How was it for you?

They say if you can’t measure, you can’t manage. I beg to differ.

Last week I received a text from my bank asking me to score by SMS my latest interaction with their call centre. Simple enough.

And, given everything else they’ve got on their plates,  you might find it refreshing news that banks were at last taking customer satisfaction seriously and tracking the service performance of their channels. It is unusual for a business in any category to track performance and customer satisfaction to this degree.

Hopefully they will not use the information provided by its customers to roast those of its service staff who failed to get a good score. I do hope they remember my belief that no one gets up in the morning to give bad service. Instead bad service is the result of poorly designed processes, poor systems and training. It is the infrastructure that leads to bad service not the people.

Is  this level of tracking really a good thing. And I take issue with the axiom that you need to measure to manage.

For in my case while the interaction I had on the phone was pleasant, efficient and helpful, my experience of the journey was awful. And I would hypothesise that it is perfectly possible to have a whole series of perfectly good individual interactions but still get an appalling experience.

And this is where I think my bank went wrong.

Having just done extensive research into how businesses develop their customer journeys to deliver a great customer experience, businesses, like my bank, which emphasise measuring and maximising satisfaction at touchpoint level are getting a distorted picture suggesting that customers might be happier than they actually are. For these businesses are failing to understand that customers view the experience as a whole and not by the organisational silos that must combine seamlessly to deliver the integrated service required through the journey and across the experience.

My bank lacked this understanding.

Instead if businesses truly feel that measurement is required to manage and to track its service performance, it is surely better that they take a more holistic and joined up view of the service they provide.

Firstly view the journey and experience as a whole. To address this we would encourage businesses to understand better their journeys as a whole, not just a single touchpoint or channel of communication.

Secondly, instead of dissipating their resources across a broad front of touchpoints and journeys, identify those that really matter to customers and those with most impact on business performance. And apply the measurement tools there.

And lastly and more importantly, measure satisfaction with the entire journey, the holistic experience. In my case it would have been considerably better and more accurate not to check out my level of happiness with my call centre call but my satisfaction with my bank’s ability to transfer an account.

This is checking satisfaction at customer level not channel level. And truly demonstrates an ability to walk in the customer’ shoes.

A business that seeks to measure and manage complete customer journeys will not only do its best at touchpoint level but will also gain a better understanding of the root causes of areas of dissatisfaction in the journey; and will discover more effective ways to collaborate and to break down organisational silos.  

And that is good news for the customer.

How do you measure and manage customer satisfaction? Any good tips to share and pass on?

I'm a bad loser

Once again we have had a great summer of British sporting success-Andy Murray wins Wimbledon, the first Scottish British to win there while playing in long trousers; Justin Rose wins the US Open (golf); the British Lions, albeit with a lot of Welsh help, win the series against Australia; Chris Froome wins the Tour de France, the second Brit (well nearly!) in succession; and England have retained the Ashes. And there will no doubt be more success to come.

Following on from last year’s Olympics our sporting triumphs are beginning to spoil us. Just as well because we all hate losing. No matter how much the British are admired for their long track record of plucky failure, there is no doubt about it all of us are bad losers. Indeed you could say we hate losing more than we like winning.

We might say that we all hate a bad loser but the way our brain works means we are most definitely not a good loser.

Consider this simple experiment-half a class of students were given a mug and the other half a large bar of chocolate. The costs of each were the same and beforehand the students were as likely to choose one as the other. Yet when offered the opportunity to switch from a mug to the chocolate bar and vice versa, only one in ten switched.

There are plenty more experiments like this providing a large body of evidence that people, and that means you and me, really are loss averse and will put more effort in avoiding a loss than they will to realise a gain.

And this can be a source of great customer dissatisfaction too-people are more likely to get more grumpy and dissatisfied when they think something they are legitimately entitled to is taken away from them than they feel satisfied and pleased when they are given something. George Osborne knows a lot about this.

This means that brands have to think and take these feelings into account when thinking about and designing the customer experience and the customer journey.

Last week I was informed by a hotel loyalty membership programme that as I hadn’t used the service enough in the past 12 months, in other words I wasn’t making as much money for them as previously, that I would no longer be entitled to certain privileges and benefits. I was however assured that should I ‘restore my usage to the levels seen previously over the coming year my privileges would be restored’.

Remember I am a bad loser.

Immediately my opinion of this brand plummeted; I now wanted to use them less not more and move on; and I wanted to tell the world about how I was being treated.

