The customer feedback experience – an experience not to be taken for granted!

Last week I made a telephone call to my bank. A routine query, I chose to pick up the phone and call with my question, rather than use any other channel open to me. Having gone through the usual number selection process (or IVR as it is known technically), I was connected to a human. The chap I spoke to was very nice – he answered my question in less than thirty seconds. The entire experience lasted no more than 90 seconds ‘end to end’. All pretty simple. I disconnected the call without another thought.

Now you may be wondering what this rather banal story has to do with the subject of customer feedback. Let me explain. Approximately five minutes after I had concluded the telephone call with my bank my telephone rang. I was greeted by an automated message from the very bank I had just been conversing with. The message asked if I would be happy to participate in a short survey regarding my ‘recent’ experience. I was slightly taken aback. I had not given anyone permission to call my home telephone number to ask for my feedback on the call I had just made. The nice man I had spoken to did not say anything about it either. Rather than providing feedback, I disconnected the call with a sense of annoyance at what had just occurred – and that is why I am writing about the customer feedback experience.

For many years I have been troubled by one of the key pieces of the Customer Experience jigsaw puzzle – VOC (Voice of the Customer). I have not been troubled by the need for it – quite the contrary. VOC is one of three essential, obligatory elements of any Customer Experience measurement programme (VOP – voice of the process and VOE – voice of the employee being the other two).What has troubled me is the way organisations go about getting it – or in other words, the suitability and appropriateness of the very experience we put our customers through in order for us to find out what they think.

When was the last time you provided feedback to an organisation? Whilst we are able to deliver feedback without any prompting from the companies we interact with, the same companies are constantly trying to get us to tell them what we think via a variety of surveying methods. The same channels we use to conduct our transactions are also used to solicit our thoughts – both in words and numbers. Most of the methodologies used are the same today as they were many years ago – not a great deal seems to have changed. Doing what I do for a living, I often provide feedback when asked – I feel it is critical to allow companies to understand how I feel about my experience with them whilst I am always interested to understand what they want to know.

So let me ask again – when did you last provide feedback to an organisation that asked you for it? What did you think of the experience of actually doing it? Did you even consider the act of giving feedback to be an experience in itself? Too often the experience of giving feedback is not a great one. Regularly faced with lengthy online surveys, many consumers become disengaged very quickly. That is why methodologies such as NPS (Net Promoter Score) and Customer Effort have been so successful – radically simplifying the capturing of information can make it a better experience for the customer in providing it.

The challenge for customer focused organisations today is that they need to be able to design the customer feedback experience in the same way they design their customer journeys. As with the customer journey, capturing customer feedback should have a clear business need as well as defining some form of clear purpose for the customer to align to. It is very common for me to come across customer feedback mechanisms that have defined neither. I therefore urge all those responsible for customer feedback in their organisations to consider the following:

Business Need

• Do you have a ‘customer feedback strategy’ in place?
• Have you mapped/designed the customer feedback experience?
• Is your customer feedback mechanism(s) actionable?
• Is your customer feedback mechanism linked to employee performance and incentives?

Customer Purpose

• Do you know how your customers want to provide feedback?
• Do you know what customers think about the experience of giving feedback?
• Do you have any defined way of keeping customers informed of actions you take as a result of their feedback?
• Do you have a defined strategy to maintain customer engagement in continuously providing feedback?

Businesses will always need measurable and actionable customer feedback to continuously improve the experience they have with their organisation. Unless companies get better at designing the experience of providing feedback, there is a risk that too many customers will just not bother to give it any more. The extremes of customer perception will always make their voice heard – the unsolicited voice of the very happy or very angry – via a variety of social media channels. However, if we want the silent majority to keep helping us make our businesses better at giving them what they want and need, we must ensure that we make the experience of giving feedback one that the silent majority can more comfortably engage with.

Businesses will always need measurable and actionable customer feedback – without it, sustaining a focus on customer experience in an organisation is made very difficult We must therefore NEVER take for granted that customers will carry on giving us the feedback that we so urgently need. Go and review your customer feedback mechanism today – walk the experience for yourself and ensure that you are able to maintain your approach to customer feedback in the future.

Dare to be Different – The ‘Dignity in Diversity’ of Customer Experience

People often ask me where the inspiration for my blog posts comes from. Whilst there is no single answer to this question, I will say that the best blogs are usually those that are unplanned. In other words, I am regularly inspired by the things I see and hear – my posts will almost always be as a result of a recent experience of my own.

At the weekend, I was fortunate to hear a sermon from a retired Anglican Priest. I must admit that I was not particularly focused in absorbing what he was saying. I did hear him repeat three words at least three times though – those three words were ‘Dignity in Diversity’. I heard the words, but they did not really touch me….. not until my wife brought them to my attention again a little later.

The Priest was describing the importance of being different – trying something new. In what I now recognise as a very poignant speech, he was telling those that were listening why there is actually something to be proud of in driving and accepting change – change is not a bad thing, it is a good thing. It is his speech that is the inspiration for this post.

Delivering great Customer Experiences – consistently – is all dependent on an organisations ability to repeatedly and continually evolve/adapt/change/transform (delete or include as appropriate). Continually doing what you have always done is rarely a recipe for success – it is almost impossible to stand still as the world and the people who populate it (your employees and customers) constantly demand something different…. something better.

Therefore the discipline of Customer Experience is all about knowing what and how to change – easy to say, yet not so easy to do. There are challenges with both the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. Let us explore knowing ‘what’ to change first of all. For me, this is the bit that requires a structured, fact based approach to Customer Experience. This is where it is critical that a business understands what it is supposed to be doing for its customers and has a clear understanding of what works and what does not.

The problem is that too many businesses still make decisions on what it is their businesses should focus on without putting customer focused facts on the table. It is still very common for companys to look towards their competitors – often from only their own industry and attempt to do the same things……slightly better. Either that, or they look to who they consider to be the best and attempt to emulate them – if only I had a £ or a $ for every time a senior leader has told me that they would ‘like to be like Apple’!

This is where the headline from this blog post comes in – Dare to be Different – there really is dignity in diversity – we should aspire to be different, not the same as everyone else. There is nothing wrong in learning from others, both inside and outside the industries from which our own businesses exist. However I strongly believe that our organisations should have the dignity to be as diverse as their customers need them to be – as different as they need to be – to constantly provide customers with better Customer Experiences.

In my time leading Customer Experience programmes, I have often been ‘knocked back’ for suggesting things that have not been done before – or that have never been tried by another company. ‘Dignity in Diversity’ is a different way of saying ‘Dare to Try’ – it plays to innovators and transformers. Being different is not a bad thing – it is what can truly make your business differentiate itself. To enable your business to change it is vital to unlock the potential that comes from within – this is the ‘how’ to change. Don’t be constrained by the negative (it has never been done before); look to the possibilities of being the first to ‘dare to try’!

In my final blog post of 2014, I suggested that we should ‘sweep the steps’ of Customer Experience in 2014 and move onwards and upwards to the land of opportunity ahead of us in 2015 – we could do this by truly daring to be as different and as diverse as our customers really want us to be. So go on – give it a go – don’t dare to dream of being like Apple – dare to dream to be the first to do something that has never been done before!

 

‘Customer excellence is here: it’s just not very evenly distributed yet’. The Nunwood 2014 UK Customer Experience Excellence Report

‘Customer Excellence is here: it’s just not evenly distributed yet’. A fantastic quote that I wish I could claim was mine! Whilst it is not, I can recognise a particularly relevant and accurate quote when I see one. The quote is in fact the very first line of the executive summary of this years Nunwood UK Customer Experience Excellence Report – a report that should be essential reading for any customer experience professional in the UK.

The reason why I think the quote is so apt is because I personally agree very much with its sentiment. In 2014, it is very difficult to find an organisation who does not believe that the customer experience or being customer centric is NOT of value. It is far easier to find companies who might say it, but demonstrate something completely different! At a time when even Ryanair CEO, Michael O’Leary, has publicly linked improving the customer experience with improving financial performance, we are possibly living in the most customer centric society ever (that may be a subject for a future blog post!).

Ryanair do not feature in the top 100 of Nunwood’s report into the Customer Experience Excellence of 250 companies operating in the UK – maybe Mr O’Leary will make entering the top 100 an objective for 2015! The report is a fascinating assessment of the customer centric nature of brand names that we interact with on a daily basis. Focussed around 6 pillars that Nunwood use to assess ‘excellence’, the brand names that are considered to be ‘customer champions’ will probably not surprise you. I am often asked who the most customer centric brands in the UK are – the 2014 top 10 are a very good reflection:

It is difficult to disagree with this bunch – although I am sure some will try!! As I have already stated, Nunwood produce the listing using their 6 pillars of Customer Experience Excellence. What is important to remember here is that their study does not just produce a league table – it more critically gives you an insight into exactly why these brands are at the top of the list. So let us look at what makes an ‘Excellent Customer Experience’ in a little more detail:

1. Personalisation

Described by Nunwood as – using individualised attention to drive an emotional connection. This is so important and a pillar that has become necessary as we, the consumer, are demanding more emotionally engaging experiences every day. It is absolutely true to say that emotionally engaged customers will interact with you more often – the Nunwood top 10 are demonstrating excellence in achieving this.

2. Expectations

Described by Nunwood as – managing, meeting and exceeding customer expectations. Not difficult to understand – it does what it says on the tin. To be at the top of the Nunwood list, you need to be consistently good at delivering both the basics and the ‘sprinkling of fairy dust’, as I and my colleagues like to describe it!

3. Time and Effort

Described by Nunwood as – minimising customer effort and creating frictionless processes. Now that would be nice! If you read my blog post last week, you will understand just how important this is in delivering ‘excellent’ customer experiences – maybe it is not a surprise that the companies involved in my experience are not in the Nunwood top 100.

4. Integrity

Described by Nunwood as – being trustworthy and engendering trust. Integrity is a word that few would associate with many industries in 2014 – it has been eroded so significantly since 2008. However it should be noted that the brand that has come top of the pile in 2014 (and was also third in 2013) is one that comes from the industry that many of us still trust the least. The fact that First Direct have maintained their integrity whilst the industry around them have failed to do so in such dramatic fashion, is absolute testament to their unrelenting focus on the customer.

5. Resolution

Described by Nunwood as – turning a poor experience into a great one. Recovery of poor experiences is well known to have a potentially galvanising effect on loyalty. The ability to respond to an issue is a vital skill for any business. However, I would argue that it is still better to have to recover as an exception!! Interestingly, my experience last week saw one of the organisations involved responding in ‘best in class’ fashion – I was very impressed. Yet despite this, my opinion of their brand has not changed. Do not get me wrong – the ability to resolve is vital – but getting things right in the first place should take precedence.

6. Empathy

Described by Nunwood as – achieving an understanding of the customer’s circumstances to drive deep rapport. Getting the emotional component of the experience right is still the thing I see most commonly missing from the organisations I interact with. Understanding and empathising with customers is a critical competency that drives the most customer centric of organisations.

To get into Nunwood’s top 10, your business needs to demonstrate excellence in all 6 of these pillars. Some might be good in one or two – yet competency in all 6 is what makes you a Nunwood Customer Champion.

Wherever your business sits today, it is wonderful to see how the excellence pillars are becoming more commonly embedded in businesses all over the UK. The report makes it clear that there is a demonstrable shift in the upward direction in 2014 – this is echoed by reports from other agencies in the US. As customers we are receiving improving customer experiences – some businesses are better than others. Some are improving faster than others. What is important is that the improvements we are seeing are maintained and even more importantly sustained.

