Frank Reactions - Customer Experience & Customer Service in the Digital Era: Recent Episodes
Tema Frank
Why is the car buying experience so awful? Year after year, customers have made it clear that they hate it. They hate the time it wastes. They hate having to negotiate and being left wondering if they got played for a sucker. And yet, that's the way most dealers still insist on playing it. Like every other industry though, the car selling business is about to undergo radical transformation. Not only will self-driving cars and car-sharing apps change the perceived need to own a car, but companies such as Hyundai Canada are experimenting with a direct-to-consumer car sales model that takes away the pain of today's usual car buying process. In today's Frank Reactions Podcast on Customer Experience interview, Tema Frank talks with Don Romano, CEO of Hyundai Canada.
I've begun my 16 months of world travel, and the customer service experience examples I'm sharing with you today cover some of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the world of customer experience. Today's examples include:
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Apartment rental agencies in Canada and in the United Kingdom
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Wineries in British Columbia
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A bathing suit shopping experience
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Insurance brokers.
With companies like LL Bean getting rid of their unlimited returns policies, and fraudulent product returns costing retailers billions of dollars a year, today we look a real-world research study that shows how organizations can turn returns into a profitable and positive experience instead of just an upsetting drag on revenues. Tema Frank interviews Dr. Necati Ertekin, Assistant Professor at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. There are important lessons for retailers in his recent paper, Immediate & Long Term Benefits of In Store Return Experience.
Dr. Ertekin notes that because we see returns as an unpleasant cost of doing business many retailers have their most inexperienced staff handling them. That’s a big mistake!
In most cases, the best a customer can hope for from such staff is that they’ll take your return without arguing with you. In a worst-case scenario, they’ll try to pressure you into replacing the return with something that doesn’t meet your needs any better.
Not surprising, says Dr. Ertekin, when you think about the incentives at play here. Most retail staff are paid on commission. If you return a product, they lose their commission. If they persuade you to exchange it, they can keep their earnings.
But for the retailer, that’s not the best option.
Pressuring a Customer is Bad
What the study showed was that if salespeople pressure a customer into exchanging a product instead of returning it, the customer is unlikely to come back and buy from you again. It leaves them feeling bad about your company.
Listening to a Customer is Good
But a skillful salesperson recognizes that when you are returning a product there’s a chance for them to better understand your needs. What was it about the first product that didn’t work for you?
If customers feel that the salesperson actually has their best interests at heart, there’s a good chance they will exchange the product, and often even upgrade to a more expensive one.
Competent Salespeople Turn Returns into Future Sales Too
In this study, they not only looked at the short term, they also looked to see what happened with customer loyalty afterwards.
Turns out that if the customer felt genuinely listened to and helped by the salesperson, whether or not they exchanged the return at the time, they were more likely to come back and buy from the retailer again. So there’s a long-term benefit as well as a short term one.
Retailers Must Change Their Training & Compensation Structures
As long as sales staff have only short term commission-based incentives that reward them for converting returns into exchanges, they’ll keep on pressuring customers.
And those customers will feel unhappy with the experience, so they won’t come back. The retailer suffers in the long-term.
So to change the situation two things are needed:
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Sales staff need better training. They need to become more skilled at empathizing and uncovering the true customer needs. That, combined with good product knowledge, will help them find a product that really is better for the customer, and leave the customer feeling happy instead of pressured.
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Compensation can’t be just on short-term sales figures. Customer satisfaction has to be brought into the formula when calculating sales staff pay.
Glenise Harvey worked for 28 years as a Grade 2 teacher before taking the helm at A&H Steel. In this episode she talks to Tema Frank about how and why she made the culture more kind and gentle, and how that has built a stronger team that can deliver better customer service.
When agricultural and fitness equipment retailer, Flaman Group, realized that it had a leaky sales funnel it discovered that many leads were lost due to poor customer service. In this Frank Reactions interview, VP Sales & Customer Experience, Steve Whittington, discusses what he did to change the culture and processes. In this episode Steve and Tema discuss:
• how he made the case to get his company investing heavily in customer experience improvement and training, and what a difference that made.
• the exact steps he took to get buy in across the organization and to help people up their customer service game.
Lots of great advice in here that everyone can use, regardless of the size of their organization.
I get that doing little things for customers than help you stand out from the crowd takes time. It takes thought, and effort, and often money. So it is easy to dismiss as not worthwhile. But the more competitive your industry, the more important those little touches become.In today’s Frank Reactions Podcast episode Matt Ruedlinger, owner of Triple R Marketing, and I discuss how much of a different those little touches can make in helping you stay in the game.
We’ve all heard it. Many of us have even been tempted to ask this question on a sales call.
The Sales Call Question You Should Never Ask
You are nervously wondering what you’ll ask when you go on that sales call, and some well-meaning person advises you, “Ask them what’s keeping them up at night.”
DON’T DO IT!
Maybe it was good advice once upon a time, but as Matt Dixon, co-author of The Challenger Sale, explains in today’s Frank Reactions Podcast interview, asking that question now — when information is so easy to find online — is just showing that you’ve haven’t done your homework before the sales call.
“You should already have a hypothesis about what’s keeping me up at night,” Dixon explains. Discuss that hypothesis with your prospect and then (once you can see that you’ve hit the mark) tell the prospect how your clients are solving that issue.
Give them insight that they didn’t have before. If you can do that, they will see you as the expert they need.
[This is part 2 of my interview with Matt Dixon. The first part focused on customer experience, and his book, The Effortless Experience.]
Marketing & Sales Must Work Together
It boggles my mind how, in so many companies, marketing and sales are still not only separate departments, but see themselves as rivals!
I’ve often thought about writing a book about this. (How about Marketers Are From Mars; Salesfolks Are From Saturn?)
The good news is that both sides are starting to realize that they need each other.
Depending on what stats you read (and on the industry) 60 -75% of the sales process now happens before the sales call. In fact, potential clients don’t want a sales call; they’ll call you when they are ready.
Insight Selling
“Insight selling,” says Dixon, “is an approach that requires both sales and marketing.”
“Part of the reason there was this rift between marketing and sales is that they just had nothing to collaborate on,” he adds.
To sell with insight means reframing the way the customer perceives their world. Finding the crucial insights that they are too thick in the weeds to be able to see.
Can Your Company Deliver?
To be effective at sales, your company first needs to look inward. Your marketing team needs to ask itself:
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Is what we are claiming really unique?
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Is it credible?
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Can we deliver?
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Is it defensible?
Once the answer to all those questions is yes, comes the time to develop the story to put in the hands of the sales department.
Can Your Sales Team Deliver?
Not all salespeople will be able to get comfortable with this approach to selling. Some may need to leave.
But with good coaching, many more can learn to be great insight sellers. Do your sales managers really know how to coach?
“Most sales managers confuse coaching with performance management,” says Dixon. They do “spreadsheet coaching.” This does not lead to effective sales people or successful sales calls.
What creates effective sales calls?
The messaging and the manager are the two most important things.
Get those right, and your growing list of clients will thank you.
If you missed it, check out part 1 of my interview with Matt Dixon: Does Customer Effort Score Trump Net Promoter Score?
Also, check out these episodes to learn more about s...
Matt Dixon makes a compelling case in his book, The Effortless Experience, that the popular Net Promoter Score (NPS) is nowhere near as useful as it claims to be.
When Bain & Co. introduced the NPS score they called the question “Would you refer us to a friend” the “ultimate question”; the only one you need to determine customer satisfaction and, ultimately, profitability of a business.
Ironically, the very reason NPS became so wildly popular demonstrates that Customer Effort Score (CES) may in fact be more powerful. Executives love NPS because it is so easy. It is about as close as you can get to “effortless” when measuring customer satisfaction!
When Dixon and I discussed the differences between the two scores in today’s podcast interview, he said that NPS is important mainly because CEOs like it. They like it because it boils down the complexity of customer opinion to one simple rating question.But by now even Fred Reicheld, creator of the NPS, acknowledges that the one question isn’t enough.
(To learn more about NPS see Are You Making This Net Promoter Score (NPS) Mistake? and Time to Stop Worrying About Your Net Promoter Score (NPS)? ).
On its own, NPS doesn’t tell you anything about why visitors gave the rating they did. Also, by defining ranking scores as high as 8 out of 10 as “neutral”, it loses many customers who are satisfied, but not ecstatic. Until I studied customer satisfaction measurement and realized that staff could be penalized if I didn’t rank them a 9 or 10, I almost never gave that high a rating.
Which brings up another problem: guilt ratings. Even if I’m not satisfied with the outcome, I’ll now sometimes give that top ranking if I feel sorry for the staffer. It’s not the server’s fault that the food was late getting cooked and that it tasted awful.
And, of course, the question “Would you recommend us to a friend?” often gets a low score not because the customer was dissatisfied but because the person answering doesn’t think any of their friends would be interested in such a product or service. We heard that often at Web Mystery Shoppers, where we always asked our testers why they gave the rating they did.
Dixon did acknowledge that NPS can be helpful for getting a pulse on the overall brand perception, but warns users to “be careful of overinterpreting what you get out of it.”
He argues that Customer Effort score is more useful for judging true customer loyalty. And a 3rd measurement, the CSAT score is good for asking about about satisfaction with the outcome of a transaction, rather than the process. For some categories of products or services, researcher Tim Keiningham argues that Share of Wallet will give a more realistic assessment of purchase behavior (see Why The Net Promoter Score Is Overrated (& What You Should Measure Instead))
There Is No “Ultimate Question”
In other words there is no “ultimate question,” at least not that we can figure out yet. Customer satisfaction, and its future impact on profitability from repeat and referral business, is not simple to measure or predict reliably.
You can get some benefit from using all of these measurement tools. I would argue, however, that ultimately true insight comes from the qualitative answers about WHY people have given the scores they have.
Perhaps once artificial intelligence gets to the point where it is really good at analyzing open-end...
Are Community Engagement Panels the Way of the Future?
I think it is great that our government wants to engage with the community and holds consultation meetings before making major decisions, I really do.
I care about my community. A lot.
But even so, I have to confess that I’ve never actually gone to one of those community consultation meetings.
I’ve thought about it, many times.
But when the evening comes and it is 25 below zero outside, who wants to leave a nice cozy living room to go sit in a community hall or school gym and listen to neighbours rant? Or if it is 25 above (Celsius. That’s 77 Fahrenheit, for my American readers) I’d far rather be out for a bike ride with my family.
Well, the City of Edmonton realized that, while there’s clearly a place for in-person meetings when it comes to community engagement, they needed a way to engage more of us. So a couple of years ago they started building the Edmonton Insight Community.
At a recent meeting of the Marketing Research & Intelligence Association (MRIA), the City of Edmonton’s Manager of Corporate Research, Mark Boulter, came to engage with the marketing research community, and tell us how they built their panel, which now has some 7,000 members, who have completed a total of about 120,000 surveys!
Today’s podcast episode is an interview I did with Boulter after that meeting.
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Advice for Building a Community Engagement Panel
- Start an e-mail list!
Don’t wait till you know for sure that you’re going to have such a panel. Boulter credits his predecessor with having had the foresight to start collecting e-mail addresses at events long before they knew they were going to create such a panel. That really helped the panel get off to a good start.