A common mistake made by brands is that they think people behave and think rationally. In this instance they believed that I would think it sensible and rational that because I wasn’t using their services to the same extent as previously that I would accept that I wasn’t entitled to certain privileges and benefits. But that is not how I think. It is not how people think.

People also think and behave emotionally.

And that is why brands when thinking about the customer experience and the customer journey must think of it as far more than a rational process. It is an emotional journey too and this must be taken into account. It is therefore important that when designing the ideal customer experience brands must think about how the customer might be feeling and want to feel and must incorporate psychological thinking and learning from behavioural economics.

Perhaps if my hotel brand had considered these factors they would have done a far better job of explaining my changing status and in helping me come to terms with my loss.

Instead of just telling me that my privileges were being with withdrawn perhaps they might have allowed me to pay a fee to retain them; or let me know that they had changed their approach to benefits for someone like me; or that as I wasn’t using my privileges and benefits they would like my input on how they might better serve me going forward.

In other words don’t blame me for the loss; help me to come to terms with the loss; and help me to change the way I thought about the loss. That would be the emotional way to design the experience.

We all like a good loser. And we all hate to be seen as a bad one. But the reality is we are all bad losers. And given this we can and should design an experience that recognises this and which takes these feelings and emotions into account to demonstrate that we are not really losing.

Do you think about this when you design your customer experience?

Is the customer always right?

In customer service there are only two rules. Rule 1-the customer is always right. Rule 2-if the customer is ever wrong, re-read rule 1.

So what are we to make of the recent story of the Sainsbury’s checkout assistant who recently refused to scan a customer’s groceries because the customer would not stop talking on their mobile phone?

Is this a breach of a Rule 2?

I must admit to being really torn on this one.

But philosophically we need to ask if we get the service we deserve. And this is as true for customers as it is for the businesses that serve them.

And if we agree with this philosophical point of view how do we change the rules of the game?

I am a terrible customer always looking to find ways to improve the service I get. I work on the principle that if I accept poor service I am condemning the next customer to shoddy and inadequate service. So I have a duty to let businesses know when and if they are getting wrong and how it might be improved.

More of us as consumers ought to do this and be less British, stoical and phlegmatic about this.  In short we need to complain more.

But businesses also need to demonstrate they value excellent customer service and that they truly want to deliver a brilliant customer experience that wows and surprises their customers. Too often too many businesses see service as a cost to be delivered as cost effectively as possible. Instead see it as an investment and show how much they really care about service.

This really concerns me.

Businesses have a great tendency to say one thing when it comes to service but do something else. And people will watch more than they listen. Consistency of message is of the utmost importance.

And so if customers get the service they deserve, businesses also deliver the service they deserve.

But to earn a reputation for brilliant customer service there are some simple things businesses can learn to do that will help them wow their colleagues and their customers and show a real passion for delivering a consistently awesome customer experience.

·         Show that you really value customer service and that those who deal with customers are the real value add to the business. All businesses should only contain two types of staff-those who serve customers and those who serve those who serve the customer. So why do we have a Head Office? This highlights the hierarchy. Why not name this Customer Support Centre?

·         Demonstrate real leadership. Get senior management to spend at least one day a month dealing with customers on the front line. No excuses, no ifs, no buts. A powerful signal to all in the business that customers and those who deal with customers are important.

·         Learn to walk in the customers’ shoes. How often does your business think about the customer experience when it is re-engineering its processes and systems from the outside in? Too often this is done from the inside out. Rare is the business which seriously thinks about who its customers might be, what they want and how they might be feeling when they touch the business. Rarer still is the business that takes such insights into account when re-designing its processes. Time to start.

At the end of the day it is about having a passion for service excellence and if the business has this passion this will be shared by its people. Simples.

And where does this leave me on the issue of the Sainsbury’s checkout assistant and the phone-glued-to-the-ear customer? 

Still confused. But maybe if businesses showed they really valued customer service and those who deliver it, maybe the customer might learn to appreciate them too. It’s worth a try.

This is the age of the train

When you think of railways in this country, having a reputation for great customer service is not necessarily the first thing you might associate with them.

But for me one of the UK’s finest exponents of a customer service that exudes humanity, warmth and helpfulness can be found working for one of our many rail companies.

It is often said that no one gets up and comes to work to give bad customer service, though as I get older I begin increasingly to doubt this saying. It is just the resources, the systems, the leadership and other infrastructure issues far too often get in the way of people giving the standard of customer care and service that they would aspire to give. Accepting that in some businesses and for some people the standard of service to which they aspire is exceedingly low, no matter the claim that the business puts customers first.

