Who's in charge?

Last week after an especially gruelling, frustrating, painful and ultimately unsatisfying customer experience from a bank, I found myself in a discussion about the experience with the director responsible for managing the people delivering this appallingly bad customer experience.

I was determined to help the bank understand the problems it had in its operations; to get them to walk in the customer’s shoes to see life from their perspective, a skill they clearly had not learnt; and to help them address its issues so that no future customer should be condemned to such an experience.

I asked the question:

‘Who is accountable for the customer experience here?’

The answer:

‘We are all accountable and responsible for the customer experience’.

Now I understood the problem.

For the reality is that if everyone is accountable and responsible no one is. Blame can too easily be shifted and transferred and avoided.

And in developing great customer experiences and customer journeys, it is a principle of our work that someone must be in charge. It doesn’t matter who it is but there must be a go to person in the business who is accountable and responsible. Businesses need a CXO or a Chief Experience Offer sitting in the C-Suite. The customer experience, just like the P&L and the balance sheet is too important a function to be left as everyone’s responsibility.

Now at this point the person in charge of marketing may well say that as the executive closest to the customer the CXO role should be incorporated within the CMO job description. And that is a very valid argument but in truth it doesn’t really matter who is accountable or whether a new role is created in the C-Suite but someone must be accountable. There must be a go-to person whenever the customer experience is broken who can muster the necessary resources and cross functional teams to work together to find a fix. Anything else is unacceptable.

And if this person can make the following component parts of the customer experience truly amazing for their business, they will have done a really brilliant job.

·         Channel experience: Do all the channels work together seamlessly and integrated? Or do the channels operate in silos with their own rules and procedures? Do the channels engage the senses and deliver an emotional experience when it matters? Does it promote advocacy and sharing?

·         Product experience: Does the product experience live up to expectations? Does it solve the problem? Does it do what it says on the tin? Does it make customers happy, productive and hopeful when they're using it, or does it make them frustrated, angry, agitated and depressed?

·         Buying experience: What is it like to go through the sales process and buy the product? Was it easy to figure out whether the product was the right fit? Was the pricing straight-forward? Was it easy to do business with us?

·         Service experience: What is it like to need help and support?  Do people dread having to call in and get help? Are we easy to deal with? Do our people show empathy and understanding and a genuine desire to help and take responsibility for resolution? Or do you feel like they just want to get rid of the enquiry as quickly as possible?

·          Exit Experience: What is it like to leave the company, return the product, or cancel the subscription and no longer be a customer?

And don’t forget this key enabler of a great customer experience for this will say a lot about your business.

·         Employee Experience: What's it like being recruited by the company? Working for the company? Being let go from the company? If you have a terrible employee experience, you will not attract the kinds of people that will make the customer experience amazing. It just doesn't work.

So the first step to designing and building an amazing customer experience is a simple one-make someone accountable for it.

What do you think? Any lessons from your experience on how you are going about improving the experience for your customers?

Prisoner 46664

I do brands.

In my job I spend a lot of my time trying to design and develop brands. I don’t do the creative work but try to help businesses develop the underlying definition of their 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. 

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.

Great brands really get their role 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.

And don’t chase and measure themselves against a long list of attributes, many of which are just the price of entry for everyone else in their marketplace.

But instead always work hard to stay on mission and always execute against their stance and not against their attributes. 

And measure they the market's understanding of their reason to be — who they are and why they do what they 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.

So in one word what do you want your brand stand for?

Light bulb moment

Does your business do market research? Does it find it helpful and useful?

David Ogilvy, the guru of Mad Men everywhere, once opined that ‘the trouble with market research is that consumers don't think how they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say’.

You may also have come across a phenomenon known as the Hawthorne Effect. This has absolutely nothing do with market research per se but does provide some insight into how people think and behave.

And note the key word here-‘people’. Too often in marketing  we use words like ‘customer’ or ‘consumer’ which hides the reality that we are serving people, with all their biases, prejudices and irrationalities.

