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.

Milking it

What's in a name? It seems quite a lot.

Researchers at Newcastle University have published a report claiming that cows given a name produce up to 284 litres more per year compared to cows which remain anonymous.

As the leader of the research team said ‘just as people respond more to the personal touch, cows also feel happier and more relaxed if they are given a bit more one to one attention’.

And seemingly such strategies also work for pigs and sheep and for poultry.

Maybe this learning might also be applied to others of the animal kingdom.

Us.

Can lessons learnt on the farm be applied to us and the customers we are privileged to serve?  I believe they can.

Firstly the more we can get up close and personal to our customers, the more productive they will be to our business. Now this does not mean that we need to try to be their best friend but does mean we should recognise them as individuals with an identity; that we should speak to them across all our human and written touch points in a way which is warm, human and adult; and wherever possible show that we know them, who they are and we understand the nature of the relationship we have with them..

There are some simple things we can do to give our customers that personal touch. We can stop addressing letters ‘Dear Customer’ and ending with an indecipherable corporate squiggle. People deal with people and like doing so

We could also show a bit more warmth and emotion.

It so annoys me when calling a call centre when the first thing you get asked for is an account number. I heard recently of one case when someone called their insurance company after an accident for their policy number.

How about a name? How about even asking ‘are you alright?’ These are the human responses.

And how about using active verbs and personal pronouns when writing our customer facing material.

Hardly radical or difficult stuff but simple to do and a start on helping make our customer relationships as productive as the cows down on the farm.

And there’s more.

For what works with customers and cows, might also work with our people.

Does something happen when we cross the threshold of our business that stops us being

Again why is it that the first thing we always get asked for us is our employee number rather than our name? Why is it that our business communicates with our people and us like we were androids?

Again the use of some personality in our communications with our people may go a long way to humanising the businesses we work in.

Do we take time out to say thank you, to celebrate individual and team success, to remember significant events in the lives of our people? It may come as a surprise that are people are exactly that- not staff, not human resources, not full time equivalents.

Again not difficult, not radical, not rocket science.

Maybe it’s not just about extra milk, rashers of bacon or chicken nuggets. Maybe we should look closer to home for the real benefits.

Hail to the Chief

I have a geek-like obsession with the workings of American politics. And this unhealthy obsession has left me with a great love of ‘West Wing’. I even thought ‘Lincoln’ was a great use of my time!

About a year ago I came across a profile for a man called Harper Reed.  This is someone you will probably never have heard of; a man prone to oddball pronouncements like ‘this morning is a red fang type of morning; and a man who was critically Barack Obama’s CTO or chief data scientist.

And it was because of this guy and the teams he led that Barack Obama is still America’s Commander-in-Chief.

For the past 12 months I have been following with rapt attention the work of Mr Harper and anyone wanting to develop a world class insight led marketing programmes can learn much from his work to re-elect Obama.

This man and his team raised more money from more people than anyone had ever done before, signed up more volunteers than previously and far more than his enemy, and registered more people to vote. Not too shabby then!

Most importantly they got their man elected again with 51% market share compared to his enemy’s share of 48%, no mean feat in a struggling economy and with the jobless rate touching 8%.

There isn’t enough space here to do justice to this work so for the moment I have picked out what I believe to be the three key lessons that us mere marketing mortals might learn.

Lesson #1 CRM is a strategic differentiator

Obama saw his CRM programme as a real strategic differentiator and as a result derived huge benefit at so many levels from his programme, something organisations like Tesco in the UK have done. Too often businesses use data and their so called CRM programme as tactic to drive e-mail distribution rather than placing it at the heart of their business strategy. 40% of Obama’s headquarters staff comprised data and technology geeks drawn from the data and analytical elite of Silicon Valley, academia and Fortune 500 businesses; digital and analytics sat alongside the political staffers at the top table; and analytics in particular grew 5 times over 2008 and was used to improve aspect of the campaign. How many businesses use their customer data analysed to within an inch of its life to improve and optimise their business from top to bottom?

Lesson #2 Follow the data

You won’t get anywhere without data and Obama went to great lengths to capture through his supporters’ customer journey as much data as he could lay his hands on. Data is the fuel for intelligent marketing programmes and you can never have too much. Obama gathered 4 levels of data:

·         Volunteered: data provided by his supporters

·         Borrowed: data fused from other sources like voting data; shopping patterns; etc

·         Derived: driven by observed behaviours like response to e-mails and website interest

·         Social: by linking to individuals social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn Obama    was not only able to improve the profiles of his database but also obtained access to his supporter’s networks.

This was data capture and management on an industrial scale feeding a voracious Single Customer View enabling a joined up understanding of and communication with supporters and prospects.

Lesson #3 Torture the data

Data never gives up its secrets willingly; it must be tortured to do so.

Obama may have stopped the torture of terrorist suspects but this does not extend to data which was tortured ruthlessly for insight and understanding. Few other CRM programmes have the same level of ruthlessness and ambition.

He developed predictive and propensity models that were run in real time and updated overnight; every interaction was personalised, and this just wasn’t about using the respondents name but about the content and from whom it was sent; and 18 e-mail variations were tested with just about every variable probed and dissected to optimise response including day of week, time of day, subject line, content, author and so much more besides. Impressive stuff.