- Meet with every community group you can think of.
If you don’t have an e-mail list, you’ll have to start here. Even if you do have a list, you want to spend lots of time engaging with local community groups so they understand what you are trying to do and its value, and are willing to encourage their members to join.
- List the engagement panel’s sign-up URL on every government communication.
Boulter noted that the City also leveraged its 311 city information hotline, letting callers know about this opportunity to have ongoing input into City decisions.
- Do localized mail drops when needed.
When an issue is coming up that will affect one specific community, they will sometimes do a physical mailing to people in that neighbourhood to invite them to join the panel.
- Give prompt feedback on what you are doing about members’ suggestions.
One of the fastest ways to turn people off is to ask for feedback and then ignore it. Engagement is a 2-way street. People who are volunteering their time like this want to know that they are having an impact.
- Don’t pay participants, but sometimes have celebratory events.
Luckily, enough people care about their city that they are willing to volunteer their time to give you detailed feedback and insights. Paying them would not only make such a panel unaffordable, it would actually diminish participants’ commitment.
Does a Commanding Call to Action Send Customers Running Away?
We’ve all seen it. And heard it.
Call Now! Buy Now! Like us on Facebook!
The ads order us to take action. But do we obey?
Even worse: does that type of call to action do the opposite of what marketers think it does?
According to University of Alberta Marketing Professor Sarah Moore, it just might.
Even worse: the customers who get turned off by it are your best customers.
Your loyalists. Those who are truly committed to your brand.
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Enduring Love Versus a Fling
Dr. Moore’s research, along with many other studies, shows that there are many similarities between human relationships and human-brand relationships. There are the loyalists, who feel deeply committed to the brand, and those who have flings — temporary infatuation, maybe, but not an enduring commitment.
The way you talk to these different types of customers should not be the same.
Her research found that even in print advertising there are an average of 2 commands per ad, and I suspect that number is even higher online. Call now. Like our Facebook page. Buy today. Tell your friends.
You’d think that those who care about your company would be most likely to respond to such commands — they care about you after all, and would presumably want to help you — but it turns out that imperative statements actually get a very negative reaction from your committed customers.
Not only will they not do what you tell them, it is likely to weaken their sense of affiliation with your brand.
I remember when I was a kid and was about to unload the dishwasher. Just as I was about to start, my mom called out, “Tema, unload the dishwasher.” It got my back up, big time. It made me want to NOT unload.
Same thing happens when you try to command your committed customers.
What If You Command Your Uncommitted Customers?
Turns out that commands don’t work well for them either.
It won’t make them angry, the way it can with your loyal customers, but nor will it make them more likely to act.
So why are commanding calls to action so common?
Mainly, I suspect, because if others are doing it, we think it must work. And, until this research, we had no idea that it was actually upsetting our most loyal customers.
Does Saying Please Help?
OK, so apparently this bit does vary a little from the human-to-human relationship. While my back will be up if my husband tries to order me to do something, I won’t be as upset if he asks nicely. He has to show that he respects me and my time. But Moore and her colleagues found that saying please didn’t make a difference.
Does a Command to Act Ever Work?
Surely the direct marketers have done their research? That’s one of the fields of marketing that was data driven long before “Big Data” became a thing.
Well, yes, they have.
Moore’s research found that even your loyal customers will respond positively if you offer a compelling reason for acting. Call now because the sale ends at midnight. Buy now because seats are almost sold out.
Direct marketers always give a reason (or several).
With loyal customers, offering the reason can actually be seen as a positive — you are giving them insider opportunities for b...
Stop Thinking of Your Call Center as a Cost Center
Today’s podcast guest, Blake Morgan, started as a conference organizer in the call center world, so it’s hardly surprising that her views on customer experience dig into the call center.
But, as she stresses in our interview and in her new book, More is More: How The Best Companies Work Harder And Go Farther To Create Knock Your Socks Off Customer Experiences, there’s a lot more to delivering great customer experiences than having great staff in the call center.
The “call center” itself is no longer even an accurate term; a shrinking number of customers want to make phone calls. Instead, we talk about “contact centers”, which handle email, phones, social media, even text messages now.
Nevertheless, some key elements of the call center model are still important. Specifically:
- Recognize that your contact center is every bit as important (if not more so) than your sales and marketing departments.
Your contact center reps may be the first people your potential customers ever speak to.
They may also be the last, especially if things have gone wrong, and your reps don’t have the skills, knowledge or freedom to make them better.
- Not just anyone should work in a call center.
It is skilled work, which takes a lot of finesse to get right. Not everybody can cope with all the criticism from customers, nor with the high pressure, fast paced demands.
Hire carefully for your contact centers, and train well.
- On the flipside, everyone senior should spend time working in customer service.
If they don’t, it will be hard for them to stop thinking of their customer service staff as “overhead” or “expenses” instead of what they really are: an investment in long-term, profitable customer relationships.
- Pay your contact center staff well.
It has always struck me as bizarre that the people who probably have the biggest impact on long-term customer satisfaction get paid among the worst in many organizations.
As a result, call center turnover rates are huge: 30 – 45% .
Given how hard it is to find people with the right personality, and the time it takes to train them well, it makes way more sense to pay them better and keep them than to put up with the devastating costs of turnover.
Mentioned in this Episode
Morgan’s DO MORE Framework
A Zappos employee had the company’s longest customer-service call at 10 hours, 43 minutes
LitFest Alberta, Canada’s Original Nonfiction Festival
UX Camp, October 20 & 21, 2017
Disrupt HR Edmonton, November 1, 2017
Other Articles & Interviews about Call Centers and Contact Centers
How to Convince Top Execs That Your Call Center Is Worth It – Interview with Jim Rembach, of Beyond Morale
What Happens to the Call Center when People Stop Calling? – Interview with Kevin Krempulec , then VP and General Manager responsible for Canada of contact center technolo...
The last time I bought a car we had a very specific requirement. The vehicle had to be big enough that we could fit two bicycles inside.
We’d destroyed too many bikes by forgetting they were on the rooftop carrier, and my husband’s bike was too expensive to leave out for thieves overnight.
We started at the Toyota dealership because we’d been happy with our Camry.
First, it took a lot of effort to get a sales rep’s attention. They were too busy chatting with each other.
We had one of the bikes with us, and explained that we had to be able to fit two into the back. He started showing us cars with seats that didn’t even fold down!
I had to be the one to tell him that from looking around the lot I thought a Rav4 might work (but it would be close).
“Maybe,” he replied.
“Can we try it?” I asked.
“Oh.” He sighed. “I’ll have to go back in and find the key.”
Twenty minutes later he finally came back. The bike was a bit too long. He offered no suggestions for alternative cars that might work.
Needless to say, we did not by a car from that dealership (and I presume he’s no longer employed there, but that dealership has lost our business forever).
Car Dealers: Give Me A Reason to Come to You!
Today is Part 2 of my conversation with Bruce Kirkland, Dealer Principal of Lexus of Edmonton West. If you missed Part 1, you’ll find it at http://frankreactions.com/109. In that one we discussed:
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How starting a dealership when he had zero experience in that industry proved to be a real benefit (though it was tough at the beginning).
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The huge importance of culture training, and his 3 Pillars of success.
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How they’ve survived – even thrived – in a recession.
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And unique things his dealership does to keep customers incredibly loyal.
In today’s interview, we discuss:
The risk of disruption of car dealers by Amazon
Hop on over to Amazon Vehicles and you’ll see that they are ready to take on the car dealers.
For now they’re still lobbying for rules to be changed to let Amazon sell cars in North America, but, as we’ve seen from Uber, when an industry is ready for disruption, lawmakers aren’t going to be able to stall it for long.
So car dealers, like retailers before them, have to offer outstanding customer experiences if they want a hope of competing.
In Part 1 we heard about how Lexus of Edmonton has made its environment special, with touches like a grand piano played by local college students in the showroom, a well educated door greeter, a dealership dog, and on-site massage chairs. As Kirkland puts it,
That said, he’s not technology resistant.
The dealership is doing a test of staff using iPads, for example, and he’s already thinking about how he’ll defend against Amazon by, for instance, ultimately being able to bring a car to someone’s home and sell it to them on the spot — no need for the customer to go to the car dealer.
Great staff are key to great customer experiences
That’s no shock to anyone who’s worked in customer experience for a while or been a follower of this blog. Without happy staff, you won’t have happy customers.
I was surprised when Kirkland told me that he insists on hiring educated staff, with at least a degree or college diploma. It’s not so much about what they learned in school, but about their willingness to learn.
To be lifelong learners.
Fresh Thinking at This Lexus Dealership Leads to Growth & Incredible Customer Loyalty
Bruce Kirkland had no background in the auto industry when he was talked into setting up a Lexus dealership.
Thirteen years later, Lexus of Edmonton West is one of the most successful car dealerships in the country, largely because he didn’t have auto industry experience.
He came at it with a fresh perspective, and was able to challenge the conventional thinking about what a customer experience was “supposed” to be like in a car dealership.
In today’s Frank Reactions Podcast, Kirkland discusses how he shook up the business model, adding features like:
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an in-house spa to make the visit pleasant while you wait for your car to be serviced,
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a grand piano in the showroom, played by music students from a local university,
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monthly hosting of a charity event in the dealership, at no expense to the charity.
Fundamentally, the store’s success comes down to one core belief:
He quickly learned that the way things were “always done” in the industry had to change.
It made for a rough beginning, having to move old-guard salespeople out of the company and replacing them with people from the hospitality industry.
Culture is Crucial
Great customer experience starts with hiring people with the right attitude, and training them in a customer-focused culture.
“Culture training” happens every week at Lexus of Edmonton. And new staff are taught the 3 pillars of what makes the dealership successful:
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That everybody have an outstanding purchase and service experience.
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Look after guests as though they were guests in our home. Ditto for the people we work with.
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Give back to the community.
No Departmental Silos
Everyone who works at the company affects the customer experience, so it is vital that they all collaborate and value each others’ skills.
I wrote in PeopleShock about the auto dealer who’s shuttle driver had great ideas about how they could provide better customer service with fewer vans and drivers, but nobody wanted to hear what a lowly driver had to say.
Kirkland and his team understand that great ideas come from everyone, and he’s set up a culture where it is clear that the “unsung heroes” are every bit as important as the sales staff.
Many companies start running into silos and the related customer service problems when their staffing levels hit about 100 people. Kirkland’s shop is now at about 127, which is why it is especially important that staff are encouraged to go get to know the people in all the other areas.
Also in This Podcast Episode
We covered a lot of ground; so much so that I’ve split the interview into two parts. In this part, we also discussed:
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How they’ve thrived even during the recession. (We talk more about this in part 2 as well.)
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What happened when he tried to eliminate negotiation with customers and have all-in-pricing.
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Why you shouldn’t be afraid of a bad customer review. (And how you should deal with it.)
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More unique ways they’ve created a differentiated customer experience.
And stay tuned for Part 2, coming up in two weeks. To be sure you don’t miss it, why not subscribe to the podcast (on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts) and/or sign up for the Frank Ideas newsletter in the box below.
Why Should Anyone Come to Your Retail Store?
(This is Part 2 of my interview with Retail Prophet, Doug Stephens. Listen to Part 1 here.)
