

Do it right  

Whatever we do – buy, sell, deliver, support – we have to do it right.  Who determines what is  right? The customer.  Our customers are the arbiters of what we do, and if we do it right, we deliver the value which they expect.

This means that when our customers change, or evolve, or want new things, we take the trouble to learn with them so that we continue to do it right.

To do so, we have to be with our customers, learning with them, and about them, as much as we can.

Doing it right also means doing it as efficiently, consistently and systematically as possible.  That way we minimise error, we minimise costs, we maximise speed and we maximise the ability, as we grow, to have colleagues do it right as well.

Do it fast

I honestly believe that speed is the single most important factor in turning customer experience into a competitive advantage.

If we can deliver what the customer wants, instantly, then that means we can impress the customer with our service, we can find out from them straightaway if we are on the money and if we are not, we can fix it immediately.

The speed with which we deliver is the speed at which we learn.  The faster we do both, the better we will be, and the better will be the customer’s experience.

Do it honourably

This one needs a little more explanation..

I wanted a way a capture the spirit of good customer experience that did not involve telling stories about the virtues of  Zappos or Nordstrom or John Lewis.  Unless we work for one of these paragons of customer service (or, sometimes, even if we do) the effect of such stories is just to make the reader feel guilty that they aren’t doing better

The more I thought about it, and the more I recalled the companies I knew who really try to make a difference for their customers, the more I realised that the essence of good customer experience is about one thing. It is about being honourable.

What do I mean by honourable?  I mean this:

  • Honourable is about good manners and courtesy.
  • Honourable is about only making promises we can keep, and keeping them – as people used to say, it is about keeping our word.
  • Honourable is about doing our best for our customers (and our colleagues, and our suppliers).
  • Honourable is about being honest about what we will, and what we won’t, do.
  • Honourable is about respecting our customers, our colleagues, our suppliers and our competitors.
  • Honourable is about being proud of what we do, about what our colleagues do, about what our company does and the experience our customers receive.
  • Honourable is about caring when things don’t go well and doing our absolute best to put things right.
  • Honourable is about admitting we got it wrong and saying sorry – and making sure that it won’t happen again.
  • Honourable is about celebrating when our customers, our colleagues or our suppliers succeed.
  • Honourable is about selling honestly and pricing fairly.
  • Honourable is about helping.
  • Honorable is about holding ourselves to high standards because they are the right things to do.
  • Honourable is about aspiring to be better, all the time.

Honourable offers the key test when we think about doing a new thing: is what we are thinking of doing, and the way we are thinking of doing it, honourable?  Unless it is, then the answer is simple: we should not do it.

I believe that an organisation which follows these principles cannot help but offer a great, trusted, customer experience. What is more, they will continue to do so as customers, markets, technology and people change.

But this is just me.

What do you think?  Do you agree with me?  Or is there something I’ve missed, or with which you disagree?  Let me know.

This is important to me, and I would really value your comments or thoughts.

Thanks.

Mike

Image credit: The Pillars of Creation in the Large Magellanic Cloud, NASA

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.

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

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, 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)

customer strategy

How do you know your strategy is working? You say no.

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The Separation of the Sheep and Goats,
Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, c540AD

A good strategy sets out our priorities. Priorities, however, are only valid when we know what we won’t do.

In my experience, organisations are full of managers willing to claim that “…X is our top priority.”

It is much harder to find managers willing to say  “…X is our top priority, so we won’t do Y.”  Which is funny, because this is what top priority means: other things won’t get done. And this is OK, because we are putting our resources and attention into the things that matter most instead..

What tells us what matters most?  Our strategy. If our strategy is clear, we know which markets, customer, products, services and capabilities are most important to us. By implication, we also know which are not.

For those of us interested in customers (and I assume that is pretty much all of us), then if our strategy is any good, we have to make some tough calls.

For example: Are all our customers equally important?

For most organisations, the answer is probably no.   So the next question follows. What are we doing to make sure that our most important customers get the service they need and expect?  And what are doing to make sure that lower priority customers do not get service or resources at the expense of our top priorities?

This is often a tough call. But organisations which genuinely answer these questions can be very successful. Apple, as one example, do not seem interested in mobile phone customers on tight budgets, and they are doing all right. Low cost airline Ryanair, as another, are interested only in the budget customer – and they are one of the most profitable airlines in Europe.

Setting strategy is easy. Doing it is hard. And our willingness (or otherwise) to use strategy to set high and low priorities is one of the one of the reasons why.