If you want to read the report in detail, or find out more about it, please have a look at Nunwood’s Customer Experience Excellence Centre.

 

 

 

The gift that is Customer Feedback. How not to accept it by Southwest Airlines & Easyjet

Customer feedback comes in many different forms. Often sought out by companies, it can be captured via email, web pop up or telephone surveys. It can be recorded in face to face customer focus groups or received in person before, during or after an interaction with a customer. Some still leave good old-fashioned paper forms for customers to fill in, whilst new-fangled QR codes attempt to entice consumers to use modern technology to tell companies what they think.

It is no big secret that the newest form of customer feedback’ is of the unsolicited kind. This is feedback that is not necessarily asked for, yet can potentially have the most significant effect on the companies it relates to. This is the feedback that is being produced on a daily basis across social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Despite the fact they have been in existence for a while, companies are still struggling to adapt to their very existence. On a regular basis, social media customer experience horror stories are being exposed – in this blog post I will be sharing two of them from the airline industry.

The two stories I am going to share relate to customer feedback posted on Twitter. Before I do share them with you, I would like to make you aware of some amazing statistics about Twitter. These statistics were posted in an excellent blog by Brian Honigman called ’10 Surprising Twitter Stats for Community Managers‘. You can read about all ten on Brian’s blog – the ones I want to draw your attention to are as follows:

1. The average company is tweeted 39 times a day and 273 times a week
2. 53% of brand followers expect them to respond to their comments in an hour. That number jumps to 72% when it’s a complaint
3. 60% of company mentions are posted when you’re not at the office
4. 30% of tweets including company names don’t include their Twitter handle
5. Only 9% of tweets mentioning a company are directed at the company
6. 97% of major brands are on Twitter

Companies cannot hide from the fact that Twitter is a hugely important vehicle for BOTH customers and their own businesses. Customers (whether existing or potential) use twitter as a way of stating a number of things. They use it to praise companies and their employees. They use it to ask companies specific questions and to ask for help. They use it to make complaints requiring a response. They also use it to express their dissatisfaction with companies who do things they do not like. In all cases, the insight that can and is being captured via Twitter is an invaluable feed into an organisations customer feedback engine room.

The beauty of Twitter and other social media platforms is that the feedback being placed on them is completely free and unprompted. There is no bias. There is no skewing of data. Customers will say what they will whenever they want to say it. It is therefore VITAL for an organisation to know what to do with the feedback they capture – how to deal with it when it comes in. Twitter is just ONE of many sources of customer feedback – the key is to ensure that all forms of feedback are linked together in someway to ensure that the strategy for dealing with it is in context with the priorities for improvement in the end to end customer experience. Feedback is a gift – but you need to know how to accept it and what to do with it.

Two organisations who have recently failed to deal well with Twitter feedback are both from the airline industry. Let us start with Southwest Airlines. When a good friend of mine brought this story to my attention, I was disbelieving. I had to check the date to make sure it was not April Fools Day. Sadly the story is not a joke. It is very real. It is one of the most amazing stories of the mistreatment of customer feedback I have seen to date. The story is about a frequent Southwest Airlines passenger called Duff Watson. Usually flying with the airline on business, Mr Watson was on this occasion travelling with his two children. Being a frequent passenger, Mr Watson benefitted from priority boarding. Although his two children did not have priority boarding tickets, he did not think it would be a problem for them to stand in the queue with him. To cut a long story short, Mr Watson was flatly refused entry to the plane via the priority boarding queue. As many consumers would, whilst making his way to the back of the normal queue with his children, Mr Watson tweeted his dissatisfaction at the way he had been treated. What happened next is quite simply amazing.

Having taken their seats on the plane, Mr Watson and his children were told to leave the aircraft immediately. When back at the gate, he was told that his tweet of dissatisfaction constituted a ‘safety threat’. The only way he would be allowed back on the plane would be for him to delete the tweet. With two distressed children, Mr Watson did this – waiting until he arrived at his final destination to tweet the airline again. Quite a remarkable story – you can read more about it here.

Just when I thought it could not get any worse, my good friend sent me another story – this time about Easyjet. Mark Leiser, a lecturer at Strathclyde University, was on the receiving end of some curt, uninformed customer service. Concerned that a delay to his flight would cause him and other passengers the inconvenience of missing important travel connections, all Mr Leiser wanted was help from Easyjet staff. Being dissatisfied with the response he received, Mr Leiser, like Mr Watson, took to twitter to express his dissatisfaction. Mr Leiser tweeted the following:

Flight delayed 90min. Soldier going to miss last connection & @easyjet refusing to help pay for him to get to Portsmouth. Get right into em!

As a result of this tweet, Mr Leiser was allegedly threatened with not being allowed to board the aircraft. Told he was not allowed to tweet ‘stuff like that’, he was genuinely at risk of being refused access to the plane. Astonishing. Eventually Mr Leiser did board the plane, but like Mr Watson before him, the story of the way he was treated will rumble on long after his flight ended. You can read more about this story here.

In both cases, valuable repeat customers of two airlines used their democratic right to leave ‘feedback’ about companies they were interacting with. In both cases, the actions of the companies were wildly inappropriate. Rather than trying to prevent customers from saying what they think, these organisations should be LISTENING to vitally important feedback that identifies weaknesses in their ability to deal with certain scenarios. Rather than defending the actions of employees who have clearly not be trained to deal with these situations, Southwest Airlines and Easyjet should be giving unreserved apologies to Mr Watson and Mr Leiser and reassuring customers that they welcome feedback in the quest to continually improve their customer experience.

I hope I will not read more stories like this in the future – sadly I expect I will. I was told a long time ago that feedback is a gift. I thought that was a very wise statement. Receiving the gift is easy – knowing what to do with it is the hard bit.

 

Guest Post: Mystery shopping reveals three common sources of profit leakage in professional and business services

I am delighted to introduce a new guest blogger this week – Tim Dixon-Phillip, Director of Service Reality. In his post, Tim talks about the term ‘Profit Leakage’ – as you take the time to read it, you will recognise where many organisations are experiencing it!! I hope you enjoy the post as much as I did.

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Increasingly, buyers of business or professional services expect more for less.  Tough economic conditions, increased promiscuity and aggressive new market entrants with deep pockets and marketing savvy have permanently changed the rules of new client engagement. 

The following article draws on mystery shopping evidence from professional and business services providers which reveal three of the most common leaks in the new enquiry pipeline which are impacting enquiry conversions, profits and returns on marketing investment. For ease of reference, clients and customers will be referred to collectively as customers. 

Profit Leakage

Profit leakage usually occurs following a mediocre or poor experience which causes a prospective customer to hesitate and/or go elsewhere. This can happen at any point of interaction in the new enquiry journey, from visiting the website, talking to the switchboard/call centre through to the initial consultation with an adviser.

The following evidence is drawn from mystery shopping the top 50 law firms (Consumer and SME- facing teams), the top 10 accountants (SME-facing teams), global B2B software providers (SME- facing teams) and major financial services providers (SME-facing teams).  Our mystery shoppers pose as credible business owners or buyers of serious personal injury across a variety of new enquiry scenarios, ranging from a referral from a friend or existing customer, to a website enquiry. Across all the above sectors, the three most common sources of profit leakage were as follows:

1. Ineffective search functions and broken links on the website
2. Lack of empathy from switchboard or call centre operatives
3. Reluctance from advisers to show enthusiasm for working with the customer and/or agree a next step

Customer journey experience as a measure of profit leakage and marketing ROI

A growing number of business and professional service providers see benefit in measuring what happens to prospective or existing customers when they start a dialogue with people at various levels in the company, either to get something done or in response to a referral or a marketing event.

Some of the companies that have adopted this approach have witnessed an exponential impact on profit, revenues and customer retention as a result.

Conversely, companies are learning that a negative customer experience is punished more severely than ever before and even dissatisfied business customers are increasingly likely to broadcast their complaints on social media.

Higher expectations, lower tolerance of mediocrity or failure

You only have to think about your personal experience with websites and call centres in retail, leisure and utilities to acknowledge that we expect companies to be easy to buy from and work with, and how frustrating it is when they fail to meet our expectations.

How quickly do you leave a website if it doesn’t give you the information you want or the content bores you?  What do you do if the link you click on is broken or the call-back button doesn’t work properly?  How do you feel if you are put on hold for longer than a minute or two, or you get put through to the wrong person or voicemail without being asked?  How irritating is it when you have to keep repeating what you want each time you are transferred to yet another person in the same company?

High service expectations extend to buying business and professional services – why wouldn’t they?  They also lead to an increasing willingness on the part of disaffected customers to publish their feelings on social media, including Linked In, or rating sites like Trustpilot.

Customer experience as a brand differentiator

Service companies are finding that the unique way in which they deliver their own version of a great customer experience is something that differentiates their brand.  It is also something that is very difficult for competitors to mimic. Retail and Leisure brands have known this for years, which explains why the global annual mystery shopping spend in these sectors is estimated to be $3 billion.

How does your company measure what it feels like for a potential or existing customer when they use your website, switchboard or call centre?  Do you know what impression your partners or account managers create during an initial telephone consultation with a prospective customer?  Which member of your senior management team is accountable for improving end-to-end customer experience across the company?

The biggest influence on customer loyalty and buying behaviour will probably always be the quality of the advice and strength of their relationship with your front line relationship managers.  However, the rules of engagement have changed.

Customers have learned to expect more.  They are more discerning and less tolerant than they ever have been.  Relationship strength and the customers’ propensity to buy is increasingly influenced by their overall experience of using your company.

Case study

During a recent project with a top 50 law firm, we audited what it felt like for customers to make a new enquiry from start to finish.  We quickly identified that they were leaking profit in several key points of interaction between customer and firm.

We tested a variety of customer personas (business and personal) and simulated a number of evaluation and enquiry journeys.  We tested the performance of the website, and taped the subsequent conversations with switchboard, support teams and fee earners.

It was easy to see the points at which they were losing potential customers and where they were giving new and existing customers a negative impression of the brand.

It was also easy to see where new enquiries were tying up fee earners with non-productive conversations due to poor filtering at the front end of the new enquiry process.

The impact of this project was immediately noticed by partners and staff.  The evidence (good and bad) generated by the audit was irrefutable and emotive, which proved to be a powerful catalyst for change.  Our client was able to galvanize teams into action and unite partners in a way they hadn’t seen happen before. New enquiry conversion rates doubled across the firm within 6 months.

Lessons learned: eight steps towards reducing profit leakage and maximising marketing ROI

1. Remove silos – one senior individual should have ‘ownership’ of the end-to-end customer experience
2. Ensure they are accountable, with clear and measurable objectives for:
   1. Maximising the enquiry-to-customer conversation rate (minimising profit leakage)
   2. Increasing fee earner productivity through improved qualification of new enquiries
   3. Improving customer experience
3. Ensure they are mandated by the Board and have the influence to make the necessary changes to behaviours, processes or technology
4. Identify the customer segments, profiles and buyer personas that have the biggest impact on achieving your strategic goals
5. For each customer segment, map out what a great customer experience looks and feels like for every service line and at every level of interaction in the company (including website, switchboard support teams and fee earners)
6. Test what it feels like to be a new or existing customer today – identify strengths and opportunities for improvement
7. Engage your front line teams in identifying the root causes of any problems identified and for implementing solutions

Commit to continuous improvement and keep measuring progress.

The Net Promoter Score No No – Do not use NPS if it makes no sense to do so

Net Promoter Score (or NPS as it is also known) has been written and spoken about thousands of times over the last few years. Whilst some see it as the simplest (and cheapest) way to capture customer feedback, others dismiss it as far too simplistic with an inability to allow the organisation using it to understand what issues need to addressed.