It’s tempting to believe that because e-commerce still only represents a small fraction of retail sales, the traditional retail store model is not really in danger.
When we see e-commerce icons like Amazon and Warby Parker setting up physical retail stores, it seems even easier to believe that traditional stores are still going to be the main places where people buy things.
Retail Prophet, Doug Stevens, author of the new book Reengineering Retail, disagrees.
In fact, he goes so far as to argue that maybe retail stores shouldn’t even be trying to sell products anymore!
Huh?
That may sound odd, but in this second part of our interview he gives more examples of new, experimental store models, and proposes a radically changed model for the retail store of the future.
[Tweet ““The purpose of retail is not to create an 80,000 sq foot warehouse with nice lighting.” @retailprophet”]
What is the Future of the Retail Store?
There are a few possible roles for the retail store going forward.
- Physical stores will be a place to test new concepts.
Kind of like a massive focus group. People will come into your store to try out new products, and you’ll be there to facilitate that, to observe what they do, and get their feedback on how to make even better products.
- Stores will be a form of advertising to drive people to your e-commerce website.
That’s already happening, and several companies have noticed that when they open physical retail stores they actually end up selling more online.
- Stores will be community centers.
People will come for the experience, not for the products. And retailers will earn their revenues from big brands who pay them to entice people into feeling a connection with the brand, rather that from customers who buy stuff.
What do you think? Is community building the future of the retail store?
The Advertising Industry Won’t Be Useful Anymore
In his provocative new book, Reengineering Retail, expert Doug Stephens argues that the whole point of advertising was to drive people to stores and then help them remember specific brands once they got there.
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But with new developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the 60 – 80% of our shopping which is routine, repeat purchases will come to us automatically.
And even new products will be brought to our attention by algorithms that know us almost as well as we know ourselves. We won’t have to go hunt for what we need or want, it will be served up to us — possibly even before we know we want it.
Advertising won’t be enough to break through the stranglehold companies like Amazon will have on most of our buying.
Most advertising agencies now are simply switching money from traditional advertising to digital, but that’s not working, says Stephens.
“We don’t want to see ads on Facebook either.”
People don’t want to engage with brands on social media. Sure you can bribe them into “liking” you, but that’s meaningless. Very few will see what you are doing on your Facebook page or Twitter feed, and even if you force paid advertising on them they resent it.
(Who hasn’t waited impatiently for the 3 seconds to pass so you can click “skip ad” and get to what you really want to see?)
Stores Need a Completely New Model
The advertising industry grew out of a need to drive people to stores, but soon traditional stores will also be a thing of the past, Stephens argues. What benefit will they offer over online shopping, especially as technology makes it faster and easier to identify, find and quickly deliver what you want?
In our interview he proposes turning the store model upside down.
The real reason people go to stores, even now, is for an experience. That experience can be the excitement of the mob at Walmart on Black Friday, or a place where teenagers can go to avoid their parents.
But unless more stores start figuring out how they can offer experiences people treasure, even the advertising industry can’t save them.
Retail Metrics Need to Change
Becoming a place where people go for experiences that can’t be provided online — experiences that are memorable and make you want to come back — may mean that stores are no longer about selling.
Products become secondary to the experience, and whether you buy them at the store or later online won’t matter.
So our current focus on sales per square foot no longer makes sense.
Stores will be about curating, community and story telling.
And, says Stephens, brands will pay stores to create those experiences, regardless of how little product gets sold in the store.
This is Part 1 of a two part interview. Subscribe to the podcast or the Frank Ideas newsletter to make sure you catch Part 2.
How Can Anything Be More Important Than Customers?
http://media.blubrry.com/frankreactions/content.blubrry.com/frankreactions/106_Jeff_Polovick_Driving_Force_final.mp3
Hey, I’m all about customer focus and delivering consistently great customer experience. The whole point of the blog and podcast is to help you do that.
But according to today’s Frank Reactions podcast guest, Jeff Polovick, founder of the Driving Force, there’s a crucial step that comes before it: creating consistently great employee experience.
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That’s easier said than done. In fact, as Jeff put it,
“The cultural part is way harder than the financial part.”
A while ago Jeff and I sat down for a long conversation about how the company he founded 38 years ago became a success by focusing first and foremost on employee satisfaction.
That focus has led to the Driving Force being named one of Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies (there’s a great story in the interview about the challenges of getting into the top 50 — they came 51st twice!) and one of Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures.
Anonymous Employee Surveys Are Vital
The company started doing employee opinion surveys about 18 years ago, and measures its progress year over year. Employees rate not just their satisfaction with the company, but also with their direct boss.
One interesting – and important – question: “How comfortable would you be going above your supervisor’s head if you had to?”
The fact is that most employee dissatisfaction results from a bad relationship with their immediate supervisor. Often the boss’s boss has no idea there’s a problem. So if employees don’t feel they can speak up, problems fester.
Of course a good employee survey will also identify problem supervisors if it is set up so you can look at the results by work unit. And if anyone actually looks at the results by work unit.
(I remember doing “post-exit interviews” for a national US employer. We discovered 3 problem managers who were causing most of the departures. But until my analysis, no one had looked at the data this way.)
At the Driving Force managers learn from the surveys how their employees feel about them. This can be a risk if the unit is very small, but even if you’ve got a half dozen or more employees, there can be enough anonymity to get valuable feedback.
In the interview, Jeff talked about how to deal with it if a small minority of employees give negative feedback, without having to know exactly who they are.
Other Tips About Employee Experience Surveys
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Keep them as short as possible. He said theirs is “down to” 26 questions. That still seems pretty long to me. On the other hand, he said they get a 98% response rate, so who am I to argue?
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Over time you will learn that some questions aren’t needed. Drop them. But be careful not to change all your questions or how they are worded because if you do that you won’t be able to track results over time.
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Simplify the rating scale. Do you really need a 1 – 10 scale?
Two Takes on Staff & Customer Experience Improvement
There’s nothing like a real holiday, disconnected from the Internet, to get you revved up and refreshed. I’ll tell you more about mine at the end, but first let me tell you about today’s interviews.
You get 2 in 1 podcast today!
Carolyn Galvin, Principal Customer Experience Analyst at Nuance Communications, Health Care Division
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I started using Dragon dictation software when it first launched, back in 1997. As an author, I spent way too many hours typing, and my arms were complaining. I had high hopes, but the program really didn’t work very well. Ditto for the first several versions — I kept trying them, desperate for something that would solve my pain! (The latest versions are soooo much better!)
To make matters worse, in the early 2000s Dragon didn’t have much competition, so we pretty much had to take whatever kind of pricing and customer service they threw at us. It wasn’t great. But now competition has heated up (Siri, anyone?), and that has driven the company to start improving customer experience.
In the first interview on today’s podcast, Galvin discusses the internal portal she’s developed to help share customer experience (CX) best practices, learning, and praise for staff who deliver great CX. (In the podcast I also mention the O Positive tool at Oxford Properties. It’s pretty cool. Check it out!)
When the company first got interested in CX improvement, Nuance made the mistake many do: it focused on customers, but forgot that staff are key to getting those improvements made. Now “we’ve realized that staff play a crucial role to get client engagement,” says Galvin.
It has also started working more closely with customers to really understand their needs, frustrations, and how they see the future for Nuance.
“Now we’re allowing our customers to lead us… instead of us telling customers where we want to go.” Carolyn Galvin, Nuance
It sounds obvious that you should listen to your customers, but it is so easy to slip away from doing so. Especially if you are used to being the only game in town. But nobody’s immune to competition now.
Jennifer Lee, Partner, National Retail and Consumer Analytics Practice Leader at Deloitte LLP
Most businesses are still struggling to connect the data dots and turn them into insight, says Lee.
One problem many businesses have is that they are trying to find and hire people who are both data experts and have the creative skills to turn the data into ideas that will help the business grow.
The reality, she says, is that trying to find that elusive geek/artsie blend in one person is about as likely as finding a unicorn.
Instead she advocates building “purple teams” that blend people from each skill set. The “blues” are the data science types and developers. The “reds” have a strategic focus and industry experience.
It isn’t easy managing a team with both types of people, but if you figure out how to do it, you’ll have a massive competitive advantage.
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This is a replay of one of our most popular episodes, first aired in April of 2016. If you missed it, have a listen; lots of good stuff in here!
If you’ve ever worked in customer service, there’s a good chance you’ve had to deal with cranky, unreasonable, lying (or at least, exaggerating) customers.
It can be sooooo frustrating!
And yet, we keep preaching that our front line staff have to be nice to customers. Be respectful. Be empathetic.
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Is that even a reasonable thing to expect of our staff?
The Point Is Not To Prove Who’s Right
Today’s podcast guest, Adam Toporek, author of Be Your Customer’s Hero: Real World Tips and Techniques for the Front Line, knows first hand about unreasonable customers: he’s spent many years in retail having to deal with them.
The trick, he maintains, is to give the customer the benefit of the doubt, but, as they used to say in nuclear disarmament talks “trust, but verify.”
He’s a strong advocate of documentation, because there are some customers who will try to take advantage of you. Ultimately you may have to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. Documentation will help you know when that time has come.
That said, when customers return products or want refunds or claim they’ve been mistreated, “the point is not to prove who’s right.” The point is to calm them down and try to turn the situation around.
So if you’ve got records proving that you had, in fact, left three phone messages for them and they insist you never called, you don’t want to get into an argument, but it may help to be able to say, “Well, our records show that we did leave messages at these three times, but I guess you didn’t get them, so now that we are talking, let’s try to get your problem resolved.”
Having the documentation will make you feel more secure and confident as you then flip the conversation away from arguing about who’s right and back to trying to find a solution that everyone will be comfortable with.
The documentation can also help prove the customer is right. Our memories and perceptions are not very accurate. We may firmly believe that we called the customer three times, when in fact, we thought about it several times but only actually called and left a message once. Having the documentation helps avoid exaggeration on both sides of the counter.
“It’s a balance,” says Toporek, “Sometimes you have to say no, but often small businesses go too far the other way.”
Empowering Employees To Really Help Customers
In the interview we also discussed the need to give customer service employees guidelines and training so that they know how to handle different types of customer problems, and what level of compensation they can offer without having to get permission. (Here’s a link to Adam’s extensive article on employee empowerment:
How a Chocolate Bar Turned Customer Service Expert Shep Hyken Into a Big Fan
Customer service expert Shep Hyken tells a story in today’s interview of walking into a hotel and being given a full chocolate bar and bottle of water when he checked in.
Nice little customer service touch, you think.
But the thing is, at the prices they were charging for the rooms, this would have cost them about 6% of the room rate! (Who knew that big name speakers don’t always get to stay at five star hotels?)
That’s a pretty big hit to the bottom line.
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Was it worth the cost?
In our social media era, absolutely. Why?
- It made the hotel visit memorable.
You wouldn’t think a little thing like that would make such a difference, but I felt the same way the first time I walked into a hotel that had fresh baked cookies at reception. I still remember the name of that hotel (Adara, in Whistler) and tell others about it.
A chocolate square on the pillow used to work, but now it has become so common that, even though we like it, that won’t be enough to wow us anymore.
Think about what you can do that would add a little touch to make a big difference.