It is not suggested that everyone out there managing a CRM programme has the ability or the resources to do ‘an Obama’ but we could at least learn from him and ponder what we can apply. 

A recent IBM report suggested that 40% of senior marketers saw Big Data as their ‘next biggest challenge’ but only 71% felt ready to deal with it.

For marketers genuinely wanting to turn information into intelligent insight, Barack Obama and his team are a great source of ideas and inspiration. Hopefully it won’t make you prone to oddball pronouncements but maybe they will be singing ‘Hail to the Chief’ to you’.

Prime Location

On a scale of 1-10 how frustrating do you find trying to find a parking space when in town? And then when you do find an unoccupied space it is reserved for some special purpose or other for which you don’t qualify?

If you are anything like me your frustration-o-meter will be off the scale.

I ask this question because last week I was driving in ever decreasing circles around Britain’s Second City looking to park and I was struck by the number of bays reserved for the charging of electric vehicles. And all sitting there unused.

''What a waste of space?'', I thought to myself.

And then I had an epiphany and the penny dropped. They weren’t there to be used.

This might seem strange but it is a great example of the workings behind Behavioural Economics.

As you know there are people out there worried and concerned about the effects of so-called ‘man made’ climate change on our environment. And as a consequence all of us are being constantly implored to switch to a more sustainable lifestyle less reliant on hydrocarbon power.

Of course the car and car owners are like Public Enemy Number One and so car manufacturers have been rushing headlong to offer us greener cars including cars that run on electric power. This is not the place to debate the green-ness or otherwise of such vehicles but when it comes to electric cars the manufacturers have to persuade us to break the habit of a lifetime and to switch from buying a nasty polluting car and to make the electric car our default vehicle of choice.

And this is where Behavioural Economics comes in.

We have identified the behaviour we want to change but what stops  us changing our behaviour. After all in so many ways electric cars are the rational choice-cheaper to run; good for the planet; and since most journeys are less than 5 miles the chances of running out of ‘fuel’ are remote.

But we do worry about running out of ‘fuel’. It is irrational but it is emotion and irrational factors that keep our bad habits firmly entrenched.

And so someone out there thought ‘I know… if we create a significant number of highly visible parking bays with charging points to send a signal that charging is convenient’.  And if consumers can be persuaded to think like this then this reason not to switch is removed.

Have you noticed how these spaces are illuminated with an eerie blue light. This does nothing except make these spaces difficult not to notice.

Brilliant.

In the jargon nudge interventions like this are known as priming-cues that work on our sub-conscious to influence behaviours. In this case the highly visible charging point is the priming cue.

All of us in marketing have the opportunity and the need to change behaviours, to break habits. Often we do this through pricing cues. But there are other ways to break the habits and change behaviour.

What do you want to prime your customers to do?  

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.

 

Prisoner 46664

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of visiting the ‘Birmingham Made Me Design EXPO’,  a celebration of Birmingham’s great design heritage and of Birmingham as the home of some of this country’s great brands-Jaguar, Triumph, Land Rover, Aga, JCB and even Marmite. It’s well worth a visit. You would be amazed to learn just how much good stuff has come out of Birmingham.

In my job I spend a lot of my time trying to design and develop brands. I don’t do the creative work on brands but instead it is my job to come up with the underlying definition of the brand. I try to define what it is going to stand for; the promise it is going to make and to try to keep, to its customers; and how it should present itself to its market. Someday it is my hope that the brands I am working on will feature in an exhibition of great brands.

And when we are sitting around with the brand owner trying to come up with the right sense of words to describe the brand, you can bet that no matter the brand, company, category, product, or service, the most common list of attributes everyone wants to be associated with goes something like this: honesty, accessibility, innovation, invention, forward thinking, collaborative, friendly, and easy to work with, trustworthy, leader, fun. Recognise the exercise?  Now who wouldn't want to be all those things? Anyone want to be the opposite?

But when every other brand has the same words on their list this is not conducive to the development of a distinctive brand.

Let us look at it another way.

If I was to ask you to describe someone like Nelson Mandela I am pretty sure I would get words like courageous, altruistic, heroic, peaceful, wise, thoughtful, giving, caring, loving, fearless and so and so on.

Great words and accurate in their description of Nelson Mandela but the same set of words could be accurately applied to many other people, including me on a good day.

But if I was to ask what Mandela stood for, your answer might be something like ‘freedom’. And that applies to very few people and most certainly not me.

That is the difference between a true brand stance and an easy list of attributes.

I like to think that great brands, like the ones on display in The Mailbox, realty understand their stance in the world and their reason to exist and pursue that mission with all their might consistently over time and across every customer touchpoint.

These brands recognise that they are not just a collection of attributes that could describe anyone but have a purpose, a stance, a value and pure mission in the world. Just like Nelson Mandela.

Great brands are never remembered for their attributes but for what gets done with these attributes. Don’t chase and measure yourself against a long list of attributes, many of which are just the price of entry for everyone else in your marketplace.

 But instead always work hard to stay on mission and always execute against your stance and not against attributes. Measure the market's understanding of your reason to be — who you are and why you do what you do.

It therefore follows that it is not so much what you make and what you sell but why you do that matters and how you do it.

Just like all the brands on display at Birmingham’s DesignEXPO. Just like Nelson Mandela.