In essence the Hawthorn Effect is derived from a series of psychological experiments from the 1920s at the Hawthorn Works, a light bulb factory, to determine if changes to the heating, lighting and other environmental factors made workers more or less productive. It found that workers' productivity seemed to improve when any changes were made and slumped when the study was concluded. This suggested that the productivity gain occurred because the workers knew they were being monitored and it was this factor which biased the results rather than the changes themselves.

And maybe this is why David O said what he said. Maybe all market research is influenced in the same way. Maybe people in a drive to be helpful provide answers and explanations to the market researchers that a) they think they want to hear and/or b) which are rational when in reality they act irrationally.

Having sat behind the mirror in numerous focus groups and listened to more research presentations than are strictly necessary, it is clear few research programmes show a real understanding of how people’s brains work.

Maybe we need fewer market researchers speaking with and listening to people, and more psychologists.

For as people we are far more intuitive, emotional and impulsive when we pass judgement and make decisions than we like to admit. Impulsivity is by far a more common human trait than calculation. We are Systems 1 people. And academic studies in cognitive psychology tell us that people take the ‘Systems 1’, automatic, route 90% of the time and then we often engage our ‘Systems 2’, considered, brain to post-rationalise our instinctive decision.

Traditional market research studies have a tendency to uncover our System 2 response. Not our System 1 response. And this is why market research findings can often be meaningless, useless and highly misleading unless we can find a way to disentangle these responses to get to the truth, if there is indeed a truth.

And why do people not engage their brains when making decisions? Why are we more instinctive than we will admit? Because if we relied on System 2 thinking all the time we would never make a decision.

The world is a complex place and because we are constantly bombarded with too much information and stimuli we find short cuts. And this why we do we what we do.

These short cuts and rule of thumb strategies shorten decision making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about what we should do next.

Instead we take the default option and do what we have always done or is the least troublesome thing to do. We do what flatters and massages our ego. We do what everyone else is doing. We do the first thing that comes into our head.

Research rarely uncovers that sort of thing. And yet as marketers we commission research project after project to convince ourselves we are meeting a customer need; or to show our bosses that we have listened to customers; or to protect our backsides. What a waste.

Instead of listening to what people say we should find ways to observe what they do and apply a knowledge and understanding of psychology to test and determine reasons why. Far more insightful.

Or alternatively find a way to explore consumer reaction just as they flip from System 1 to System 2 thinking, as they transition from the unconscious to the conscious.

So how much money do you waste on market research? Found out anything useful?

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?

Knickers in a twist

I am annoyed. Dismayed. And even embarrassed that my fellow marketing professionals either sanctioned such practise or failed to stop this.

And the cause of this ire?

A recent e-mail communication from a significant High St brand inviting me to join their special club.... for women's knickers.

Did it not occur to someone that I am a man? Did no one realise that I might not be all that interested in women's knickers? It is not as if I have ever bought women's knickers from which they could assess my propensity to buy more pairs.

Naturally I pointed this out to the brand only to be told that ' this was a blanket e-mail which they do regularly although we do understand where you are coming from'.

And there's the rub. This brand might do brilliant TV ads but they have much to learn about CRM and database marketing.

In days of yore, when I was a lad, to write to customers cost about 40p per pack. You therefore made damn sure that you were writing to the right customer about the right thing. Anything else was a waste of money

But in this day and age when it costs fractions of a penny to send e- mails there is no real cost in carpet bombing the database without a thought to relevance.

This is wrong and ought to be banned.

But of course there is ought a cost. There is a cost to the brand and to its reputation. There is a cost of losing customers through opt outs and unsubscribes.  And of course there is the cost of unrealised lost business as a consequence.

Database marketing is not difficult-all anyone has to do is to get the right message to the right customer at the right time. Simples.

And to determine this all that is required is the information that the customer tells you about him or herself, acquired data, mixed with the data and insight derived from their behaviour and from the behaviour of similar people. Even more simples.