- Shep Hyken speaks to thousands of people a year. The experience impressed him so much that he talks about that hotel.
(Sadly for them, he didn’t mention the name of it in this interview, but he probably has at other times, and he has definitely recommended the hotel to colleagues travelling in the area.)
- It uses the principle of reciprocity.
When people do something nice for you, you are more likely to do something nice for them. This special touch makes visitors much more likely to take time to do a positive hotel review on Trip Advisor, Yelp, or Booking.com.
- If it gets even one person to book a night who wouldn’t have otherwise, it has paid for itself many times over.
It doesn’t take a lot of word of mouth for those chocolate bars to help keep the hotel’s rooms booked.
Other Customer Experience Thoughts from Shep Hyken
We talked about the challenges of getting buy-in across the organization.
“If it doesn’t start at the top,” he warns, “it’s not going to work.“
Hyken’s 6 Ds of Great Customer Service
This 6-step process is key to having a good customer service culture, says Hyken.
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Define it. What does customer experience mean in this company? Develop common wording so everyone understands and talks about it the same way.
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Disseminate it. Make sure everyone in the company knows what the experience is that you are trying to create.
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Deploy it. Do a lot of training, and keep on doing it. “Customer service & experience training isn’t something that you did, it’s something that you do,” says Hyken.
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Demonstrate it. The CEO and other top leaders must show, through their actions, that they are committed to the organization’s customer experience goals.
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Defend it. Keep your eyes and ears open for chances to recognize and reward those who are doing it right,
Tema Frank's interview with Jeff Toister, author of The Service Culture Handbook.
In this episode you’ll find out:
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The 3 elements of a good cs vision statement
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Why you should NOT – according to Toister – consult with customers when developing a CS vision statement!
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The 1 question you should ask colleagues from all over your organization when you are developing your cx vision statement
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What “cultural artifacts” are and how they affect your efforts to improve cx
Retail Survival = Seamless Experiences
One of my favorite omnichannel retail stories is from Tesco in Korea. So when I spoke about changes in the retail world at the Seamless Africa conference a few weeks ago, I put up this picture and talked about it.
Tesco developed a system where they display store shelves on a subway wall, and tired commuters simply scan the items they want to buy. By the time their commute is over, the items are waiting for them at home.
Brilliant!
The speaker right after me was Vinod Bidarkoppa, Senior Vice President & Group Chief Information and Technology Officer at Future Group in India.
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Turns out he was the one who developed that program for Tesco!
Naturally, I couldn’t resist snagging him for an interview.
Bidarkoppa has worked as a Chief Information Officer (CIO) at large retailers and airlines, and overseen projects to move from purely bricks and mortar to multichannel or omnichannel.
Here are his thoughts on the changes happening in retail and how to make retailers more customer friendly.
Tesco was one of the early retailers to realize that multichannel was inevitable and make the necessary investments in technology to enable it. Says Vinod, it was “all about bringing tech conveniences to the hands of the customer.”
What’s holding retailers back?
Retailers worldwide are watching their traditional store sales erode. They know they have to change, but many aren’t doing so, or aren’t doing it well.
Why?
As we discuss in the interview, there are several factors that have to be in place to make the shift to omnichannel retail successfully:
- CEO buy-in isn’t enough.
Given the magnitude of the changes required, Board buy-in is also essential.
- Major technology investments are necessary
Although the cost of technology has dropped a lot in the past few years, it is still an investment. One that involves both significant risk and the likelihood of it being obsolete within five years. Like it or not, that’s the world we now live in. Think of it the same way you would of investing in new stores. It is not just an IT add-on.
- Silos = death
Customers don’t see the silos; they just see that the organization isn’t working for them. As Vinod put it, “all [customers] want is a super, super experience in a seamless way.”
- To end silos you must completely change your metrics.
The behaviors you’ve rewarded in the past are likely to prevent those you need now.
Amazon Is Powerful, But You Can Compete
Despite Amazon’s massive growth (it now accounts for approximately half of all online retail sales), the bulk of consumer retail still happens offline.
There’s no doubt that more retail sales will continue to move online, so you cannot ignore that channel. But to survive, retailers also need to completely rethink the store experience.
“Experience” is the key word in that sentence.
Increasingly people will only go to stores for the experience. It had better be one that’s worth their time and travel hassle.
What can you offer to make your in-store experience special?
What is related but unusual to see in a store of your type?
Here are two examples to get you thinking:
- UK grocer, Waitrose, has in-store wine bars.
Kris Andreychuk, Supervisor of Community Safety in the City of Edmonton's Neighbourhood Empowerment Team, was frustrated. His teams of social workers, police officers and youth workers were great at helping move criminals or juvenile offenders onto a better path after they'd been involved in a crime, but he wanted to predict areas where crime would be most likely to be brewing so they could work to improve those neighborhoods before crimes happened. We discuss how they did it, some surprising results, and the need to combine powerful machine learning algorithms with human intelligence.
That led him to contact Stephane Contre, Chief Analytics Officer of Edmonton's Open City Team, to see how they could use the masses of data the City had access to in order to identify patterns that are likely to cause crime in a particular area.
Social Customer Care is Scary, But Inevitable
I won’t lie to you: there’s a lot that can go wrong when you are interacting with customers online.
But more and more customers are turning to social media when they’ve got a problem or complaint. If you aren’t there to offer that social customer care, things can easily get out of control and you might not even know that a tsunami is about to hit you till you’re drowning.
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But according to today’s guest, Dan Gingiss, author of the new book,
Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media, not only is social customer care inevitable, it can actually be a really good thing for your business.
How Social Customer Care Can Help Your Business
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Social customer care, done right, can convert people from angry to advocates.
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It is cheaper than telephone-based customer service.
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It can make your contact center staff happier. Nobody ever calls with praise, but they do offer praise in social media.
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It can give you insight into customer frustrations that might not be big enough to call you about, but are annoying enough to share on social media. You can get a competitive edge by proactively solving them.
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Sometimes a picture can help you spot and solve a problem way faster than a telephone conversation. (In the interview Gingiss talks about a company that realized, once they saw a photo, that the customer had two cords plugged in to the wrong places.)
The Main Difference in Hiring for Social Customer Care vs Traditional Contact Center Staff
As with traditional customer service staff, having traits like empathy are crucial.
You can train them on the tools, but if they don’t have the right attitude, you’ll soon have problems.
The big difference, though, is that they have to be good writers, says Gingiss.
It is so easy to misinterpret the written word, especially when it has to be short enough to Tweet. Good writers are less likely to be misunderstood.
At the same time, you also want them to be able to respond quickly; they don’t have time to compose the perfect 140 characters.
And to make it even more complicated, they should be able to show a little personality in their writing. People don’t want to think they are being answered by a bot.
Also Discussed In This Interview
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How to choose the right tools for managing social customer care (including things like ensuring “collision avoidance” — when different staff respond to the same comment — and tools that let you route higher priority people on social media to the front of the queue).
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Social listening secrets (like looking for misspellings of your brand name).
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How and when to use humor in responding on social media.
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Budget allocation between marketing and customer care.
Get a Free Report on Twitter-Based Customer Care
We studied 104 companies that sell online to see how well they handled a simple help request on Twitter. In this free report on Twitter-based customer service you’ll find out:
Investment Management Firm’s Success Starts With Values
I just got back from an amazing two weeks in South Africa, where I spoke at the Seamless Africa Conference, interviewed people like today’s podcast guest, Nomi Bodlani from investment management firm, Allan Gray and then explored the history, politics, beauty and wine of the region.
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(If you are curious, you can see my photos and video clips from Cape Town and surrounding regions here.)
Nomi Bodlani is the Client Experience Team Lead at Allan Gray. The company was founded in 1973, and has been hugely successful. The founder of this investment management firm, Allan Gray, is now one of the richest men in the world. The firm itself is the largest privately-owned asset manager in South Africa, according to Forbes, with $35 billion in assets.
What impressed me about the company is that from the start it has been values-driven and customer focused. Over and over again in our interview Bodlani talked about how the values (or what I call the Promise in the 3P Profit Formula) have been used to guide decisions at the firm.
Values Are Clear, Explicit & Guide Decisions
The core values, says Bodlani, are for the firm and its employees to be:
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client focused
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individually accountable
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independent minded
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performance driven
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long-term oriented.
Employees Train on Values & the Technical Side
New employees in this 1,000 person firm undergo extensive training on the values as well as the technical aspects of their jobs.
During their first three days of training they hear super-hero stories about extraordinary lengths investment management front line and other staff have gone to in order to solve client problems or exceed their expectations.
The company has also chosen to keep its set of investment products simple. Keeping things simple makes it easier for staff and clients to understand and choose the right vehicles for their investment goals.
It is just too easy for companies to get carried away with new products and features. When that happens, their staff can’t reasonably be expected to know and understand them all, let alone explain them to clients. Often that can lead to the downfall of companies, as many a high-tech entrepreneur has learned the hard way.
Allan Gray has avoided that trap, although, admittedly it does mean that they are not on the cutting edge of new products or whizz bang website technology.
On the other hand, the solid relationships between the company, its investment managers and its clients meant that “our clients still trusted us even though our website didn’t look like the others they saw.”
Think About The Why
In training, employees are taught to consider how every aspect of what they do, no matter what part of the organization they work in, has an eventual impact on customer satisfaction.
Even something as mundane as making sure they get the client’s name and contact information right isn’t just a checklist item: if you get something wrong, it could mean that the client doesn’t get what they are waiting for, or that their privacy is violated because somebo...
In today’s podcast interview, multiple best-selling author, Chip Bell, discusses his new book, Kaleidoscope: Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles, and the importance of going beyond good customer service to — not great service, but unique value service.
In other words, you don’t have to do heroics to create an experience that is memorable enough that people want to tell others about it. And that, says Bell, is what you are aiming for in order to maximize profits and satisfy customers.
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Unique Value vs Added Value
I still remember the first time I was greeted with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies when I checked in to a hotel. (I also remember which hotel it was: the Adara Hotel in Whistler). At that time, it was what Bell calls “value unique.”
Since then the idea has been copied by others, so it is more of a “value added,” which is still nice, but not as likely to get people talking about your organization.
The other problem with “value added” as opposed to “value unique,” says Bell, is that value added keeps raising the customer experience bar. Once others start doing it, it becomes expected, like the animal shaped folded towels in high-end resorts.
Then it is no longer memorable (though its absence might be), and the financial burden of continual value adds can kill your profitability.
Creating Unique Value Without Breaking the Bank
Unique value can come from the smallest of things, but helps people remember the experience.
A simple, no-cost example: When I bought my new car, the saleswoman (who actually listened to what we wanted, unlike the salesmen we’d dealt with elsewhere) had made up an acronym to help me remember my new license plate number. (It starts with BHT, so she called it Beautiful, Happy Tema.) That was five years ago, and I still remember it and who made up the acronym!
Brainstorm some ideas with your staff about little touches you could add that would deliver unique value. Quirky is good. Encourage craziness… you can always scale back later.
The key here is to involve your front-line staff in generating the ideas. As the ones who interact the most with your customers, they are most likely to know what little touches would be appreciated and stand out.
Mentioned in This Episode
Matt Dixon, and his wonderful book, The Effortless Experience. (I’m hoping to get him on the show in the next little while. He’ll be the headliner at the upcoming CXPA Insight Exchange. You should come!