Using the NPS scoring system as an analogy, I am neither a promoter nor a detractor of the methodology – although I would say the same thing for any customer feedback mechanism. As I will tell any business that asks me – every organisation is different – different customers; employees; business structure; issues; environment etc.. What each individual organisation needs to do to improve the customer experience will de dependent on its situation. This includes the adoption of a customer feedback programme.

NPS is a very effective tool to help a business understand customer loyalty – but it does not apply to every business. I have very successfully encouraged organisations to adopt it.  These tend to be businesses looking to grow – the more likely one customer is to recommend the business to someone else, the greater the likelihood is that they will achieve the growth they are looking for.

NPS is obviously not the only customer feedback mechanism available. Customer Satisfaction is very commonly deployed, whilst ‘Customer Effort Score’ has become more prominent in the last couple of years. None is right, none is wrong – what is important is that an organisation deploys what is right for them. More often than not, I will recommend using two methods – one to galvanise support in the organisation, and one to provide a granular understanding of the priorities for improvement.

Sadly, NPS is often abused and misused – I would like to share with you a very current example. Yesterday, Mrs Golding unfortunately had to pay a visit to the Accident & Emergency department of our local hospital in Chester. Naomi’s injury was a long way from life threatening, but she was sent there by our General Practitioner. To cut a long story short, Naomi had a piece of ceramic tile stuck in her foot – a little like a splinter – and it needed to be removed as quickly as possible.

I dropped Naomi off at the hospital at 11:30am, and collected her at 15:45. We did not expect her visit to be swift!! In the hours Naomi was at the hospital, she observed and experienced a number of things – from the packed, not particularly clean waiting room, to friendly nurses and helpful doctors. By the time she hobbled out of the hospital, her objective had been met – her foot was sore, but the problem was solved.

Of all of the experiences we have today – especially in the UK – the one that we might least expect to be asked about is our experience at an NHS hospital. When Naomi looked at her phone later that day and saw a text message from an unknown number – she was intrigued. The unknown number turned out to be from the Countess of Chester Hospital – the image below is of the text message:

Instantly Naomi knew I would be interested in seeing it – she was right. My immediate thought was No No No!! Why on earth is an Accident and Emergency department of the only NHS hospital with an A&E department in Chester asking the NPS question??? What better example can be provided of an inappropriate use of the NPS methodology? Why on earth would anyone NOT recommend the A&E department in a city where there is only one??? Would anyone ask a paramedic to drive on to the hospital in the next city as they were told by a friend not to use the local one??

I think that the intent of the text message is correct – the method is completely wrong. I once attended a meeting where the now defunct NHS Direct shared with the group that their NPS score was close to 100% – this was yet another example of an organisation using the wrong method – NHS Direct was unique – you would never have NOT recommended it!!

I can tell you right now that the Countess of Chester Hospital will learn nothing from this survey – they will not have any idea that the waiting room was not clean, that certain members of staff were kind and polite, that the waiting times were satisfactory or not. The NPS score they receive will be extremely high. They may perceive as a result that the A&E department is doing a great job.

There is NO POINT capturing customer feedback unless that feedback enables your organisation to understand what the priorities for improvement are. If you want to get a great customer feedback score for the purposes of vanity, put your business in a monopoly situation and then ask the NPS question. The A&E department at the Countess of Chester Hospital would be much better served asking patients how satisfied they were with a small number of touchpoints during their visit – from waiting room, to triage assessment, to staff engagement etc.. If they carry on asking patients if they would recommend the unrecommendable, the result will be quite simple – a complete waste of money!

 

Innovating the market research industry – a startup perspective

One thing is certain in the environment we live in today – innovation is essential if organisations want to achieve sustainable growth. Innovation will help ensure that our ever changing and more demanding needs as consumers are met. In this guest blog post, I am delighted to introduce you to Ben Claxton – Ben is the Founder and CEO of a new, innovative company called nativeye – a mobile research platform that in his words ‘helps your business stay relevant’. Ben talks us through his thoughts as to how innovation can help to transform the way we seek feedback from customers…..

Anyone who has tried to get traction for an innovation – whether startup or internal initiative – will recognise the challenge. You have a view of a better future for your customers, if only you can convince them. Sticking doggedly to your grand vision on the one hand may not bring along enough people to achieve market success, while being too customer-centric limits your potential and fail to deliver the game-changer.

The trick of course if navigating a third way of market-driven innovation that meets people’s unarticulated and unmet needs – giving them the thing they didn’t even know they wanted but from which there’s no going back.

The following are some personal experiences from the last 3 years of launching and growing a mobile research platform – a tool that seeks to transform the market research industry. The examples are specific but hopefully the lessons are relevant to anyone trying to get their innovation off the ground.

Mobile – the next frontier in market research

When asked at the recent Insight Innovation Exchange in Amsterdam when the time of mobile market research is coming, Ray Pointer of Vision Critical replied, “About 18 months ago”.

This anecdote gives you some insight as to a market that has been hotly tipped for a while now but is still waiting to catch fire. (that said Survey Monkey recently reported that they had seen x14 increase in their mobile traffic in the last 3 years).

The case for mobile is various but includes: massive smartphone penetration and usage, an intimate and ‘in the moment’ channel,  the richer data made possible by smartphones’ communication, multimedia and location functions. This all adds up to a new way of engaging and learning from customers. At nativeye we talk about doing research that doesn’t feel like research.

Predicting real need is hard but vital

Prior to coding a single line we put together a clickable prototype and received strong encouragement to proceed. However those nodding heads we had initially were not necessarily our first customers. In fact, some are only starting to buy now, 3 years on. Possibly there was more we could have done to validate need, but there are a whole host of other factors beyond your control that dictate when people are ready to buy.

A clue to validating real current need is to look at whether people are already trying to solve the problem right now. They might be using other products, hiring people or inventing workarounds to try and do the thing that your product does.

Find your tribe

Some people resist just change (including new technology). This is certainly the case in the market research industry. Either because it requires effort to learn new techniques or because people feel threatened by it (which is probably justified if you are an Amazon warehouse picker). David A. Aaker advises innovators to ‘beware the pessimist’ that will attempt to derail innovation projects based solely of their irrational fear of the new (interesting to note that he also mentions to be aware of the over-optimist).

Some people you’re just not going to win over. The best you can hope for is to quickly identify them and move on. For others to try something new the Benefit must > Pain. Pain comes in many forms – the mental effort to work out where your product fits, the risk of an untried approach, bugs in a new product.

However, some people are much more inclined to give something new a whirl – the benefit to them being the potential transformation of their day-to-day. These people are like gold and will be your champions. I think Seth Godin provides the best advice here which is, “find your tribe and grow out from there.”

Learn to explain innovations in terms people currently understand

Of those that do embrace technology, many initially consider it in old frames of reference. Initially nativeye was seen as a mobile survey tool. Common questions included, “How will I get all the survey questions I want on a screen that size?” This made our spirit sink somewhat as we didn’t see nativeye this way – we saw it as a two-way customer channel that captured people’s experience in unprecedented richness and timeliness.

It’s sometimes frustrating when trying to push things forward only to be pulled back into old frames. But if your product is truly transformational and you can get people to try you out, then this should bubble to the surface and they will tell others of their great experience. In the MR world a tool has to deliver on old measures such as ‘response rate’ before people will countenance the new stuff. It’s a reality that you have to navigate this while still not losing track of the larger potential.

Don’t sell features, solve jobs

Clay Christensen talks about innovating by solving the jobs people want to do. Selling in these terms also makes your proposition much more compelling whereas only talking about features leads you to sell yourself short. This is why about 18 months in we started selling “relevance”. This is the bigger benefit that helps bring people on board by speaking language they can understand. As a customer, I don’t know if I want a ‘mobile research platform’ or to ‘open up a channel to my customers’ but I certainly want my brand to stay relevant to its customers.

Ben Claxton is the founder of nativeye, a mobile research platform that helps your business stay relevant. http://nativeye.com/

Contact Ben for ideas on how nativeye can help you ben@nativeye.com

 

Why would you recommend Virgin Trains? Why NPS should not be the default question to measure all customer experiences

Virgin Trains – why would you recommend them to anyone when there is no other option?

I am very fortunate to work with and alongside some exceptional Customer Experience Professionals. As a specialist in the profession myself, the ability to continually learn from my peers enables my own development. Whilst I love writing about all things to do with Customer Experience (as I hope you know), some of my colleagues are not as keen as I am to rant on a regular basis. That being said, I often try to ‘twist the arm’ of the experts I know others will be keen to learn from.

I am absolutely delighted that my friend and fellow Customer Experience Professional, Maria McCann has finally caved in and written about an experience of her own. If you do not know Maria, you should. Maria is one of the most accomplished leaders I know in the Customer Experience field, having held senior roles at Red Letter Days, ASOS, Spotify and Aurora Fashions. Her story (which I am hoping you have guessed involves Virgin Trains) is one that I am sure we can all relate to – I know you will enjoy reading it:

We’ve all been on the receiving end of a train delay. It’s often a no-win situation for the train company focused on getting everyone to their destination safely, while passengers are left feeling impotent and frustrated.  I feel protective of the customer facing teams dealing with confused, sometimes angry customers and the social teams whose twitter handles get put under immense pressure to respond with lightening speed.

However a first time trip using Virgin Trains left me with more steam coming out of my ears than one of their Super Voyagers! Let me set the scene. My train was cancelled. The next one was delayed. Updates from the concourse and on twitter citing reasons outside of the train Operators control. A blameless situation and a communicative company.  All ok so far. Expect in the middle of my chaos, I received a survey asking me how my recent travel experience was and how likely I was to recommend Virgin Trains to a family or friend. The good old NPS question.

When I told them there was zero chance of me recommending them, I was asked why.  This is what I told them.

1. Why would I need to recommend the only operator that runs this route?
2. My train is delayed. I wouldn’t recommend anyone right now

I’m going to pivot here for a moment and talk about Net Promoter Score; the methodology that Virgin Trains, and countless other businesses use to measure their customer experience.

I was an early UK adopter of NPS, first implementing it at Red Letter Days in 2007. The reason I used it was a purists’ one. I wanted something we could use to measure organic growth. As a company coming out of Administration, it was crucial we had a sustainable customer growth underpinning our strategy and NPS was a great way to measure this.

Since then I have seen the use of NPS evolve into a benchmark measure for customer satisfaction or experience reaching out beyond commercial markets into sectors with consumer monopolies such as train travel, and even NHS Direct in health.I’m all for having a measure that provides insight which organisations can act upon. However, I would challenge NPS as the default question to measure customer experience in all cases. It was certainly the wrong question to ask about my train experience.

Anyway, back to my frustrated self, standing on the platform. NPS question asked and answered. Check. Algorithm picked up key word, prompting more detail from me. Check. Detail given in form of mini-rant. Check.

‘We’re sorry you experienced a delay’ was the answer to my response ‘If you have been delayed by more than 30 minutes, please click here to download a form to claim for compensation.

WOW! I thought; this business is so sorry that I have to do all the work to pick up the pieces.

My train finally arrived and it was elbows at dusk as two trains worth of passengers attempted what looked like a line of rugby scrums as they boarded. Deciding that standard class was going to be more like cattle class, I decided to seek out a member of staff to see if I could upgrade to 1st, (which took up a third of the train and was practically empty). ‘Upgrades are only available at weekends’ was the flat response.  I had no idea what this meant and was losing my calm. And so I turned to Twitter to see if I could get what I wanted. #Epicfail

I got no response from Virgin Trains after my final tweet and I spent the rest of my journey calming myself over a gin and reflecting on what I could learn from my experience.