However the person who is the subject of these musings is capable of rising above all this and no matter the issues and the extent to which a whole host of factors get in the way of a top class level of service being delivered, is unfailingly polite, helpful, diligent, reliable and totally 100% customer centric. Here the customer does come first even if a few rules have to be quietly bent to make sure they do and even if they don’t deserve to come first (and at times I am ashamed to say I have fallen into this category).

I once asked about the attitude and approach to customer service. It was simple.

‘’I just imagine that everyone I meet has VIP stamped on their forehead and I treat them like a VIP’’.

Management consultants working in this area will come up with PowerPoint upon PowerPoint detailing their approach to customer service management but I doubt they can come up with anything better.

And so every day myself and all the other customers are treated as a VIPs.

I am met at the station with a warm greeting; I am called Sir until my name is learnt and then I become Mr and eventually we graduate to Christian names; nothing is ever too much trouble, I am never made to feel a bother or stupid; and extraordinary requests not covered by the rule book are treated with a graciousness that is uncommon and dealt with through the application of common sense. You never get the sense of a jobsworth or a box ticker or a slavish follower of rules.

The impact of such a devotion to customer service excellence is noticeable by its rarity.

Indeed it is so noticeable that I am delighted to announce that all these efforts were rewarded by an MBE in this year’s New Year’s Honours List. Brilliant.

For me this is a master class in customer service and I would urge all rail staff and anyone else looking to deliver great customer service at all moments of truth to get down to my local rail station and see excellence in action.

Judy MBE, I salute you.

One small step and all that...

Now that we are back at our desks stuffed full with turkey, pudding and chocolate, let me start the year with a question…

When did you last try to deal with your business as a customer might and look at your business through their eyes?

Probably not recently.  

It always amazes and astounds me that while sales returns and financial KPIs get monitored ruthlessly the customer journey is frequently an overlooked business issue with accountability and responsibility often muddied.

And yet there are businesses which see this as a route to real competitive advantage.

The key to this is for businesses to learn ‘to walk in the shoes of their customers’, so they might examine from the outside-in how they come across. Often customer journey planning is based on inside out thinking and obsesses about internal details.  By thinking outside-in, one business uncovered that while its procedures were obediently followed, no one thought to communicate what was happening to the customer for up to 4 months.

Through speaking with a number of leading edge businesses from a broad range of sectors across the private and public sectors, I learnt that the ability to walk in customers shoes is key to what really smart businesses are doing  to turn what is often a prosaic process driven exercise into a programme that delivers tangible and lasting benefits.

These businesses align fully the journey and the experience with the business and brand strategy. The customer journey for a Waitrose customer will be very different from that experienced by say an Aldi shopper yet since both are fully aligned strategically, both will be equally effective.

Another insight was the importance those with highly distinctive customer journeys place on understanding and responding to customer feelings and emotions at key moments of truth.  Most journeys tend to be built around reliability and speed of response. While important, these factors will not offer advantage. Interventions that appeal to the gut will.

I also learnt that, and this will impress Finance Director’s everywhere, good understanding will also help reduce cost as journey analysis can help identify bottlenecks, duplication and outcomes of low customer value. One business promised to delivers its product within 28 days but builds costly processes to deliver within 7. Except in extreme cases 28 days fully met customer needs, allowing significant costs to be stripped from the business without adversely affecting the customer experience.

Lastly the role of the leadership team is critical here.  As the saying goes, to improve airline food, serve it in the board room. To deliver enduring competitive advantage the C-suite must invest the time to walk in customers’ shoes. A powerful signal to send to colleagues that this matters.

Of course there is far more to building a great customer journey than I have been able to describe here but you have been warned to expect much more on this topic in the weeks ahead. So, as the late great Neil Armstrong might have said… just think of these insights as the first small steps on a hugely rewarding journey.

How to improve airline food

I have a real problem with call centres.

And I don’t suffer the people who work in call centres gladly. And even though I know it is not the fault of those answering the phones, too often these people get the sharp end of my tongue. If you are one of these people, I am sorry.

Last week is a case in point.

I had to phone a call centre to sort out my insurance. An innocuous request but once again the illogicality of a call centre process left me fuming. And even though the customer service rep I was dealing with could see the sense in my position she was unable to do anything for me as she had ‘to follow orders’- a defence rejected by the Nuremburg courts! No matter. Nothing was going to budge her and so I was left back where I started, annoyed, enraged and frustrated.

It was not her fault, nor the fault of her colleagues. They did not get up in the morning and come into work to deliver bad customer service. Instead I blame the senior management of the place. These are the ones that dictated and built the process but they rarely get the chance to view their handiwork.