Mary Miller and Jancoa Janitorial Service’s Dream Manager program.
Ray Attiyah, and his book The Fearless Front Line
Question: What’s the most memorable, unique touch you’ve ever experienced?
Please scroll down and comment below.
During the last recession, Brian Gracon, author of Meconomics 101: 16 Ways to Improve Your Marketing, Selling and Business Management for Today’s Consumers, wondered why it was that some businesses were still busy, even when unemployment was high. What was their secret to being recession-proof?
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It’s All About Me
The secret, it seems, is that people are emotional creatures, not the rational actors we were taught about in economics class.
What selling boils down to, in a recession or at any other time, says Gracon, is appealing to these three factors that drive customer behavior:
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Self-image
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Entertainment
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Pampering
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Self-image
People who line up for hours to buy the latest iPhone have a self-image of being cutting edge technology adopters. People who buy at discount stores may have a self-image of being frugal. As Gracon puts it in his book,
So think about the self-images of your target customers, and then design your marketing to appeal to those self-images.
- Entertainment
Why do people pay hundreds of dollars to hear a band perform in a giant stadium with lousy sound, when for far less they could own and listen to a high-quality recording of every song that band ever wrote?
Because of the entertainment value.
Sitting at home listening to the music, even dancing in front of your mirror, can’t compete with the feeling of being in a crowd of like minded people all bopping together.
- Pampering
When you shop at Holt Renfrew or Nordstrom you pay a premium for pampering. Yes, the clothes they sell are of high quality. But you can buy equal quality for less in stores like Winners. But at Winners, you won’t have a sales rep catering to your needs and wants, advising you, finding “just the thing” for you.
Different self-image draws each to their own type of store. Winners could even be argued to offer entertainment, in that for many people hunting through racks to find that amazing deal is entertaining. But pampering? No.
All 3 Together = Irresistible = Recession-Proof
Each of the three “lenses,” as Gracon calls them, will attract customers. But if you can combine two, or better yet, all three of them, you’ve got an offer that is no longer price-bound.
As I wrote in PeopleShock, people will pay to go to Disney even when they know they can’t afford it. It meets all three emotional criteria:
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Their self-image as great parents.
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Their desire to be entertained.
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The pampering Disney gives its customers.
Want to Recession-Proof Your Business?
Even in the B2B World it IS Possible
In business-to-business sales:
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Self-image may be to seem savvy to their superiors. Or to showcase their talents (invite them to co-present at a conference). Or to get the best value.
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Entertainment can be offered in the cliche ways (golf, fancy restaurant meals, sports tickets) or in more creative ways that are tailored to the type of prospect you are selling to. (I’d far rather have fringe theatre tickets!)
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Pampering: well,
OK, so Grant Cardone may love cold calling, but most of us hate it. (And, frankly, I find Cardone’s approach seriously off-putting). So, like many people, I was thrilled when “inbound marketing” became a thing.
I had fantasies about never having to cold call again.
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But as the amount of content on the Internet has skyrocketed, the dream of just being “found” naturally as a result of your great inbound marketing content has become less and less likely.
So the need to make sales calls isn’t going away. (Darn!)
As today’s guest, Jill Konrath, puts it in our interview,
“I’m not going to sit here an wait until somebody from [my target customer] stumbles across my website.”
That huge content overload (what Mark Schaeffer called “content shock“), not only makes it harder for you to reach your prospects, it even makes it harder for your sales people to do their jobs well. Because they are also dealing with content overload.
Even Konrath realized she was struggling with Internet-based distractions, which led to her new book, More Sales, Less Time. It talks about the things she’s done to overcome the overwhelm; something we also discuss in today’s podcast.
How You Sell Matters
But how we sell is vitally important to the customer experience. If I get a Cardone-type on the call, I’m outta there!
And I’ll be warning all my friends to stay away.
Konrath is one of the sales gurus whose approach to sales is a lot more aligned with what I believe makes for good customer experiences.
It’s about building a relationship based on honesty and openness, right from the start. A relationship that will leave prospects feeling good about you, whether or not they ultimately become customers.
Now to be fair, with good content marketing, some inbound calls or emails are likely to happen. But they probably won’t be enough to keep you in business. Even Hubspot — one of the first companies to really push the idea of “inbound marketing” — admits that it does outbound sales too.
Sales in the Digital Era
So if you can’t rely on inbound marketing efforts, what do you do instead?
Well, the elements of inbound are still important:
You need a good, informative website.
Pretty well everybody is going to go to your website before contacting you, and/or after you’ve reached out to them. It had better answer their questions. (You might find our 85 Tips to a Winning Website helpful.)
Social media matters.
It’s like advertising: it builds brand awareness, which can make people more open to talking to you when you try to contact them.
Target specific niches, and develop content just for them.
Some of this content you’ll use on the webs...
What Impact Will Kaiser Permanente’s Acquisition of GHC Have On Customer Experience?
Seattle-based Group Health Cooperative (GHC) has been in business for over 75 years; longer that Kaiser Permanente, which recently acquired it. In today’s podcast interview with GHC’s Customer Experience Designer, Brian Clark, we talk about how the acquisition could be a positive thing for customers, even though it will doubtless cause stress.
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OK, so let’s be blunt here: when you are an employee of a company that is about to be swallowed by a big fish, you aren’t going to go on the record saying anything nasty about the biggie.
But Clark did make some good points about the acquisition, and the effect it is likely to have on customer experience.
- Are Your Values Compatible?
For starters, both Kaiser Permanente and GHC are not-for-profit organizations. So there is likely more similarity in outlook than there would be if the acquirer were a for-profit entity. From what Clark has seen, their values are similar.
- How Good is the Communication?
For an acquisition to work there needs to be excellent communication in many directions: between Kaiser and GHC management, between management and employees of both groups (who include medical staff as well as administration), and between GHC and its customers. This will not be easy, and is a major focus of the work Clark is doing in preparation for the merger.
- Will the Acquisition Actually Help?
Mergers and acquisitions have a terrible track record: according to the Harvard Business Review 70% – 90% of mergers and acquisitions fail!
Often they didn’t make sense in the first place, but Clark argues that not only is there strategic fit with this one, GHC will benefit from being able to modernize and upgrade its old technology and systems. That’s something leaders felt it couldn’t afford to do soon on its own. And it’s important: customer experience is hurt when systems don’t talk to each other.
- Are Your Staff Persuaded?
You’ll never get 100% buy in, but showing people how the acquisition can actually make their jobs better should help. Despite great communication, this will take time.
As Clark puts it, “There’s a process change aversion,” even when new processes are actually better than the old, familiar ones. (User experience designers know this: that’s why there’s a backlash whenever a web design or software changes, even if in testing it is clear that the new design is easier to learn.)
- Be Patient (& But Not TOO Patient)
Sometimes, says Clark, you have to accept an incremental approach. Change management is never easy. But, working in a scientific field, he tries to rely on evidence as a way to persuade people.
Sharing successes and, when necessary, documenting the pain can help convince people that things are moving in the right direction as the acquisition proceeds.
- Speak to People in a Language They Understand
When I interviewed Erin Wallace,
Who hasn’t stood in a lineup trying to access a government service?
It’s so easy to bash government service departments, especially when you’ve spent an hour in a lineup only to be told you are missing something and have to start all over.
Or you are filling in an online form and it glitches and you have to start all over.
Or you’ve been on hold for half an hour only to have the line go dead.
Today’s podcast guest, Micheal Martino, is trying to change all that. The government agency he works for has about 5,000 staff, spread over 14 cities, serving 3 major customer groups.
Shrinking Budgets & Rising Citizen Expectations
In the past, many governments have felt that it was just fine to have citizens waste their time, but, as with customer service in other types of organizations, people just won’t put up with that any more. At least not in the countries most Frank Reactions podcast listeners and readers live in.
Apart from public pressure to improve service, governments are looking for ways to streamline service and be efficient.
That’s one of the great things about customer experience improvement: making it better for customers often makes processes more efficient and cheaper to deliver.
As Martino put it, “Where the biggest effort is for a citizen is also your most inefficient process.”
That said, there’s a big up-front investment to get all the systems in place, and in the short run at least, you can’t just replace your other government service delivery channels, like phones, with online only. Complex problems still need help from a person.
But a well designed website can significantly cut the number of people who need to call or line up at the same time as making citizens happier. Most of citizens want to do the simple things online.
User Experience is Key
Note the words “well designed” in the paragraph above. Coming from a UX (user experience) background himself, Martino knew that key to getting it right was really understanding the customers and their needs.
So his staff hit the road and spent 150 hours doing 50 ethnographic interviews, spending entire days with customers and learning what they really needed from his agency, and how it would fit in with their work and lives.
He made a few discoveries that might surprise some anti-government cynics.
The Surprising Truth About Government Service
[Look at that sub-head: I must be reading too much BuzzFeed!]
Their customers told them that they really want to help make the government agency work better. They are willing to spend hours giving feedback and participating in research studies. Customers care!
They actually spoke positively about the call center staff! It was call center time pressures, not people, that were destroying the relationships.
“Your people are really good on the phone but it always seems that you want to get us off the phone,” they told the researchers.
As in so many organizations (private sector too), call center reps are pressured to keep the “average handle time” low. So they start out being friendly and empathetic, but as their systems signaled that they’d been on the phone too long with a customer they’d rush to cut the call off, even if the problem hadn’t been solved.
Think about it from a call center rep’s point of view: If their average time on a call goes up, they’ll get punished. If they fail to solve the problem and somebody else has to deal with it, it is the next rep who has to take the long call. (Mind you, immediate post-call surveys can help offset that pressure. They don’t want a bad evaluation from the customer.)
Another surprise to some: the government service reps really want to provide better service.
Don’t Make These Stupid Customer Service Mistakes
If you want to lose business, check out today’s podcast (and/or read the blog post). Yes folks, this really happened. Please don’t make these mistakes!
On July 31 I bought a product that was supposed to automate the process of finding email addresses for people who have reviewed books similar to yours, so you can offer them a review copy in the hopes they might want to review yours.
I’d already done that manually with a couple of reviewers I’d spotted, and they’d given excellent honest reviews of PeopleShock (for example, the PeopleShock review by Amazon Top Reviewer, Robert Morris), so the idea of not having to hunt for their contact info sounded great.
The product came with a 30 money back guarantee, so I decided to give it a try.
When you sign up it gives you an introductory video on how to use it, which I watched, and then went to test it out.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work.
Now I really wanted it to work, so I emailed the company to ask what could be done about the problem.
Here’s what happened. At each step, I want you to think about what the customer was likely thinking and feeling, and what the owner of the small business that offered the software was probably thinking and feeling. You’ll watch the whole thing go off the rails.
July 31
Hi,
I’m just trying out your software. A couple of things:
- The Export to CSV doesn’t work. It returns this in the spreadsheet:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 84 bytes) in /home/breview/public_html/software/db.php on line 82
- It would be wonderful if your lists would also return info on what star rating they gave the book, and how many people voted their review helpful.
Thanks.
(When I checked back, I saw that it was, in fact, supposed to provide that information, as well as their actual review.)
A bit later, I wrote back:
Hi again,
I noticed that many (most) of them are website urls rather than emails.