Data gives us opportunities to see further ahead than the customer. So why do we often act out of kilter with our customers’ reality?

When I headed up Customer Service at ASOS, I obsessed over being one step ahead of our customers. Especially on delayed deliveries. Then we developed the capability to predict delays, communicate the failure and refund the delivery charge. All in one smooth service experience. This presented a culture problem. If we refunded 100% of failures, we might refund some customers who didn’t deserve it and we would definitely spend more in refunds.

However we decided to put the right experience over our fears and became one of the first retailers to tell customers of a problem before they felt the pain of experiencing it.  Customers who had previously complained fell, rapidly.  Refunds ballooned but we were able to reinvest the resources we had saved from reduced customer contact, into finding the root of these delays and fixing them for good.

Virgin Trains could have mashed up mine and the train’s data. They could have emailed me to tell me of the delay. They could have reassured me I didn’t have to do anything because they were sorting the compensation. And they could have avoided sending me a survey at the worst possible moment in my experience.

 We love training our teams to be empowered. So why don’t we support them to be autonomous?

I know some of you will be thinking empowerment and autonomy are the same and I’ve lost the plot.  Admittedly my mind can sometimes make quantum leaps of logic so let me try to explain what’s going on in my head…

Empowerment is a set of pre-defined powers handed from manager to employee, usually to manage a set of processes. Autonomy starts from the other end. It is an individual using their purpose, self-reliance and judgment to handle any situation, with their leaders supporting their needs. Talk to me about autonomy and I get inspired.

My experience could have gone differently in a completely autonomous environment. 1^st class seats could have been sold without referring to process limitations to those interested in paying. If a totally customer obsessed train manager had been in charge, free WiFi and coffee might have been given to the flagging passengers! Although it was clear the team were empowered to manage the overall situation of the delay, I felt like I’d been shoved through a linear process.

To be fair to Virgin Trains, my overall experience is no better or worse than most consumer face everyday. Most brands are just not brave enough to push the boundaries in how we can use data and support our teams to act autonomously.

So I’ll leave you with this thought …  if we did use data to manage and measure the hygiene parts of our customers experience and leave the awesome parts to our autonomous colleagues, I believe most brands would have a better relationship with their customers as a result.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

I am sure you will join me in thanking Maria for taking the time to write this excellent post. You can connect with her on Twitter @mariamccann or LinkedIn

	uk.linkedin.com/pub/maria-mccann/9/6/a28

Was everything ok with your stay sir? Why welcoming all types of customer feedback is so important

As consumers, we are asked our opinions on a regular basis. On any given day we could be asked if we are happy with the product or service we have received on multiple occasions. I have often wondered if the people enquiring about our happiness (or not) are actually interested in the response. I am regularly asked the ‘was everything ok sir?’ type question, and it is regularly delivered in an almost automated, robotic way. It seems clear to me that should you ask the question, you should genuinely be interested to know what the answer will be – and be prepared for the feedback to be in all shapes and sizes. Some might be very complimentary. Some might be negative. Some feedback might point out issues that may help other customers if rectified.

A recent experience of mine highlighted to me how important it is for organisations to get this right. Last week I stayed in a hotel near Northampton. It is not relevant which hotel I stayed in – I only hope they may one day read this blog and recognise the issues highlighted in it. I was staying in the hotel with a client. I travelled by train, and the client travelled by car. When I arrived at Northampton station, I entered the postcode of the hotel into my smartphone. I had not had a chance to check how close to the station it was located. When I checked on my smartphone, I had a minor panic when I was advised the hotel was 48 miles away!! I approached the taxi rank in trepidation, worrying how I was going to explain the taxi receipt in my expenses submission.

I was delighted when the taxi driver told me that it was only about 5 miles away, and would take fifteen minutes. I did not think any more of the issue until I arrived at the hotel. My client had been due to arrive at least an hour and half before me. I was very surprised when the lady on reception advised me that she was still on route. She told me that my client had got lost, and had been in telephone contact to try and guide her in! As I finished checking out, my client finally walked through the front door. It transpires that she too had issues with the postcode. In her case, she was directed to a spot roughly four miles away from the hotel. It certainly did appear that there were ‘sat nav’ issues with the post code – more on this later.

There were a number of other problems encountered during our stay at the hotel. The signage was awful – from the start I did not quite know where to go from reception to get to my room. The staff were pretty hapless too – not quite knowing what to do or how to act in a professional manner. I asked reception when the gym opened in the morning. 6am was the confident response. When I checked the information in my room, it quite clearly said 7am – as did the sign on the door of the changing rooms.

At dinner I was asked if I would like a drink. I asked for sparkling mineral water (I am a cheap date) – the waiter was not sure what I meant. He eventually returned with sparkling mineral water served in a branded beer pint glass – maybe he was trying to tell me something! Whilst all the staff were very nice, the hotel was just not very well run (in my opinion), and it was clear that the little details were not being thought about. The staff were obviously not trained to a very high standard, and many of the issues should have been spotted and acknowledged if someone in authority had experienced what they do as a customer for themselves.

Despite the issues, I actually slept very well. As I approached the reception desk to check out, I braced myself for the inevitable ‘robotic’ question. ‘Was everything ok with your stay sir?’ said the lady behind the desk. It is at this point that I made the all important decision (as will all of us every time we are put in this situation). Will I tell her about the issues I encountered, or will I keep them to myself? I decided on this occasion to do the former – and tell her about two of the issues. I told her that there may be problems with satellite navigation systems picking up the postcode. ‘It has always worked on my sat nav’, came the very curt response. It was clear that this lady was not prepared to receive negative feedback from guests. There was no apology. There was no, ‘I am sorry to hear that sir’. There was no offer to have a look at the sat nav dvice used to confirm what the problem was. This lady instantly dismissed my response to her initial question as ‘the customer is wrong’.

I decided to move on to the issue of signage. Once again, the lady was not willing to listen to a negative response. ‘Oh it is very easy to find your way around in this hotel sir’. Did she not hear what I said? Was she intentionally ignoring my opinion? Why did she ask me if everything was ok if she could not care less about my response? By now, I was infuriated – to the point where I decided not to say anything else. I could not even make eye contact with her. My decision had already been made – I would never cross the threshold of this hotel again. Whilst my issues were actually minor, her attitude and behaviour in listening to my feedback had ensured that I was a customer never to be seen again.

I know I am not alone in having an experience like this. If you want to know what I think, I will tell you – but do not assume I am just going to tell you the things you want to hear. I came across a great quote when pulling together this blog post from Darren Kahneman:

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes

To me this says it all. If you genuinely want to know what a customer thinks, than be delighted if that customer takes the time to tell you – good or bad. Even if the customer is wrong, your ability to demonstrate that you take their feedback seriously will have a serious effect on that customers decision to use you again and again. I have since learned that I mistyped the post code of the hotel into my smartphone. I was wrong – if only the receptionist had taken the time to have a look at the issue with me, rather than dismissing me out of hand. Not only would I not be writing this blog post, I might be booking a night in their hotel next week!

What irritates customers most? The top five irritations revealed!

A few weeks ago, I decided to conduct some independent research. I wanted to know what was really important to us as customers of organisations, and was very excited to produce a blog post revealing the ‘top five’ things we want earlier this month – http://ijgolding.com/2013/11/06/what-do-customers-really-want-the-top-five-most-important-things-revealed/.

The research asked 4 further questions:

1. What irritates you most as a customer (based on recent experiences)?
2. Which organisations do you, or have you transacted with who deliver excellent customer experiences (in your opinion)?
3. Do you ever recommend organisations you have transacted with to friends, family or acquaintances?
4. Have you ever used social media (Twitter or Facebook) to interact with an organisation (when requiring customer service or help)?

In this second blog post, I am delighted to reveal the findings to the question ‘what irritates us most’. A question that potentially leads to the ‘opening of floodgates’, I experienced mixed emotions reading the 240 responses. I found myself switching from laughter, to sadness, to anger, to empathy as I immersed myself into the pain and frustration of others – pain that I myself have experienced all too often. So in order to avoid running the risk of irritating you, the reader, by rambling on, let me reveal the results:

You will notice that I have used a scale of ‘irritation’ to depict the most irritating things. The most irritating thing gets 5 irritant symbols, the fifth one gets 1 irritant symbol. They all have one thing in common – they are very irritating to us as customers!!

So what is your initial reaction? The consensus feedback from the first blog post was that the top five were not a surprise. I am guessing that this list will receive a similar reaction. Whether they are a surprise or not, once again it is fantastic to get independent fact based validation of the things that we like least as customers. So let us look into a little more depth at each of the top five.

It is no surprise to me to see ‘poor’ customer service top of the pile. 46% of respondents cited customer service not meeting their expectation as irritating. Comments to bring this to life range from ‘being passed from pillar to post’; to ineffective issue resolution; to ‘unanswered correspondence’; to just plain lack of service altogether. It is clear that if we do not feel that the organisation we are interacting with looks after us from a service perspective, it is significant enough for us to be irritated. Irritated customers are not happy customers. Unhappy customers are not likely to remain customers for long.

What is important about this ‘finding’ is that it confirms and validates why organisations MUST continually invest in improving and evolving customer service – NOT just see service as a cost centre that can continually be squeezed – does that sound like a rant? Maybe it is!!

Pedants may argue that number two in the list of most irritating things is really just another element of customer service. Employee attitude and knowledge – or poor attitude and lack of knowledge is a fundamental part of the service experience, but I have separated it out as so many respondents clearly cited employee behaviour as their major irritation (often as well as the overall service offered). 37% of respondents in fact used words such as rude, ignorant, unprofessional, apathetic, un-knowledgeable, flippant, surly – I could go on. This category of feedback received the most vociferous comments of all.

The way employees behave and act has an enormous effect on our perception of the organisation we interact with. This research clearly shows that the wrong behaviours are evident far too often. I can sum up the responses to employee attitude in a single image:

Third on the list of ‘things we want’ was for organisation to ‘keep their promises’ – so perhaps it is no surprise at all to find ‘not keeping promises’ third in the list of most irritating things according to 30% of respondents. We just want companies to do what they say they will – if you do, you will not irritate us – it is that simple. I often wonder why organisations focus on glitz and glamour – trying to wow us, when they fail to do the most basic things right. How often has a business promised to call you back and then not. How often have you had a commitment for something to be done within a certain timeframe only for that timeframe to be missed. It is not good enough and it irritates us!!!

Making fourth spot is a general lack of customer focus. 18% of respondents are irritated by companies who care more about themselves than the customer. Not valuing customers or relationships; too internally focused; not knowing or caring who I am; were among words used to describe this. What interests me is that companies think we, the customer, do not know that they are only interested in the numbers on their spread sheets rather than the smile on our faces. Profitable organisations are those who focus on meeting and exceeding customer expectation – and consistently do so. I am always reminded by the amazingly appropriate ‘quality vision’ used by GE Capital at the end of the nineties and early noughties:

continuously satisfying customer needs profitably

Never has a mission made more sense to me – I hope they still use it. It is possible to focus on the customer and make money – and lots of it. In fact it is the best and most sustainable way to grow  a business. I wish more would try it.

13% of respondents cited poor design as an irritation – concluding our top five. Correlating with number five in the list of things we want, ease of doing business, we are annoyed when the systems, processes and journeys are too complicated, clunky, or just do not work. Poorly designed websites were raised most, especially those with links that do not go anywhere. Additionally, contact processes with unclear direction and hand offs raise many an eyebrow. Basically we crave ease and simplicity. If your systems and processes are neither, you will irritate us – most likely to the point where we will not use them or you again.