But how do you get these people closer to the customers who pay their wages and away from the financial reports, strategy papers and the other bumf that absorbs senior management time?

If you want to improve the food served on airlines, serve it up in the boardroom for the Board’s lunch. And, in recent work I’ve been doing to help businesses across the region think about their customer journey and the experience their brand delivers to its customers, I have collected 5 ideas that other businesses have implemented with their senior executives.

Simulation…In one very large business senior executives take a weekly turn to simulate the complete customer experience by going through a transaction or business process as a customer. Through this they are asked to log their thoughts, feelings and emotions, positive and negative This really does help the executives walk in the shoes of the customer.

Executive Complaints…get your top team to investigate and answer one complaint a week from start to finish. They are not allowed to dictate the task to secretaries, PAs or some other flunky. It is down to them and this gives them the opportunity to uncover the cause of the complaint and any defects in the processes, the journey, and the experience.

Speed Dating…the executive get to team meet a group of customers and each executive has 10 minutes with each customer on different topics. After their time is up they move onto the next customer. I think it is important in this context that the team work off the customer’s agenda as well as their own.

Hanging on the telephone… the senior management team to randomly phone customers on a  regular basis (even those who have provided low customer satisfaction scores) to ask them what they think of the experience or how it could be improved.

 ‘Meet the Manager’/ ‘Tweet the Manager’…sessions which allow  to contact or meet directly with the management of the business on a regular basis. It might be scary but it does show great commitment to your customers and your people.  

These ideas take time and courage, commodities which can both be in short supply, but the willingness of the management team to adopt ideas like these show real and genuine commitment to improving the customer experience and to walking in the footsteps of your customers.

 

Love story

I was really interested to hear Warren Buckley, BT’s Customer Service Director, tell a recent event that ‘marketers need to embark on a love affair with their customer service counterparts or risk failing their brands’.

I couldn’t agree more. I may have had some issues in the past with BT and its customer service teams but on this occasion Mr Buckley, a man who does respond to customer e-mails, has got it spot on.

Mr Buckley’s comment was that by having a dialogue with the customer service teams, marketers could save a whole load of money on customer research. Yes they would but I think there is far far more to it than that.

It always amazes me that marketers don’t pay more attention to the brand experience being delivered day in, day out through their customer service teams. For too long this has been seen as the preserve of the customer service chief while marketers take the line of least resistance and focus on their brand wheels, their ads and the other visual symbols of their power but it is on the ground where their brand hits the road where they can make a real difference. This is where marketers need to start to fall in love.

Mr Buckley wants marketers to work with their colleagues to determine a consistent tone of voice for marketing campaigns and responses to customer queries. I would want marketers to go a lot further.

As you know it never ceases to amaze me how few marketers and customer service chiefs actually put their customer services teams to the test and actually experience the service through a customer's eyes. You will be amazed what you might find out. If you want to improve the quality of airline food, serve it in the Board Room, is my principle.

I did hear last week of one CEO who spent the weekend putting his customer service to the test and then spent Monday firing off a series of e-mails to his operations and customer service bosses with required fixes. Good on him. More of us need to do that to get our own direct and real impressions of the service our business delivers.

Speaking as a marketer, and a customer, here are my top 5 things that we need to be looking for in our customer service departments:

#1 Is the IVR system intuitive and easy to use? If we adopt a principle online that the customer should be within 2 clicks of the service they way, why not follow this principle on the phone and make it easy to get to speak to someone.

#2 How customer friendly is the tone of voice? It is always best to use personal and not impersonal pronouns, scrap jargon and three letter acronyms, use the active and not the passive case. And why don’t people sign letters and put a name to them instead of using the corporate squiggle?

#3 Why not take the name of the customer before asking for an account or an order number? I am a person not a number. Take the name and use it. It will make the call sound more personal.

#4 Why not scrap call duration targets? Targets forces call handlers to aim to hurry the call. Scrap the target and more calls will be resolved.

#5 Why tell customers that the Marketing Director or Customer Services Directors doesn’t speak to customers? If your job is to stop your business doing dumb things to customers, you should speak and listen to customers.

And one final thought, give the customer service people some empowerment to do the right thing for the customer instead of slavishly following a script or a process. In many instances I have no doubt that people do their job properly but fail to deliver a satisfying customer experience. This might help.

Obviously there is more to the love affair than this but hopefully this is a start.

Next week is Valentine’s Day, a perfect time for marketers to fall in love with customer service...and vice versa.