Two days later, on Aug 2, I got this:
Hi Tema
Please watch the first video: Main Overview of The Entire Process
On this page
http://[link to video]
This will help out a lot.
Thanks,
D
I replied:
Hi D,
I had watched that. I still have the problems noted. See screenshot [attached]. Even for those that do have an email address (and most of them are websites rather than emails, it does not show the review stars, or text nor link to the review. And the Export to CSV doesn’t work.
Aug 2 reply from her:
This has been addressed and fixed 🙂
Thanks,
D
Three days later, on Aug 5, I tried it again.
Hi D,
So the Export to CSV works now, but it still doesn’t provide me with much data. No
– email addresses
– Review URL
– book name
– Author
– ASIN
– Review Stars
– Review text
So not very helpful. Is there something I’m misunderstanding?
Aug 7, her reply:
The new searches should work better moving forward
Thanks,
D
To which I answered:
Hi D
I tried a few today and it doesn’t seem to have done anything at all with them. It said on [the website] that the searches had been sent, but I didn’t get confirmation emails and no sign of results.
Aug 8
I see that your books are in the queue.
Can Customer Service Recession-Proof Your Business?
There are an awful lot of empty offices in oil capital Calgary these days, but a company that does tenant improvements has managed to grow anyway, thanks in part to an increased focus on customer service.
Of course, it helps that offices also need to be fixed up after tenants vacate them so there’s a hope of finding new tenants, so Maxim Constructors‘ success can’t all be credited to customer service.
But, as today’s interview guest, Craig Nadeau, managing director of the company, points out, the recession also means that there are a lot of unemployed trades workers flooding in to compete with them for those office fix-up dollars.
Click for a 5-step Strategy to Get Growing Again
Customer Experience Starts Before the Sale
Customer experience is part of a good brand, and sometimes customer experience includes more than just how well you treat customers. It can also be about how you get them to feel comfortable with you, right from the very first meeting.
Craig Nadeau says he was always “a suit and tie guy,” so in an industry where most contractors show up at bid meetings in work wear, he fits right in with the downtown office executives. He’s discovered that this gives him instant credibility and rapport with prospective clients, who also tend to wear suits.
“When you show up in dirty jeans people know that you know how to swing a hammer, but when you show up in a suit and tie people know you are about business.” – Craig Nadeau
He also shows up on site dressed in a suit, and expects his workers to keep their workplace tidy.
“When I walk onto a site I want it to look like my clients expect it to look.” – Craig Nadeau
Looking like his clients has helped him develop the solid relationships (and keep growing more) that have seen him through recessionary times.
When Money’s Tight Customer Focus is More Important Than Ever
Too many companies just cut back in a panic when times are tight.
Sometimes you do have to lay off staff. But you’ve got to make sure that doesn’t hurt your customer service. If it does, you’ll enter a downward spiral. Instead, says Nadeau, “always be looking at where we can make a difference to the client.”
Click for a 5-step Strategy to Get Growing Again
Here’s the Full Transcript of This Interview
Episode 92 – How Upping Their Customer Service Led to Growth in a Recession
TEMA (INTRO): There was lots of interest in last week’s podcast episode on accessibility in Web and mobile app design. We’ve all got to recognize that not only are there lots of people who have acknowledged disabilities, there are an awful lot of us in our 40s and older who are pretty heavy Web users, but we’re starting to deal with issues like less than perfect eyesight or hearing challenges or hand tremors that make it harder to get the cursor in the exact right spot needed to click on something, to say nothing of broken and sprained limbs.
00:00:51 Although it’s not specifically about accessibility, many of the user experience tips that I give in my report on 85 Tips for a Usable Website fare something that you may find useful if you’re responsible for a website or have any input into what goes into one or how it’s designed. You can download that free by going to http://bit.ly/85uxtips. Of course, to hear that episode on accessibility if you missed it, just go to FrankReactions.com/91.
00:01:40 Now to today’s episode. Today’s interview is with Craig Nadeau, who is the managing director of Maxim Contractors, who do tenant improvements in office buildings. And the conversation actually started when I was chatting with a former business student...
Web Accessibility Is Not Just for Disabled People!
According to today’s podcast guest, Joanne Pires, of eSSENTIAL Accessibility, 1 in 5 Americans self-identify as having a disability.
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And that doesn’t even include the masses of people in their 40s and beyond who are struggling with “middle aged vision”, arthritis, and fading hearing but who don’t think of themselves as ‘disabled’.
So designing your websites and apps to be accessible to people with disabilities makes it more likely you’ll be able to sell to everybody!
Web Accessibility for Law & Profit
Apart from the financial benefits that come from more accessible websites, you should know that it’s also legally required in many places. For example:
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In the province of Ontario every company with 50 or more employees and all government organizations must have accessible websites.
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In Europe all websites run by public sector organizations must meet accessibility guidelines, and many countries have requirements for private sector companies too.
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In the United States, any organization selling to or partnering with the federal government must meet web accessibility criteria.
Wonder What’s Needed to Make Your Site Accessible?
There’s a great free testing tool called WAVE, at http://wave.webaim.org/. It’s kind of scary to use, because almost all of us will discover our sites have errors. (Guilty!)
One of the biggest barriers I’ve found to web accessibility is finding web designers who know and understand the guidelines and will make designs that comply.
I had to argue repeatedly with my designer even to have basic contrast in the font color versus the background, and I never did manage to get him to make all the needed changes to comply with the guidelines. I hope to do better on the next redesign.
It would help if all web design schools and programs taught web accessible design and user experience testing as required parts of their curriculum.
Sadly, most still do not.
So how do you choose a web designer who gets accessibility?
Pires advises asking:
-
Have you built an accessible website? (Get them to show examples.)
-
Do you know what the standards and regulations are in the jurisdictions we serve?
-
Are you aware of WCAG 2.0?
Plan your site with accessibility in mind, right from the start.
Changes are much easier to make in the early stages than after they’ve been coded in.
Then, as your designer works, I’d suggest you keep running their designs through at tool like WAVE, and just keep pushing them to knock off the problems it identifies.
Cool Free Accessibility Tool For Navigating Websites
In the interview Pires mentioned a web accessibility app her company has designed to help people who struggle with current websites use them more easily. You can download it at https://www.essentialaccessibility.
When Sites Like Twitter Are Vulnerable to Cyber Attacks, Should We Just Give Up?
Last Friday huge sites like Twitter, Netflix and Spotify were down for a while thanks to a massive cyber attack on domain provider, Dyn. According to an article in Fast Company, attackers were easily able to take over tens of thousands of home-based or small office devices that had poor security to mount the attack.
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We all know cyber attacks are a risk, and that we should be doing more to protect the security of our own information and that of our customers. And yet…
Few Companies Are Protecting Their Data Well
In today’s episode of the Frank Reactions Podcast on Customer Experience I interview cyber security expert, Saar Cohn. He’s worked for huge international organizations like l’Oreal and Israel’s Defense Department, but says his real love is startups and small companies that are struggling to figure out how to avoid cyber attacks. (In fact, he’s offered to answer questions, free of charge, for any small businesses that have a concern about how to handle cyber security. Just send him an e-mail.)
This interview is a bit of a roller coaster, filled with both scary moments and great advice about how businesses of any size should prepare for and handle cyber security breaches.
Here’s the first bit of bad news from Cohn:
“You need to acknowledge that you are going to be breached or that you’ve already been breached and don’t know about it.”
Yes, folks, a cyber attack is only a matter of time.
To cheer you up even more, he comments that
“It’s proven that passwords are useless.”
So, as tempting as it is to go bury our heads in the sand now, we don’t dare do that. Because if a breach is only a matter of time, what can we do to minimize the damage?
Tips for Preventing a Cyber Attack
Decide what is most critical to your operation.
What would kill your business if it went down? What would be almost impossible to recover from?
You can’t effectively protect everything, so focus on the mission-critical parts of what you do.
Don’t be overly pressured by the cyber security vendors.
They make their living by scaring the living daylights out of all of us. In fact, if you buy too much security software and hardware, you can end up lowering your security!
Why?
Because if you are screening everything there’s so much “noise” in the data that you either get paralyzed or you start turning the warning systems off to shut them up. Result? There’s no “noise” and you think everything’s OK, when it isn’t.
Train your staff on cyber safety.
It’s a lot easier to fool humans than machines. Most cyber attacks succeed because of human weaknesses, such as wanting to help a stranger on the phone who seems to know what they are talking about, or being tempted to click on a link in an email when you really shouldn’t, or using default passwords like “admin”.
Keep your software up-to-date.
As annoying as it is to have to keep updating,
Process Problems Upset Customers AND Hurt Profitability
Process is the 3rd P in the 3P Profit Formula I discuss in the book PeopleShock: The Path to Profits When Customers Rule, and it is one of the biggest areas where organizations fall down on customer experience. (The first two Ps are Promise and People.)
I mean, really, why should we have to repeat our bank card number to the service rep after we’ve already keyed it into our phone?
Why should we get different information each time we call?
Why should the rep need to get approval from his manager to give a refund when the problem was clearly caused at their end?
I gave you a sneak preview of the first two Ps earlier on this blog and podcast, at episode 52 for Promise and episode 56 for People.
So for those of you who haven’t read the book yet, in today’s podcast I read from Chapter 15, about how to spot the important process problems and do customer journey mapping.
Chapter 15: Identifying Process Problems
(excerpt from PeopleShock: The Path to Profits When Customers Rule, by Tema Frank, ©2016)
I’ve been podcasting since 2012 — first the Frank Online Marketing Show, and now the Frank Reactions podcast on customer experience (http://frankreactions.com/show). If you are not familiar with podcasts, they are like radio shows, but aired on the Internet and over services like iTunes.
For someone like me, who grew up admiring the great in-depth interviewers of my youth, like Dick Cavett, Peter Gzowski and Oriana Fallaci, it’s a thrill to be able to join them in my own small way. The frustration, however, is that second-last word: small. Podcast listening is growing, but slowly. I believe that process problems are the big barrier to mass use.
We all know how to turn on a radio. Even my kids, digital natives though they are, could figure that out pretty easily. But “turning on” a podcast is more complicated. Assuming you know what podcasts are (and many still don’t), it is not obvious where you find them. And once you do, how do you play them? Are you going to be dinged for data charges? How do you share them?
If you ever listen to podcasts you’ll hear the podcaster’s plea, where we beg our listeners to go to iTunes and review our podcast. But few people do, because there’s no easy way to do it from where you are listening.
Customer Journey Mapping
The questions I just asked are the beginnings of a customer journey map. The way to figure out how your processes can be improved is to start with mapping, from the customer’s point of view. This is a key step in improving customer experiences.
The journey starts before prospects contact you. Walk through the steps from the time someone realizes they may need your type of service or product, right through to contacting you and then buying and using the product or service.
Given the rate of technological change, customer journey mapping is also something you have to re-do periodically, because customer expectations are constantly being reset. In the early days of podcasting you had to be (or be friends with) a geek to figure out how to find and listen to podcasts. Then Apple started listing podcasts in iTunes, which made it easier for podcasts to be discovered. Then, just as people got used to that, Apple took them out of iTunes and set up a dedicated podcasting app. On the positive side, this would presumably make it easier for people to find and manage podcasts. But on the negative side,
Can You Reconcile Quality vs. Quantity After a Merger?