Dis-honourable Mentions!

Although not making the top five, I thought I would highlight one or two other irritations that I know you will be interested in (although all were cited by less than 10% of respondents):

• Waiting – we do not like it – delays; queuing – very irritating
• Miss selling – up selling, cross selling = no selling!
• Automated phone systems – I can hear the groans from here – despite radical improvements over the years, we still seem to not like them very much!!

So we now know the top five things we want, and the top five things to irritate us. In theory if you are good at doing the things we want, and good at not doing the things that irritate us, you should have an incredibly successful company!! If anyone is willing to do an open and honest self assessment, I would be delighted to share the results with readers of this blog.

Once again, let me thank the lovely people who shared their thoughts to make this research possible. Without them, I would not be able to share this with you. This is also not the end! One more post is to come – sharing the results of the ‘best’ companies to deal with, and answers to the questions regarding use of social media and recommendation.

I hope you are finding this research useful – I certainly am!!

What do customers really want? The top five most important things revealed

A few weeks ago, I decided to conduct some independent research. I have always been intrigued to know exactly what is most important to us as consumers, and up until now have used my professional experience, personal experiences and gut feel to assess what I thought to be the most important things. Thanks to friends, contacts and acquaintances, I am delighted to be able to put a little more ‘flesh on the bones’ to determine what is important – based on fact!

Before I reveal the results, let me give you a little background. In September 2013, I distributed a short survey to people within my networks on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. The survey contained five simple questions as follows:

1. What are the three most important things to you as a customer (consumer) of an organisation?
2. What irritates you most as a customer (based on recent experiences)?
3. Which organisations do you, or have you transacted with who deliver excellent customer experiences (in your opinion)?
4. Do you ever recommend organisations you have transacted with to friends, family or acquaintances?
5. Have you ever used social media (Twitter or Facebook) to interact with an organisation (when requiring customer service or help)?

In the first of a series of blog posts investigating the results, I am today exploring question number 1 – ‘what are the three most important things to you as a customer of an organisation?’. The results represent a sample of 240 people – a group of anonymous consumers to whom I shall always be very grateful. Future blog posts will look at the results of other questions from the survey.

So let’s cut to the chase!! What are the most important things to us as consumers? Although I asked respondents to list their top three things, I am actually a fan of focussing on the ‘top 5’. As such, I am excited to reveal the top five things that are important to customers (the clever reader may already have guessed from the headline image!):

Surprised? If you are surprised, I am hoping that these results may be of significance to you in some way. Whether it be to help you influence or change mind sets, or just set things straight in your own mind, having an independent source of research can be helpful. If you are not surprised, I hope you can use these results to validate what you have always thought, or add weight to what you have always said.

Analysing the results was challenging. The questions were intentionally open – leading to a wide array of responses which required interpretation. I am sure that research experts will be able to pick holes in my method – yet I am confident that the results are a very accurate reflection of the thoughts of the respondents who themselves are a representative sample of consumers. I therefore would like to walk you through the top five and provide a little more explanation.

First place and winner of the gold medal goes to what can be best described as the ‘financial’ aspect of a customers relationship with an organisation. 48% of survey respondents  cited value for money, cost, price or competitiveness as one of their three most important things. I have intentionally grouped these elements together – yet it is important to understand that they are all actually different.

Many see ‘value for money’ as being something more significant than just cost or price. Consumers want to feel that the whole experience has been of value. Whether price is high or low is not as relevant as the consumer perception of value. For example, a two bedroom terrace house in London will be significantly more expensive than the same type of house in Rochdale. Despite the disparity in price or cost, they are both perceived to be value for money in their relative markets.

This does not mean price is not important. Research conducted by BT showed that 85% of consumers always shop around to get the best prices – my independent research appears to validate this. We are living in a society where disposable incomes are dropping, and price is a significant factor in purchase decision-making. The important takeaway from the findings of this research is to ensure that you consider pricing and competitiveness from a value perspective.

The silver medal goes to customer service. There is still confusion around the difference between customer service and customer experience. This recent blog post helps to clarify the situation – http://ijgolding.com/2013/10/23/customer-service-or-customer-experience-what-exactly-does-customer-experience-mean/.

Customer service is vital to us as customers – from pre sale, to post sale. 47% of survey respondents stated that customer service was one of their three most important things. The ability of organisations to help consumers at every stage of the journey is critical here, including the ability and willingness to sort out issues as they arise.

The bronze medal goes to something that I have increasingly seen become important over the last five years. As Group head of Customer Experience at Shop Direct Group, I consistently saw the inability to keep customer promises as a key driver of customer dissatisfaction. The research backs this up – 32% of respondents stated reliability (or keeping promises) as one of their top three things. We want and need to be able to trust organisations to do the things they say they will. Where promises are broken, it will have a fundamental effect on our relationships with companies.

This leads to an important question – do organisations know how reliable they are? Do they know how often they do break a promise, or not do what they say they will? Understanding your own internal capability and aligning it to customer perception can seriously aid your understanding of the elements of your customer journey that need to be improved.

Just missing out on the medals are ‘quality’ and ‘ease of doing business’. 29% of respondents cited product and/or service quality as one of their three most important things. Essentially, we need the things we are buying to be of the quality we expect. The link to price and value is vital . We still expect quality, even in a world where we expect competitive prices.

23% of respondents said that the ease of doing business with an organisation is one of their three most important things. This is of no surprise to me, as it would make my personal top three. We want websites to be easy to navigate; products to be easy to access; for it to be easy to contact an organisation. In our increasingly automated and mobile enabled world, we crave simplicity – organisations who make it difficult to interact, will ultimately lose out – as this research suggests. If I repeat this research in a years time, I would not be surprised if ‘ease’ were to move up the rankings.

So there you have it. The top five most important things to us as consumers. If you want to know what other ‘things’ missed out on the top five, drop me a line and I will fill you in! Now you know the top five, how does your own organisation measure up? Are you good value for money? Do you deliver ‘great’ customer service? Are you reliable? Are you easy to do business with? Maybe you could conduct a self assessment and let me know! Whatever you choose to do, it would be great if you would consider sharing your thoughts on the research results.

Finally, another huge thank you to all those who contributed to the research. Your time is greatly appreciated in enabling me to produce such a valuable insight into what we want as customers. The next blog post on question 2 – what irritates us most – will follow soon.

Shhhhh!! Don’t mention Six Sigma – the truth behind the stigma

I am about to say something that I rarely do in public these days (I bet that got your attention!). I am a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt. There…..I did it. To those that do not know what this means, you are probably wondering what on earth I am on about. To those of you that do, you may be thinking ‘so what’. Please allow me to explain.

Over the weekend I had a little time to review my Twitter feed. I have been following a very clever man by the name of Ted Coine (@tedcoine). Ted describes himself as a ‘business heretic’ and is named as a Forbes Top 10 Influencer. With over 270 thousand followers, his excellent musings and submissions from guest authors get to be seen by many people all over the world. This particular weekend, a blog post from one of his network of experts, Dr Andrew Smart, caught my eye. This is the tweet that got my attention:

A top post of 2013 – Six Sigma Is Draining Employees' #Creativity http://t.co/7NbO08oSCn #humanbiz #leadership

— Ted Coiné (@tedcoine) September 15, 2013

Hopefully you will all take the time to read the blog post he refers to, especially if you have been involved in or around business improvement/customer experience programmes that have used Six Sigma methodology in some way. The post is excellently written, and essentially see’s Andrew make the case for Six Sigma ‘programmes’ limiting employees and organisations abilities to be creative and innovative.

Before I get in to the meat of why I am telling you about this, I need to provide a little bit more background. I first became exposed to Six Sigma in 1998. I became indirectly involved through my wife Naomi. Naomi was working for GE, and like many business professionals around that time, was involved in the Jack Welch Six Sigma machine. Naomi was a Black Belt in a GE business looking at improving finance processes. She knew straight away that the methodology would appeal to me. Just over a year later, and completely coincidentally, I found myself taking up a Black Belt role in a different GE business.

We never intended to be a six sigma ‘couple’ – it just happened. Whilst Naomi moved on to other things after her Black Belt stint, I, as Andrew alludes to in his post, became hooked. I can categorically state that GE and its development of me as a business improvement professional changed my career – and for the better. It was the first time in my working life that something was explained to me that actually made sense. A set of tools and principles to help improve what we do as a business to better meet the expectations of our customers. It sounded so obvious, and I wanted to be a part of it. Six Sigma and its later association with Lean principles have underpinned everything I have done in business ever since. Now, as a customer experience professional, this is still the case. What I have learned from the methodology, is fundamental to my approach in improving the customer experience. So if that is the case, why am I so afraid/ashamed/unwilling to even let people know about it?

To answer this question, we have to delve deeper into what happened at GE and other corporations around the world in the nineties and early noughties. Jack Welch’s motivation behind the implementation of six sigma across the GE empire was in my opinion absolutely bang on. In their fast-moving industries and environments, it was essential that every business was able to understand what customers wanted, and how capable existing processes were of giving it to them. Six Sigma as a methodology ticked all the right boxes. Not only did the methodology work (it delivered millions and millions of dollars worth of PROVEN financial benefits, as well as happier customers), it also acted as an excellent management development programme.

Jack Welch

However (there is always one of those), there were many, and I mean many, issues with the way GE deployed their six sigma programme. In my opinion, it is the legacy of the deployment, and many similar ones that used the GE model, that has left an indelible stigma that many trained Six Sigma professionals find hard to shake today. People knew that to get on in GE, you needed six sigma certification. They knew that the better the certification, the more likely it would become that you may be eligible for a senior role. Likewise, a trend commenced whereby ex GE professionals applying for new jobs would cite all sorts of six sigma achievements and certifications on their CVs. In reality, much of what they claimed had never been achieved. When I was deploying a six sigma programme at a UK retailer, I reviewed countless CVs when helping to bring in new resource. At least 70% of the time, the person that came in for interview was nothing like the person described on the CV. All of this was helping to damage the reputation of both the methodology and the ‘real’ six sigma protagonists.

Not everyone saw the benefits of becoming a ‘belt’. GE’s approach in 2000/2001 was one of ‘you have no choice’. Jeff Immelt, on taking over from Jack Welch, decreed that a minimum percentage of employees in every GE business (I forget what the percentage was), MUST be certified as a Green Belt, Black Belt or Master Black Belt. At the time, I was a full-time six sigma trainer for GE’s reinsurance business. I trained hundreds of people all over the world who were taking on the knowledge because ‘they had to’. This led to many disaffected business professionals who just did not believe in the method – they were being forced to learn it and conjure up projects that were often of little importance. As they have moved on from GE, they can comfortably dismiss it as something of no value.

Today, the ‘big bang’ deployment approach a la GE is rarely seen. Hundreds of people doing attending training course after training course; conducting pointless project after pointless project, was never going to be sustainable. The big deployment made everyone believe that you had to follow a completely prescriptive framework for utilising six sigma methodologies, and every tool in the box had to be used. It made the method look complicated, time-consuming and frankly very irritating.

The sad thing is, that whilst I completely agree with what I have just said, I still believe that six sigma is of HUGE benefit to organisations all over the world. If it is applied correctly, by the right people in the right way, it can transform the effectiveness (capability in six sigma speak) of your business processes. When Ted says that the use of ‘process’ is wrong – I cannot disagree with him more. Everything we do is a process whether we like it or not. Every customer journey is enabled by a series of underlying processes. It is our ability to use the method and tools that comprise it appropriately that is the key. A Six Sigma expert is not one that can fill out a set of spreadsheets and tick a number of boxes. An expert is one who can use what is needed at the right time to have the greatest impact. Sometimes the application of the skillset can be remarkably simple.