And of course the wit to use this understanding to direct the most appropriate message to the most appropriate people.

My pants people must have observed, or at least should have observed, that I don't buy women's pants; that the majority of men don’t buy women's pants on a regular basis; and that I am a man.

Conclusion-don’t e-mail me, and all other men who don’t buy pants on a regular basis, about women's lingerie.

I am guessing that your in-box is filled on a daily basis with irrelevant offers. It might even be the case that because it’s cheap to do your business might even be doing blanket e-mails with little thought to relevance and frequency. And the impact on the customer.

Are unsubscribes monitored? Are open and CTRs checked? What is the trend? How do they compare against industry norms? These should be known and form a crucial aspect of the campaign KPIs and its evaluation. It’s not just about sales. What else is happening?

Blanket e-mails are pants. No matter the content or the category.  And with the application of insight and intelligence, it is easily possible to make your marketing smarter.

Blankets are best kept on the bed. They have no role in marketing.

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.

Bacon and egg

A chicken and a pig were walking down the road one day discussing what they might do with the rest of their lives.

‘I know’ said the chicken, ‘let’s go into business together and set up a breakfast diner serving up bacon and eggs and all day breakfasts’.

‘No way’, said the pig, ‘that’s a really dumb idea’.

‘Why?’

‘Because’, said the pig, ‘if we do that me and my relatives are committed while you would only be involved. You might be well motivated to make this a goer but we would be the only ones with skin in the game….quite literally.’’

In today’s modern world, the motivation word is somewhat overused and overhyped. We will all have been subject to  ‘motivational speeches’ that get everybody fired up for a few hours then, when they go back into their normal world, nothing different really happens.

I recently read this passage from a world leading psychologist.

"MOTIVATION is simply the desire for something. All people are motivated. And most individuals are motivated to perform better at whatever they do in love, work and play. However, far FEWER people are actually COMMITTED to doing the things necessary to perform better. COMMITMENT is demonstrated when one regularly and consistently demonstrates the SPECIFIC behaviours and activities that are LIKELY to DIRECTLY result in optimal performance”.

This is the difference between thinking about doing (as we all do) and just doing (as very few do).

That got me thinking.

As Benjamin Franklin once said ‘tell me and I will forget, show me and I will remember but involve me and I will learn’.

I am also reminded from my readings of behavioural economics that we are more likely to change behaviour if we are involved and are able to take a participatory approach to behavioural change. Commitment devices can help us overcome our self-will weaknesses. Making our commitments public leads to reputational damage should we break our commitments. Even the very act of writing a commitment can increase the likelihood of it being fulfilled.

So what does this mean for improving our level of commitment to the brand, the businesses, we all work with?

We are all motivated to do well but are we really and truly committed to the processes necessary to be the best and to improve ourselves? Are we really committed to do what it takes to achieve our personal and/or professional goals? And we shouldn’t be looking for our managers or anyone else to help us here. This is down to us.

Last week I came across the story of a world class golfer who had lost the winning habit. He was still motivated to win but his family, his coach, his friends and his fans wondered if he had the commitment to still win.

So he wrote out a plan of action and he made a series of specific commitments not to his coach, his family or friends, but to himself to take the specific behaviours and activities that were likely to result in optimum performance.

This is not the place to talk about golf but needless to say off the back of these quite public and written down commitments he has won 3 times. He is back! He had recovered the habit that is borne out of commitment.

And he had done so by involving himself in the process. Not by listening to a motivation tapes, speeches or talks. As Mr Franklin implied-these words would soon be forgotten.

We can all learn from this.

Commitment isn’t about ‘positive thinking’ or a ‘great attitude’, it is about doing what needs to be done. It’s about being focused on the task at hand despite your mind telling you that you don’t feel like it or you are too tired. It is about getting things done.

Are you committed to whatever you want to achieve or do in life or are you just motivated?

Are you a pig or a chicken?