When your company has built its reputation on great customer service, what happens when you’re in a merger with a bigger company that has a different focus?
That’s the challenge Martin Gurth, Senior Manager of Customer Experience at Travelocity faced after the company was bought by the larger, volume-focused, Expedia.
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In today’s interview, which was recorded at the recent Digital Customer Experience Strategies Summit (DCX), he discusses how they’ve not only kept the strong customer service focus at Travelocity, but how they are now successfully selling the other parts of the merged organization on the value of great customer experience too.
(To hear other highlights from DCX, visit http://frankreactions.com/85)
Same Owners, Different Brands
Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity are all owned by the same company now. But they had three distinct brands. Expedia was known for its huge scale — lots of properties, lots of listings — and it had a widely known brand name.
Travelocity had a much smaller, but devoted, following. It’s followers had stuck with it because the customer service had always been great. So after the merger, Gurth and his team decided to go back to their roots: great customer service.
Research showed that their customers were on the go when they had a problem that needed Travelocity’s help, and normally reached out via social media. That meant it was crucial to be there with timely, friendly, and fast service at those times.
“The customer needs to love us … not because of a loyalty program … but because in your time of need we are going to be there.” – Martin Gurth, Travelocity
The way to do this, they decided, was to have an entire social support center staffed with “Tier 3” executive-level support. In other words, with the folks you’d only get to at other companies if you really pushed your way through the first and second support levels. The folks with the power to make decisions on whether or not to give you a refund, with direct access to the airlines’ reservation systems, with the ability to call a hotel and speak to the manager instantly.
How To Afford Widespread Tier 3 Customer Service
You can’t put just anybody into a Tier 3 support role. It takes a lot of skill, knowledge and training.
That all costs money. Gurth and his colleagues decided the way to finance it was through:
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Moving the social support center to a lower cost location than the United States.
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Taking brand dollars and shifting them from advertising to customer support.
Moving a contact center offshore can work, but, as many companies have found out, there are language and cultural differences, which can lower customer satisfaction. Travelocity realized, soon after setting up a social support center in the Philippines, that it needed to invest heavily in English grammer education, and in training agents how to show empathy in a way that their customers would welcome.
The agents hired to work in that center had already worked with the company for a couple of years, so they knew the organization and its policies. But they also got six weeks of specialized training,
Yeah, sure you’re different from all the other banks.
(This is part 2 of my interview with Dave Mowat, CEO of ATB Financial. Click here for Part 1.)
ATB Financial, a government owned financial institution with about 5,300 employees and $46 billion in assets, is trying to shake off its past as a stodgy, bureaucratic institution and replace it with a reputation for being a dynamic, customer-focused one.
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They’ve made great headway, and are working hard at making more, but it’s not an easy sell to a jaded public. We’ve all heard banks telling us how they are different, they are customer-focused, they put our needs first. And we all know that, in general, they are pretty similar and a great many of our customer experiences are not particularly happy ones.
First, Make Sure You Really ARE Better
Before you go trumpeting to the public that you’ve changed, you better make sure that you really have. Otherwise, customers will be even more upset, because they were expecting better than in the past, and not getting it. As Mowat put it,
Convincing the public that you really are different “needs to be things that you do; it can’t just be things that you say.”
Getting Better All The Time
So how do you get better? Not a simple question, which explains why it is the subject of this entire blog, and of my book, PeopleShock, and many other books. But ATB does seem to be using the 3P Profit Formula approach that I advocate.
- Promise
They’ve tried to articulate clearly what their mission and values really are, and spread that message deeply within the organization. As I noted in Part 1, I still think their promise is a bit too wordy, but they are on the right track.
- People
In the first part of this interview we talked extensively about how they are trying to shift to a culture where they encourage independent thought by employees, and give them much more autonomy and ability to get things changed.
They are also trying to become much more customer-centric in determining how things should be done.
- Processes
It was a long and difficult process, but the bank has overhauled its CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system so that staff can finally have one, common, view of the customer. Now they should no longer have the sort of issue I experienced recently at a competitor bank where, seven months after being informed that my father had died, they said he’d have to come in to sign a form!
Systems and the training and technology to make them work well for customers are key to proving that your bank really is different from all the others.
“It’s really about how to marry up the aptitude and the desire and the knowledge that we should be doing that, with the things that help make it easier for us.” Dave Mowat, ATB Financial
Learn More About the 3Ps & Great Customer Experience This Wednesday (October 5, 2016) at the Business Link
It’s hard to find an industry much more risk averse than banking (especially these days), so it was startling to hear ATB Financial CEO, Dave Mowat, tell me that he’s trying to encourage employees to break rules!
The key, obviously, is common sense. But it’s still a huge transition for the 5,300 employees in a 78-year old government-owned bank with a tradition of stodginess.
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This is part 1 of a two-part episode where Mowat explains how he’s been changing the culture at the bank to make it more customer-focused.
Before Employees Break Rules, They Must Know The Story
If you want employees to feel comfortable using “common sense,” they need to know what that means in your organization’s context. It may not be common sense for a banker to write off a mortgage because a homeowner has lost their job, but allowing for a delayed payment or two may be.
For employees to be able to make those kinds of judgement calls and break rules wisely, there are a few key elements that must be in place first:
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Know The Story. Both your company’s story (i.e. Why do we exist? What’s our mission?) and the customer’s story (e.g. Do we have a history with them? How trustworthy are they?)
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Have Guiding Principles and Values. As I explain in the chapters about the first P — Promise — of the 3P Profit Formula in my book, PeopleShock, the promise should provide a set of principles that employees can use as guidance when they are considering straying outside the lines. If staff are all grounded in a common set of values, it becomes much easier to make good decisions at every level in an organization.
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Accept That Not Every Decision Will Be the Right One. If you punish employees for making the wrong call every now and then, no one will dare take the risk of making their own decisions again. If the judgement call makes no sense at all and didn’t make sense in light of the guiding principles, then it is fine to have disciplinary action. But try to avoid it for borderline cases. (I think it was Peter Druker who said, why would I fire an employee who just made a big mistake? I’ve invested so much in their education now!)
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Get the Right People on the Team. As you transition to a more autonomous style of management, some people simply won’t be able to adapt. They have to be eased out. And in hiring, look for those who have good judgement and share your corporate values naturally.
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Change the Rules. As employees make such judgment calls, you should be collecting the data. Where are problems occurring most often that cause employees to break rules? Maybe it is time to scrap or change that rule. By having made it acceptable for employees to take this risk (and report on having done so), you are getting fantastic information about where the customer pain points are and how you can change your processes to become more customer-friendly.
Get a Free copy of the book, PeopleShock: The Path To Profits When Customers Rule, thanks to ATB!
Next week’s podcast will continue the conversation, but in the meantime, I’d like to thank ATB which (quite independently of Dave’s agreeing to the interview) has sponsored two talks I’m giving this week, and is providing FREE copies of PeopleShock: The Path To Pro...
This week’s podcast highlights some of the take-aways from last week’s Digital Customer Experience Strategies Summit in Chicago, at which I had the honor of being on the first panel of the event.
Banks, Telecomms, and B2B Companies Grapple With Omnichannel Customer Experience
Most startling for me was to discover how many big companies in the worlds of financial services, telecommunications, utilities and business-to-business vendors are just now starting to realize that they’ve got to take omnichannel customer experience seriously.
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And many of them — even those that paid a couple of thousand dollars to send someone to the conference — are still not serious enough to put significant resources behind the effort. Nice that they’ve appointed someone to look at “customer experience” but when a company with over 10,000 employees and billions of dollars of assets appoints one person — seriously?? That person has to be a superhero to make progress!
That said, many companies are committed, and we heard from several of them at the conference.
DCX 2016 Highlights
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Culture Change: Vicki Jones, of AT&T, talked about the challenges of merging three large organizations. Dealing with culture differences is even harder than the technological challenges. Having a supportive CEO (which she has) is incredibly helpful.
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Text & Messaging for Customer Service: There was a lot of talk about the increasing use of text and messaging for customer service. If it is done right, it can really save you money by lowering the number of contact center calls.
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Data: Big data is great, but you have to figure out what’s relevant in all that data. Don’t just go fishing; know what you are trying to learn.
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Streamlining offers and systems: In a large organization it is easy for the number of offerings to have spun out of control. It may be time to re-examine and rationalize them. This will help you and your overwhelmed potential customers.
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Personalization: One of the great things about using data more effectively is that it is becoming increasingly feasible to truly personalize offers. Once you’ve got the technology and expertise to understand that data, you can potentially really optimize your profits by giving more customers exactly what they want at the perfect price.
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Empathy: If you are doing customer journey mapping (which you should be doing!), map customer emotions along the journey, not just actions.
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De-silo: Not surprisingly, many speakers and audience members discussed the challenges of getting cooperation of all departments that are needed to implement omnichannel customer experience. Crossing silos is inevitable if you really want to make things work across all channels.
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Executive buy-in: The best way to get executives interested in customer experience improvement is by exposing them to what their customers are really saying. Whether video clips, story telling using a simplified customer journey map with customer quotes, or dragging them out onto the front lines, they’ve got understand the pain before they’ll commit the resources.
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Happy employees: As Michelle Morris, of Crowe Horwath LLP, put it,
Wednesday, September 7, 2016, is PeopleShock Launch Day!
Yes, the book, PeopleShock: The Path To Profits When Customers Rule, has been available for a while already, but I figured there was no point trying to do the “official” launch during the summer, so here it is! If you are going to be in Edmonton, come to the party! Details and registration at http://bit.ly/ps-launch.
In today’s podcast, I am sharing the start of the book with you, and talking about riding the boom and bust economic cycles, and how strategic customer experience improvement can actually help you survive the tough times (and surge ahead when the boom happens again).
20% Off at DCX Conference
Also, wanted to remind you that you can get a 20% discount at the Digital Customer Experience by using the offer code TFRANK20.
I’ll be on a panel with Naaz Nichols from Travelocity and Danny Setiawan of The Economist about Digital Customer Experience Integration Strategies.
Let me know if you’ll be there! I’d love to meet you in person!
Customer Experience Improvement Program Challenges
Big and small companies have different challenges when it comes to implementing a customer experience improvement program, but there are things each can learn from the other.
That’s why this podcast and blog range from last week’s episode with small business owner, Marie Soprovich, whose company has 20 employees, to today’s interview with Benjamin Easaw, Senior Director, Customer Experience at Thomson Reuters, which has about 50,000 employees in 100 countries.
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Thomson started as a holding company, which had acquired hundreds of different companies. A few years ago it decided to bring them all into a common brand: no easy task!
Just think of all the different systems, attitudes, and customer expectations! How the heck do you bring all that together?
Should You Even Take the Job?
There’s not much hope of developing a successful customer experience improvement program in that situation if you don’t have some pretty serious commitment from management. So if you are thinking of taking a position like Easaw’s, before you accept it, ask some tough questions to find out how committed the company really is.
Where to Start With the New Customer Experience Program?
You’ve accepted the job. Now what?