I do not tell people that I am a Six Sigma professional because they do not really need to know. I do not want them ‘thinking’ the wrong things about me. The astute business leader will want to know why I do the things I do – I may then tell them where a lot of my actions come from. Six Sigma changed my life – it is something  will always thank GE for. Never write off a method that has delivered so much value to so many people and so many businesses. If you disagree, you need to talk to people who applied it correctly.

‘You could win £500!!’ Should you incentivise customer feedback?

I have often wondered about the pros and cons of incentivising customer feedback. I am not sure what kind of person this makes me – hopefully one that is forever focussed on all of the things around us that can and will contribute to customer experiences being made better!

Capturing customer feedback is not easy. In fact, some organisations find it very difficult to get customers to tell them what they really think. Some would argue that this is because customers ‘do not care enough’. Some would say that particular organisations do not have a large enough customer base, and as such, opportunity to capture feedback is limited. Customers might point out that they never see what happens with feedback that is provided, so why bother!

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a blog post about the retailer Boden. They had used Facebook as a means of capturing feedback about their brand. It was a very economical, quick and effective way of doing it. However, 8 months later, and we as Boden customers have no idea what they did with the feedback – this is despite me contacting Boden directly to ask (they did not respond). You can read the full blog post here – http://ijgolding.com/2013/01/10/hats-off-to-you-boden-but-it-depends-what-you-do-with-the-insight/

Boden’s actions, or inaction in this case, will ensure that a proportion of customers who gave feedback in January may not do so again. This will only make it harder for them to continuously capture feedback going forward. It is this word ‘continuously’ that is vital here. Capturing feedback from customers MUST be a regular, continuous process. You cannot capture feedback today and never ask again. Unfortunately, customers are tricky things – what they want today, may be completely different in six months time. It is critical to CONTINUOUSLY understand customers needs over time.

If you do not capture feedback effectively, it will become more and more difficult to keep the process continuous. This interesting blog post from Econsultancy, states 20 ways to capture feedback http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8109-20-ways-to-get-reviews-from-customers. The methods all point towards ways that can be used to encourage customers to feedback, thus helping you to maintain a continuous flow. Method number 9 is ‘incentivise me’ – it is this method I want to focus on.

One way of trying to ‘keep’ or ‘get’ customers ‘engaged’ with providing feedback is to incentivise them to give it. Many organisations do this. I recently took Jack, my 5-year-old son for a hot chocolate in Café Nero. On every table was a card. ‘Tell us how we did and you might just win free coffee for a month or an iPad’. Whilst Jack was tucking in, I pondered this. Will it really work? It certainly did not with me – I had no intention of being ‘coerced’ into giving them feedback when I did not really have any feedback to give. That was my instant reaction – I do not actually have anything to say, so why would I, other than trying to win something?

I suppose what I am trying to say is that I believe that incentivising feedback can (and I stress the word can) have the effect of artificially enhancing customer feedback. It is very likely that customers will give you feedback, just to be entered into a prize draw – not necessarily because they have anything to say. It is likely that feedback will be either positive or neutral than negative.

Capturing customer feedback serves a very important purpose. It acts as the external mirror to the organisation. It provides you with the reality of what customers think of your products, service and end to end customer journey. It enables you to understand WHERE in the customer journey you are failing to meet customer expectation. As a result, it provides you with the priorities for improvement (from a customer perspective). If you do not structure your customer feedback programme correctly, or use methods that have the potential to skew the results, you run the risk of failing to identify the correct priorities for improvement.

Last week, we had a family trip to Pizza Express. The service was actually first class, and I was very impressed. At the end of the meal, I was handed a card (which you can see below). I have not seen this in Pizza Express before. Like Café Nero, Pizza Express have decided to start incentivising customer feedback – in this case, you get a free portion of garlic bread or dough balls, just for giving the feedback! They will also enter you in to a free prize draw. I actually think the garlic bread and dough balls ‘giveaway’ is a smart move – a low value item that may not just get you feedback but that could also get you to return. However, I think it is unnecessary to add-on the £500 gift card as well.

So how else could brands like Pizza Express capture feedback, without having to use incentives? The most important thing for any business is to get real feedback that allows you to take the appropriate action. Providing customers with simple, quick and instant methods to encourage customers to say what they think when they are thinking it is important. Maybe giving customers a tablet computer with a short survey to complete at the same time as receiving your bill could be a neat way for Pizza Express to do it. They are likely to get very high participation, create a little bit of theatre, and keep everyone busy whilst the bill is being paid. There would be no need for incentivising anyone. Additionally, they would be getting feedback at the point the experience is completely fresh in the mind – this is when it is most accurate and real.

So the next time you are asked to complete a survey to receive an incentive, have a think about exactly why you are taking the action you are. Are you doing it to get a prize, or because you actually have valuable feedback to give? Are you not doing it because you do not want to be ‘bribed’? Incentivising feedback can work, but be very careful how you do it, or the feedback you get will not give you the real representation of your customer journey that you need.

As always, your thoughts on comments on this blog post are very welcome.

‘Brilliant Basics or Magic Moments?’ What should you be focussing on?

‘What does my business need to do better?’ A pretty simple question that many business owners, shareholders, boards of directors, senior managers and employees all over the world will ask, or be asked on a regular basis. Although the question is simple, the answer is often not. A number of methods, tools, techniques and strategies have, and continue to be deployed to assist in responding to the question – some have worked very successfully, some have failed dismally.

As a customer experience professional, it is always my hope that something is added to the end of the question. That something is ‘for customers’ – ‘What does my business need to do better for customers?’. This sounds pretty obvious, but in reality, what is obvious, is not always what happens. Other variants to the question include ‘What does my business need to do better to give my shareholders a better return on their investment?’; ‘What does my business need to do better to increase profits?’; What does my business need to do better to save money?’ Sadly, the variants are probably still more common than my suggestion.

Many business leaders now recognise that doing things better for customers will lead to improved top and bottom line, greater rewards for shareholders, and happier, more motivated employees. But what exactly is it that they should focus on when it comes to ‘improvement’.

Have you ever heard of the phrases ‘brilliant basics’ and ‘magic moments’? They are not new, and not phrases that I can claim as my own. However, they explain very neatly what any organisation could/should determine as their focus in attempting to meet and then exceed customer expectations or needs. How good is your business at getting the basics right – the things that your customers just expect you to do, and to do very well every time you do it. Meeting your promises; doing what you said you would do – these are the basics of your customer journey that you must and need to do brilliantly.

Understanding how ‘capable’ your customer journey is  at doing what your customers ‘expect’, will allow you to understand how brilliant you are at delivering ‘the basics’, or not as the case may be. You can read about my recommended approach to measuring the customer journey in this blog post – http://ijgolding.com/2013/04/30/do-you-know-the-facts-4-steps-to-deploying-a-customer-focussed-measurement-system/.

Getting ‘the basics’ right is not as easy as it may seem. It is why methodologies such as Six Sigma came in to existence. In fact the principle of ‘continuous improvement’ centres around your ability to know how good you are at doing something today, and understanding what elements of whatever it is you do, need to be addressed to get better at doing it. Although Six Sigma is no longer the business ‘fashion statement’ it was in the 1980’s and 1990’s, it is still as valuable an approach to improving your customer journey and its enabling processes as ever.

I was inspired to write this blog post as a result of seeing an advert on TV. The advert was about an App that was launched by Barclays Bank last year. The App is called ‘Pingit’ – you can view the advert here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9letFy7a0c4.  I do not have a problem with the App itself – the Pingit application is a demonstration of continuous improvement in the Barclays customer journey. It has created a simple way for customers to transfer money – potentially leading to an even better solution that enables customers to pay for goods using their mobile phone. The App is a great example of a ‘Magic Moment’ – something that differentiates the Barclays Bank customer journey from other banks. It is not something that customers traditionally expect from the Barclays customer journey – it is an added bonus. Here is the Wikipedia page on the Pingit App – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barclays_Pingit.

If you watch the advert, you will notice that it makes a very big deal about the fact that you can transfer money with a photograph/image. I remember hearing about this on the radio last week. At the time, it instantly made me question why anyone would want to transfer money to someone with a photograph/image. It seems to me to be completely unnecessary, and not what I would describe as a Magic Moment. The danger of creating and designing things for customers is that you go a step too far. You end up creating something that makes your customer question why you have devoted time and money to creating something that is unnecessary. You potentially put your customers in a position where they start to question why you are playing around with the unnecessary, whilst not fixing ‘the basics’.

Below is a small selection of reviews of the Pingit App (Android) – you would hope that ‘the basics’ being highlighted by customers as not working well, are the priority. Surely it would be better to advertise how the App is being made even better in response to customer feedback, rather than focusing on the inane pointlessness of sending payments with a photograph or image?

I am not saying ‘Magic Moments’ are not necessary. I actually think quite the opposite. Magic Moments are the very special things that occur throughout your customer journey that your customers will remember. If you do the basics well, your customers should not even notice. If you do the basics badly, they will remember forever. You want your customers to remember the magic – for it is a combination of not having to worry about the basics, and the sprinkling of ‘fairy dust’ that will inspire you to come back for more.

Last week, I noticed a re-tweet about Metro Bank. It is now common knowledge how customer focussed they are. The content of the tweet caught my attention immediately. The tweet said something along the lines of:

‘Opened an account with @Metro_Bank and found a random £3 in my account. The note on my online statement says “Coffee on Us”‘

Now that is a nailed on example of a ‘Magic Moment’. It is not something that Peter expected, but you can bet your bottom dollar he will never forget it. You can almost guarantee that he will tell a lot of people about it. Metro Bank is still a very young company. It is an organisation that was designed with customer service as its number one reason for being. They are already pretty good at delivering the basics. As a result, they are able to focus on delivering Magic Moments like these that make them stand out very clearly from the crowd.

All businesses need a combination of ‘Brilliant Basics’ and ‘Magic Moments’. Doing the basics brilliantly is essential (not optional). The better you do the basics, the more likely it is that your customers will be able to trust you and rely on you. The better you do the basics, the more likely it is that your customers will keep coming back. Get the basics wrong, and you will have a hard time holding on to them. If you do not know how good you are at delivering the basics, you need to find out – and fast.

Magic Moments are the ‘fairy dust’ to sprinkle over the basics of your customer journey. They are your differentiators. A company that does the basics brilliantly, but without any magic, may lose customers to companies that do. If two coffee shops are on the same street, two doors apart and serve the same brand of coffee in the same environment – one has free Wifi and every now and then gives a little treat to regular customers (like a free coffee or biscuit), whilst the other does not – which coffee shop is likely to be more successful?

Barclays Bank, like many of its competitors (Metro Bank apart), has been through a turbulent period in recent years. This article in the Telegraph summarises it nicely http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/9969642/How-it-all-went-wrong-at-Barclays.html. Would it not be better for Barclays to rigorously get the basics right and restore trust and confidence with its customer base, rather than focussing on mass marketing a Magic Moment with a little bit of unnecessary sparkle? I certainly think so. What about you?

Do you know the facts? 4 steps to deploying a customer focussed measurement system

A few weeks ago, I introduced my perspective on the significance of a customer experience framework and how it can help an organisation to focus its customer experience efforts (http://ijgolding.com/2013/03/26/strategy-measurement-people-a-simple-framework-for-managing-customer-experience/)

The framework I personally deploy when working with an organisation has three core components – STRATEGY (or proposition); MEASUREMENT (or facts); and PEOPLE (or engagement and advocacy). In this blog post I want to expand on the importance of the MEASUREMENT component, and how you can go about arming your business with THE FACTS it needs to become truly customer focussed.

Firstly, let me just clarify why understanding the facts is so fundamental to any organisation that aspires to have a customer focus. All businesses, large or small, B2B or B2C, possess a huge amount of data. Businesses use this data to produce report after report and KPI after KPI. Senior leaders use these reports and KPIs to run their businesses. They will use them to determine the performance of their staff. They will use them to determine the performance of the business strategy. From my experience, much of the time, the reports and KPIs that are produced in great number are generally missing something quite vital – any link to the customer!

To test this statement, and what I am saying I have experienced, let me ask you three important questions:

1. Is ‘customer’ on the agenda of your regular business meetings (from board level down)?
2. Is a customer metric(s) included in your performance management process and/or incentive programme?
3. Are the metrics used to measure business performance related to anything the customer would deem important?

If you have been able to answer yes to these questions, you are definitely in good shape when it comes to deploying what I would describe as a customer focussed measurement system. If you cannot answer yes, or know of organisations that cannot, you will understand what I am referring to when I describe organisations who make decisions ‘without having all the facts’.

Organisations who do not know all the facts, or who have the ‘customer piece of the jigsaw’ missing, are taking a big risk. They will be reacting to issues not fully understanding what the cause of the problem is. They will be making judgements as to what customers want and need. They will potentially be investing money and resources in products and processes that are not significant to their customer. It is not a surprise that the organisations that usually tend to fail are the ones who have not understood what it is they need to do to continuously meet their customers’ needs.

Implementing a customer focussed measurement system as part of a customer experience framework will complete the often missing piece of the jigsaw. It will provide invaluable insight and understanding into what it is the business needs to focus on to improve customer perception. So how do you do it? Let me talk you through the four steps to deploying a customer focussed measurement system.

STEP 1 – UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Before you are able to implement the right customer focussed measures, you must first understand what it is you are measuring! It has become very fashionable over the last two to three years for companies to create customer journey maps. Visualising and understanding the customer journey is a very important step in any customer experience framework. Understanding the journey and the key touch points or ‘moments of truth’ within it allows you to understand what it is that needs to be measured. Customer journeys can be very simple and very complicated. I always advocate the ‘keeping it simple’ method. Here are two high level examples of ‘getting started’:

Once you understand the key ‘stages’ of your journey, you can then drill down to the next level – identifying the touch points or moments of truth. Once you have done this, you are ready to move to step 2.

STEP 2 – UNDERSTAND HOW CAPABLE YOUR BUSINESS IS IN DELIVERING THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Understanding your customer journey and the key touch points within it, enables you to start contemplating how able you are to measure the effectiveness of it. Going back to what I described earlier on the subject of KPIs, how many existing KPIs in your business relate to the customer journey and the interactions customers have throughout it? Without needing to know the answer, I can confidently assume that many of you reading this will not be able to answer this question positively. Implementing a customer focussed measurement system is not just about understanding customer perception. Your customer journey will deliver a CAUSE and EFFECT relationship. Your ability, or not as the case may be, to do what you are supposed to do at every customer interaction will be the CAUSE that will determine customer perception of that interaction. Customer perception is the CAUSE. Understanding how capable you are at doing hat you are supposed to do will enable you to a) determine how far away from ‘perfection’ your customer journey is, and b) act as a predictor of customer perception. If your capability drops this month, you will almost certainly be able to predict that customer perception will also drop the following month.

I strongly advocate the introduction of a customer focussed index that acts as your internal customer metric. The index known as the OMI or ‘operational measures index’ allows you to measure the gap between current state and perfection – perfection is defined as the level that you aspire to get each customer touch point to. If the OMI were to be 100%, all touch points would be as perfect as you aspire them to be. Below is an example of how an OMI dashboard might look for a vehicle rental business (number of journey stages and metrics is dependant on the business):

STEP 3 – UNDERSTAND CUSTOMER PERCEPTION

Understanding customer perception is a step in deploying a measurement system that most people are relatively comfortable with – and as such, one I will not dwell on too much. Many organisations have customer feedback mechanisms in place. Whether they be driven by Customer Satisfaction (CSat), or Net Promoter Score (NPS), it is obviously essential to understand what your customer actually thinks about your relationship with them. It is important that you do measure the relationship as well as individual transactions. Aligning your internal metrics (step 2) with customer perception will allow you to have a clear understanding of what may be causing the problem. At the end of the day, one of the key objectives of any customer experience programme must be to identify what your priorities are to improve customer perception, which in turn will lead to greater loyalty, revenue and profit.

STEP 4 – CONTINUOUSLY IMPROVE THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

This all leads to the fourth step – and perhaps the most important. A customer focussed measurement system as I have described, will give your organisation invaluable insight. This insight will enable your business to clearly understand what it needs to do to better meet customer expectation. Embedding a continuous improvement programme to address the ‘priorities’ for improvement from a customer perspective will ensure that the insight you are capturing will provide the focus your business needs. Most pieces of work to improve a business should sit in one of two camps:

1. Keeping the lights on (infrastructure, technology etc..)

2. Improving the customer journey

If your business is focussing resource and investment anywhere else, it should question why. Continuous improvement in your customer journey is what will ensure the sustainability of your business. If you keep measuring the right thing, and addressing the priorities that come out of your measurement system, you will be constantly adjusting to the changing needs of your customers

So – 4 steps to deploying a customer focussed measurement system. It all starts and ends with the customer journey – just as your customer would like it to!! As always, your comments on any part of this blog post are most welcome.

STRATEGY – MEASUREMENT – PEOPLE: a simple framework for managing customer experience

Understanding, managing and improving the customer experience is a skill set that has led to the formation of a new profession. The proliferation of customer experience professionals has led to the creation and adoption of a variety of methods, techniques and approaches to putting the customer at the heart of the organisation.

Many ‘customer experience frameworks’ have been formed to help and guide businesses to understand what and how to achieve a customer focussed culture. This post explores how simple a framework for customer experience management can be, and looks at some of the varieties of framework on offer.

Firstly, I must point out that there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to choosing to adopt a ‘framework’. Depending on the ‘state’ of your business, it may not be appropriate to adopt a framework at all. For example, organisations that have very well established customer experience ‘cultures’, may find the structure of a specific framework unnecessary – businesses that are starting their evolution are far more likely to need the formality that a framework provides.

So what exactly do I mean by a customer experience framework? To explain, let me talk you through the framework that I use – and that is embodied by the image at the beginning of this post. In my opinion, all organisations that are looking to be truly and genuinely customer centric, can do so by embedding three core elements of a customer experience framework. The elements of STRATEGY, MEASUREMENT and PEOPLE will together ensure that the organisation is ultimately aligned to understand how well it is able to consistently meet customer expectation with a fully engaged and motivated workforce. I will walk you through the elements, one by one:

STRATEGY

The starting point for any business is to determine its ‘customer experience strategy’. This is a concept that is unfortunately lacking in many organisations today. The strategy will incorporate questions such as ‘what is our proposition?’; ‘why do customers transact with us?’; ‘why do customers come back (or not)?’; ‘what do we want our business to be for customers?’.

Defining the CX strategy is not that simple, but it is imperative. If you do not know what your strategy is, your employees will not know – and your customers will certainly not know. Not knowing your strategy means that employees do not know what direction they are going in, and customers are unlikely to know what to expect. The result is that you will fail to meet customer expectation more than you will meet it.

Businesses that have very well-defined CX strategies are not always the ones you expect. I always argue that Ryanair…..yes Ryanair…..have a very well-defined strategy. It is very well-defined because it is so clear and evident to the consumer and employee. We all know who Ryanair are, what they offer (or not!), and how they work. If you do not buy in to the Ryanair proposition, like me, you will not transact with them. However, millions of consumers do, because they are prepared to accept the proposition for the price that is offered. Ryanair meet customer expectation far more consistently than other, more ‘up-market’ airlines.

MEASUREMENT

Once your business has a defined strategy, then next element of my suggested framework must be assessed. I call this element MEASUREMENT. If you know what your proposition is, you should then be able to continuously MEASURE how capable you are of delivering it. Measurement is the part of the framework where you complete the ‘customer’ piece of the jigsaw. It is where a business must consider what insight or fact is necessary to help understand whether or not you are capable of giving customers what they want and need.

I split measurement into four bits. To measure how good you are at doing something, it is first necessary to determine what that ‘something’ is. It is this stage of the framework where it is necessary to have a clear understanding of the ‘customer journey’. Customer journey mapping is a topic that could form a blog post in its own right. It can be as simple or complicated as you need it to be. The key is that you are able to identify the customer touch points, or ‘Moments of Truth’, in the end to end customer journey. These are all the points in your customer journey where a customer directly interacts with you. Once you know this, you are then able to identify what I call ‘internal capability’ – how good do you think you are at delivering the ‘Moments of Truth’?

Measuring customer facing processes is sadly all too uncommon in businesses. Organisations that have not thought about what they do as a ‘customer journey’, are most likely to measure internally focussed processes that are more likely to benefit the internal stakeholder, more than the customer. Creating a transparent view of how capable your customer facing processes are is critical.

Once you have measured the internal view, it should then be possible to correlate it with the external view – what does the customer think. This is where all forms of ‘voice of the customer’ measurement come in to play. Whether you choose CSat, NPS or Customer Effort Score, what is important in this stage of the framework is to be able to capture the true effect of what your journey delivers – customer perception. Granular customer feedback mechanisms will enable you to determine where in the journey the customer thinks your problems are. being able to align this to your internal measurement is the key to determining ‘priorities for improvement’.

This is the final bit of the MEASUREMENT stage of the framework. Measuring is important – but it is a means to find out what it is you must IMPROVE. Continuous improvement of the customer journey is what this stage focusses on. It will show you where you are today, and how far away from achieving your strategic goals you are. A continuous improvement plan will then plot you on the course to closing the gap.

PEOPLE

The third stage of my proposed framework is what I will always describe as ‘the most important, but most difficult’. It is very difficult to achieve strategic goals, and/or improve a business, unless or until that business has fully engaged people. Engagement is important to any organisation, but in the terms of a customer experience framework, just being engaged with your job is not enough. A few years ago, O2 – a business that many forget used to be BT Cellnet – invented the principle of the O2 Fanbook. They believed that for their customers to become fans of O2, their employees must become fans first. It is a simple concept that resonates so well. For a business to be truly customer centric, it must have people who care. It must have employees who are passionate advocates of that business. They have become advocates because they believe in he product; the strategy; the customer. They know that the organisation cares for them, and in turn they care for the organisation.

Richard Branson tweeted recently that ‘your employees will treat your customers in the way you treat them’ – wise words from a business legend. Ask yourself the question – are you a fan of the business you work for? People engagement and advocacy is all about the CULTURE that underpins the organisation. This is why it is often so difficult. Changing an organisational culture is not a quick fix. It can take years, and it requires strong and committed leadership.

This customer experience framework works. I can say this as I have deployed it in a variety of businesses – B2C and B2B. But as I said at the beginning of this post, it is just one way of approaching the issue of customer experience management. Below are a variety of other frameworks that are equally as applicable. It all depends on your preference. The web link for all of the featured frameworks is featured below each image:

http://www.customerinput.com/customerexperience/framework/

http://www.foviance.com/what-we-do/our-approach/customer-experience-framework/

http://howtoexperience.wordpress.com/tag/cem-framework/

http://www.nunwood.com/services/customer-experience-management/

http://www.xperience-associates.com/

If you are interested in the topic of Customer Experience, and would like to find out more, please do not hesitate to contact me at ijgolding@hotmail.com As always, your comments on this or any of my blog posts are very welcome.

Hats off to you Boden……but it depends what you do with the insight!

On the day that a stalwart of the British High Street, Marks & Spencer, announces poor Christmas trading figures, I think it is apt that I should write a blog about another British retailer. In some respects Boden is very different to M&S – it is predominantly a distance retailer (catalogue and web) – but many of Boden’s customers will have, or still do shop at M&S as well. So what it is about Boden that has compelled me to write this blog?

Without giving away too much personal Golding information, the inspiration came to me whilst lying in bed with Naomi last night. It is not uncommon for Naomi to catch up on everything on her iPhone, whilst I read a book on my Kindle. It is also not uncommon for Naomi to relay all the things she is catching up on whilst I am trying to read. On occasion this can get slightly irritating – reading and listening cannot be done at the same time – well not by a bloke like me!. However, Naomi is often reciting things that are very interesting – and last night, she was telling me what she saw on Boden’s Facebook page.

Yesterday, Boden posted a question – it went like this:

“We love you all of course! But what is it you love (or hate) about Boden?”

In fact, here is the Facebook post itself.

Now this seems like a perfectly legitimate question. In fact, it is a very good question that most organisations would like to know the answer to. Many organisations attempt to find out the answer by installing customer feedback mechanisms. Customers are regularly asked to complete online surveys that literally ‘pop up’ in front of their very eyes, or are often sent emails asking them to participate. We have all seen them, but we only ever get to see the things we say or feedback. It is not a common occurrence to see an organisation ask for feedback in this way so publicly.

Do not get me wrong – this is in no way a criticism of Boden – in fact quite the opposite. I take my hat off to them for so openly and transparantley asking customers what they think (it is also a very low cost way of capturing feedback) – in a way that anyone can see the response. I am sure it will be very interesting for other retailers to see what customers are saying. In the screen shot of the Facebook page above, you can see some positive feedback – but let me show you some of the negative. Here are some ‘negative’ verbatims:

Love the mini Boden clothes not over keen on your prices,do you look how much other companies are selling same kinda a item for ?

Love MB but hate the prices.

I’d love to buy more boden but the prices are way to high and the quality is not that great. I work for a family who live in boden so wash and iron your clothes on a regular basis. They lose there shape quickly and wool items bobble so much so my son only wore his very expensive skull jumper twice.

Pay full price for mini Boden then a week later you reduce the price 😦

Love the clothes but irritating when a catalogue arrives, go online to order and all out of stock . Happens frequently.

Dislike the super skinny models

Mini Boden clothes are lovely, but find the trousers are too short in the waist for my tall girls, we always have to go a size or two bigger to get the length and  they get builders’ bums, because they are too big around the waist.  Did not buy anything from the women’s range this winter as the colours and patterns seemed dull compared to usual and not so quirky. For the price, I want something a bit different.

I could go on – but you get the point. This is incredibly powerful and insightful stuff for the powers that be at Boden. I will state again here that they are VERY brave in gathering feedback in this way. Now they have done it, there is no going back. Despite being such an admirable thing to do, it will completely worthless UNLESS Boden demonstrate to their customers what they are going to do with the information. It is all well and good asking for it, but if they fail to do anything with it, the effect will be potentially detrimental to their business. On the other hand, if Boden take this insight and act on the key themes in a way that they can communicate back to customers – it could be an incredibly powerful tool for Boden to drive greater loyalty with their customer base.

Asking for customer feedback is now extremely common in all industries. Demonstrating to customers what you have done with the feedback they give is unfortunately not very common. Boden have an opportunity here to show the way – to lead from the front and be as transparent with their actions as they are in asking customers what they think. Do nothing though, and this will be a very damp squib.

So for now, I have become an even greater fan of Boden (Naomi and I are both Boden customers) – but I await with interest to see what will come of the simple Facebook post from the 9th January 2013.

As always, your comments are welcome.

Customer Feedback – Ten Tips to help you get it right

In May 2012, I was fortunate enough to be able to present at the inaugural Customer Experience Strategy Summit in London. I was asked to speak on the subject of the customer experience (CX) measurement – a subject that is very close to my heart.

On Sunday, Business Reporter produced a special report on the state of CX from the learning’s at that conference. The report was produced for the Sunday Telegraph. Within the report, I highlight my ‘top tips’ for measuring the customer experience. This blog highlights what my tips are.

As the report rightly states, ‘organisations are pumping money into keeping the customer happy, but how do they know if they’ve got it right?’ Here are my top ten tips:

1.       Know what you’re trying to achieve

It sounds obvious but the key thing is to understand exactly what you’re trying to find out from your customers so you can you pick the appropriate method and metric(s). What is it that you are trying to achieve? Different organisations have different objectives and there are different ways of measuring customer experience in order to achieve them. For some it’s Net Promoter Score, for others it’s CSAT surveys. If you don’t know what you want to measure, then gathering feedback from customers is obsolete as you won’t be able to appropriately use the data. It’s a waste of time and resources for you and your customer.

2.       Work out what numbers you want

Once you’ve chosen a metric(s) to be the key driver for change, communicate the magic number to all staff and help put strategies in place to help them improve it. Communication is the key. The score should become a company Talisman of sorts. Everyone needs to know the number – although not necessarily the ins and outs of why it’s that number – and the detail behind that score will help govern and stimulate change across the board.

3.       Get your facts right

Track the CX from start to finish so you can back up what colleagues believe, or assume, with concrete evidence. It’s important to determine what’s driving customer behaviour so you also know where to make changes. NPS alone won’t tell you this. For example, a negative score will only tell you something needs fixing – it doesn’t tell you what or where the “key moments of truth” are for your customer. Be prepared to bring in an additional metrics such as customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to help you drill down into the data. Also ensure that you are able to link what your customers think, with your own internal view of operational performance. Getting your facts right will ensure that you identify the right priorities for improvement.

4.       Consider outsourcing your research

Think very carefully about the pros and cons of both outsourcing and using in-house services. In-house can be cheap, quick and simple to implement, but the down side is that it’s not independent. Outsourced agencies are more expensive, but will provide you with unbiased figures from experts in the field of customer research. Many are accredited by the Market Research Society, which may also give you more kudos with customers and directors alike.

5.       Think like a customer

From a customer’s perspective, feedback forms can be complex, tedious and irrelevant, especially when they have no idea how you will use the information. But customer feedback is a crucial trigger for product and process improvements – so make this clear to customers and thank them for taking the time to tell you what they think.

6.       Listen to what the customer is saying

Forms can be long and complicated and customers are often not told why they are being asked for their opinion or how the information will subsequently be used. How often do you go back and thank them or tell them how the information was used? Feedback is vital for improvements, and customers won’t realise this if you don’t tell them.

7.       Stick to your guns

Choose the right metric for your organisation and stick to it until you have a body of data to work with. This doesn’t mean you can’t run measurements in parallel with one another – it will soon become clear which measurements are providing you with relevant and useful data that drives performance improvements.

8.       Understand the numbers

Whatever the metric, you need to make certain that you understand the maths behind it, especially if you’ve outsourced to an agency. If you can’t explain it to your bosses, the data (and you) will lose credibility.

9.       Don’t rest on your laurels

Customer expectations are changing all the time, so no matter how high your feedback ratings, be prepared to re-evaluate what you are doing for your customers. Question whether or not you’re making a difference and is that difference the right one for your customer.

10.   Make customer service a priority for the whole company

CX metrics are now sophisticated enough to enable firms to report customer ratings to teams, process owners, and individuals. However, the metrics may not be relevant to everyone – especially support functions such as finance and HR. If you want your customer data to drive tangible improvements in CX, then that data has to be relevant to every single member of staff. If staff do not own or contribute to a process, they can certainly walk in the customers shoes and feel what it is like to be one.

You can access the full report via this link – http://business-reporter.co.uk/2012/07/customer-experience/

You can watch the recording of my presentation via this link – http://business-reporter.co.uk/2012/07/feel-the-pulse-of-your-people/

You are very welcome to comment on any of my blogs.

Customer Feedback – Why Bother?

This weekend I received an email from Starbucks. The title of the email was ‘My Starbucks Idea’. I was made aware of this initiative a couple of years ago – a genuine proactive initiative to involve customers in a discussion to essentially make Starbucks better. A tool to ensure that customer feedback is used positively and transparently so that customers could see the tangible effects of their feedback.

The feedback that this tool encourages is categorised into Product ideas, Experience ideas, and Involvement ideas. At the time of writing this blog, Starbucks have received almost 400,000 ideas from customers, many of which have become reality, and even if they do not, Starbucks take the time to explain why.

If you have not seen ‘My Starbucks Ideas’ you must take a few minutes to have a look – it is very impressive and a huge commitment from Starbucks to engage in a continuous conversation with their customer base –  http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/apex/ideahome

‘My Starbucks Idea’ got me thinking – why do Starbucks customers bother sending in their ideas? Why does any customer bother giving feedback?

To answer these questions, let us consider customer feedback tools in general. The majority of organisations around the world use surveys to elicit feedback from their customers. Whether they be online surveys through ‘web pop up tools’, email surveys, telephone surveys, surveys at the beginning and end of telephone calls through IVR systems, or even postal questionnaires, businesses around the world have gone survey crazy, wanting to know what customers think.

Additionally, companies conduct focus groups, interactive research sessions with customers, and even qualitative research where you watch customers behind one way mirrors! BUT the key question with all of these methods is ‘why do customers bother’?

In most cases, customers are giving us their feedback ‘out of the kindness of their hearts’. On many occasions, customers are so irritated or annoyed, it is their negative emotion that leads them to ‘download’ their feelings. In other cases, advocates or supporters of your brand are usually willing to say lovely things about you at every opportunity. But 99% of the time, the customer will receive NOTHING for the feedback they are giving.

Many consumers believe that by telling an organisation what they thought of an experience, the organisation will use that feedback to make the experience better – to act on the things that the customer does not think is very good – to improve what needs to be improved. BUT – is this really the case?

If you think long and hard about your own experiences of giving feedback – how many times can you say that a company has ever done anything with it – that you are aware of? Has a company you have ever given feedback to changed an element of the customer experience to the extent that you noticed? Has a company you have ever given feedback to told you what they did with the feedback?

Unfortunately, in the desperate rush to find out what customers think, I fear that we have perhaps forgotten to consider what the experience might be like of giving that feedback in the first place. The well over used phrase of ‘feedback is a gift’, leads me to think that it is the only gift we never say ‘thank you’ for.

What Starbucks have created with ‘My Starbucks Idea’ is a very different way of getting feedback. A collaborative way of getting feedback. A way of ensuring that customers know what is being done with the things they provide as a ‘gift’. It is clever. That is why Starbucks customers bother. That is why Starbucks customers care.

Why do customers bother to complete surveys for other companies? Your guess is as good as mine – maybe they are either deliriously happy, or at the depths of despair. But maybe it explains why the MAJORITY of customers who are asked do not bother. This ‘silent majority’ is the group of customers who will provide the tangible answers to what your organisation needs to do to improve, or stay ahead.

So the next time you look at your company CSat scores, or the monthly NPS results, just have a think about the difference the feedback that comprises the scores will actually make on the people who provided it. Ask yourself the question – why do our customers bother?

Starbucks are not the only company who proactively tell customers what they do with feedback – can you provide further examples by commenting on this blog?

You can see me talking about the importance of customer experience measurement at the Customer Experience Strategy Summit in London (May 2012) via this link – http://business-reporter.co.uk/2012/07/feel-the-pulse-of-your-people/