To start on the right foot, you need to do a few key things:
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Get to know the players. Who’s who in each department, and what are their goals. (We discussed this a bit in episode 16, with Reginald Chatman on how to win internal support for a customer experience program. You may want to go back and listen to that one.)
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Develop common terminology. Easaw found that “everybody seems to have a different definition of customer experience.” Depending on what your department does, you’ll see it in different ways. So you need to develop a common definition and words to work with.
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Assemble a team. No customer experience improvement program succeeds in a vacuum. You need representation from across the organization, and you’ll need an executive level sponsor or champion. While some people put on such a team will start off skeptical, Easaw found that one on one conversations to understand what makes them negative can often turn them around. And having some skeptics on your team is actually a good thing: it’s a reality check as you make plans.
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Dig for data. Find out what data exists, and start drilling into it for insights. Try connecting different sources of data across the organization to help you get a view of the overall customer experience, not just one department’s part of it. Often there are plenty of people within the organization who know the key problems customers experience, but without the data assembled and organized to tell a convincing story, there is no way for them to prove their hunches.
Next Steps?
Hang in there. In a company that large, customer experience improvement is a marathon, not a sprint.
In Other News – Upcoming Events
Hope I’ll see you at some of these!
Would Your Small Business Survive If You Were Gone?
Entrepreneurs and small business owners are often advised to think about what would happen to their business if they were hit by a truck. It’s a horrible thing to contemplate, but that sort of thing can — and does — happen.
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If you are a regular reader or Frank Reactions podcast listener, you know that I’ve been away for the last couple of weeks because that very thing happened to one of my closest friends recently. (I’m sad to have to report that he’s still in a coma.)
Marie Soprovich’s husband, Doug, was hit by a sudden cancer diagnosis, not a truck, so they had a little bit more time to plan, but not much. When he died, Marie concluded that it would be easier to replace her as a school vice-principal than to fill the leadership void left by the passing of her husband, the much-loved CEO of Aquarian Renovations.
So she took a deep breath, and took over as CEO.
“It was the biggest challenge of my lifetime. Doug was a very loved leader” – Marie Soprovich
In the five years since, the small business has not only stayed strong, but has grown its revenues and profits with the same size staff by improving processes and by always, always staying focused on the people side of things.
Internal People – Staff
The company was focused on culture from the beginning, so it was a close-knit team. That undoubtedly helped the staff deal with the terrible blow of its founder’s illness.
But at the same time, their loyalty to the leader also meant that invariably it would be hard to adjust to anyone new stepping into his role, whether or not it was his wife.
Marie decided the way to deal with her lack of experience in the company was to play to her strengths — writing and communications — while getting to know the strengths and weaknesses of the staff.
External People – Customers
As an English teacher, she had strong writing skills, so she decided to start writing for industry magazines about home renovations and featuring some of the projects the company had done. This brilliant move not only leveraged her strengths, it
Gave the new CEO a wonderful excuse to interview customers
about what their experience had been like with Aquarian during their renovations. She got to know them on a personal level, established herself as the new leader, and learned where the company could improve.
Created positive publicity at a time when the company’s future could have been in doubt.
If you are going to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a high end home renovation, you are likely to be nervous about signing a contract with a company that has just lost its founder, leader and driving force. The articles reinforced the company’s image as a strong, high quality producer that hadn’t disappeared.
Generated staff pride.
Seeing your work featured in glossy magazines can do great things for morale.
The 3P Profit Formula At Work
Aquarian Renovations is profiting from all 3 of the Ps in the 3P Profit Formula:
- Promise. The company has a strong set of guiding values and principles, including a commitment to quality and customer satisfaction.
No Podcast This Week. Here’s Why:
Sometimes the world doesn’t unfold as it should.
The wonderful man who is both a good friend and was the first early reader for my book recently moved to College Station in Texas to start a new job. His wife sold their home in Calgary and had just joined him. They’d had a bunch of things go wrong in their lives over the last few years through no fault of their own, but now it was all turning around.
They had just bought a house in College Station — hadn’t moved in yet — and were walking, hand in hand, to dinner. They were in a crosswalk when a pickup truck raced round the corner and knocked my dear friend out of his wife’s hand. He was sent flying, and his skull shattered.
That happened last Wednesday. After emergency surgery, he has been in a medically induced coma to try to keep the swelling in the brain down.
I’m flying down to Texas to be with his wonderful wife. I can’t even imagine what a nightmare she’s living through. And there’s no quick end in sight.
When it comes down to it, people are more important than anything else. So PeopleShock book promotions and the Frank Reactions podcast have to take a back seat for the next couple of weeks. Sorry about that.
Now, go hug someone you love. Don’t wait.
Update: September 6, 2016. People have been asking me how my friend is. I’m sad to report that, after a month in a coma, they have decided to take him off life support. This is so tragic. He will be sorely missed by people from all around the world.
Last time I went to my car dealership (because I was too lazy to do the switch from winter to summer tires myself), I got really mad.
Why?
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I had called to book an appointment, chose to come at a time when they wouldn’t be swamped with the morning rush of people bringing cars in before work, and told them I’d wait, since it should only take about 20 minutes to change the tires. (The tires are on rims.)
Many Car Dealerships Act As Though We Had No Options
So I get there at the appointed time, and the guy in the service bay says, “Things are pretty busy today, so it might be a couple of hours before we can get to it.”
I reminded him that I had booked an appointment. “Oh,” he tells me, “The appointment is just to see the service rep. It has nothing to do with when we’ll actually get to your car.”
Seriously???
So what the hell is the point of booking an appointment? I should have just driven in at 8:00 a.m. when they opened!
I once switched doctors because mine routinely made me wait an hour or more, didn’t apologize, and had a lousy “bedside manner”. I finally found a good doctor, and I’ll wait for him because I know he cares about me, if he’s running late it is because somebody else needed more time than expected, and the odds of finding someone better are pretty low.
But when I pay a premium to get my car serviced (regularly, I might add) at the dealership, there are other options. Those other options are cheaper, and may even treat me better.
Not only does bad customer service make customers look elsewhere for car maintenance, it gets them looking elsewhere to buy their next car.
We Pay a Premium for Service at a Car Dealership. So Why Aren’t We Treated That Way?
Today’s guest, Joseph Michelli, author of Driven to Delight: Delivering World-Class Customer Experience the Mercedes-Benz Way, talks about the painful realization at Mercedes that they were losing business to a competitor who had what Mercedes engineers insisted was an inferior product.
The customers were leaving because the other product was close enough, and the customer experience was way better at the competitors’ car dealerships.
So they realized they had to become the best at customer experience quality, not just car engineering quality.
This interview talks about how they made that transformation.
“It is less about how much you spend and more about how kind and thoughtful you are in the delivery” – J. Michelli
Topics covered in the interview include:
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The challenge of getting the car dealerships to buy in to the changes.
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The key roles of the 3Ps of Promise, People and Process.
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How to find the money to make major improvements to customer experience.
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The process Mercedes-Benz used to change how people thought and acted.
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Shifts in reward systems and measurement tools, so that people didn’t just focus on lagging indicators like their J.D. Power ranking but instead worked to improve the leading indicators that make customers happier overall.
Can You Really Do a Restaurant Turnaround When Things are This Bad?
It took a lot of guts to buy the failing Wild Wing restaurant franchise in Sherwood Park, Alberta, but Kevin Sembaliuk was convinced he could manage a restaurant turnaround based on great customer experience.
Things were so bad even the Mayor said he’d never eat there.
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Things were so bad that when Sembaliuk advertised online to hire staff, the ad instantly had comments on it warning people not to go work there.
Things were so bad the health inspectors were on the verge of closing it down.
Yes, Virginia, You Can Turn it Around
It was all about “turning the guest experience” around — quickly, says Sembaliuk in today’s podcast interview.
“Anybody can put food on a plate and anybody can serve a cold beer. But when you walk in the door, what’s the experience?
He started by cleaning the place up. Literally. It was filthy. Then he got out and networked. He started sponsoring community sports teams. He hired and trained new staff, telling them,
He focused on each of the 3Ps I talk about in PeopleShock.
Promise
He made it very clear to staff and new hires that he and his wife, Tina, had strong core values that centered around treating people well, teamwork, and providing great guest experiences. Staff who didn’t buy in couldn’t stay.
People
Not only was it crucial to treat staff well, and to listen to front line staff for their ideas, he also realized that playing an active role in the community would be key to helping convince people that the restaurant really had changed, and was worth trying.
Process
He developed and put in writing processes and checklists for everything. That way it was faster to bring new hires up to speed, and everyone knows exactly what is expected of them. (If you haven’t read it, check out Michael Gerber’s book, E-myth, about processes in small businesses.)
Kevin Sembaliuk was right: it is possible to turnaround a restaurant that is on the brink of disaster.
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Cold Calling Isn’t Dead?!
I wish cold calling were dead. I really do.
I don’t like making cold calls and I don’t like being on the receiving end.
But according to today’s guest, Mari Anne Vanella, the problem isn’t cold calls; the problem is bad cold callers.
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And if you care about customer experience, you want to start off on the right foot with prospective customers. Asking “How are you today?” or “Is this a good time?” are not promising ways to start. Nor is lying to the assistant who took the call, or pretending on my voice mail that you are something other than what you are.
Crazy though it sounds, sales reps are still doing these things all the time. According to Vanella, they don’t all work for two-bit operators either; some of them represent huge companies.
Note the word “represent” there. Your sales reps represent you to prospective customers. Make sure the way they are behaving is truly representative of your brand.
Why Do We Even Need to Cold Call Anymore?
I wish we could just rely on inbound marketing but the reality is that it’s a big, noisy, competitive world out there.
It is true that customers do a lot of research before deciding what to buy and who to buy from. But without monumental marketing budgets there’s a good chance they won’t even know that you sell it.
So if you want your company to grow, you are going to have to suck it up and do some cold calling.
10 Tips For Sales Teams
Since I’m a reluctant caller, I took advantage of the opportunity to grill Vanella about how to be better at cold calling. Here are some of the tips she had. For more, listen to the podcast.
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Involve the sales team in your customer journey mapping process. These days most prospects will already have researched your type of offering at least a bit before you call them, so don’t assume they are ignorant. Teach your sales staff how to identify where in the journey the prospect is.
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Get you marketing automation right. Don’t send the same thing to everybody. Have different streams depending on where they are in the purchase cycle. And make sure that your sales reps are aware of where somebody is before they call them!
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Think from the point of view of the person receiving the call. Why should they want to talk to you? Can you really offer something that will help them, not just you?
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Do your homework! Develop systems so that in 10 minutes you can research a prospect and their company well enough to be able to offer something of value in that call or phone message. Use LinkedIn. Check company news releases. Be able to show that you’ve taken the time to learn at least a bit about them.
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Treat administrative assistants as allies, not roadblocks. If you treat them with respect and are open about what you are hoping to accomplish, they will often help connect you with the right person. The CEO is not always the right person.
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Be prepared to leave a good voice message. Good means relevant to the prospect’s situation, brief, and non-demanding. Don’t expect the prospect to call you back. It’s not their job to try to connect with you.
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Make a test call. Record the message you plan to leave,
It’s Time For Multi-Brand Companies to Focus on Customers Instead of Brands
Martin Aubut is the Digital Director at L’Oreal Canada, which owns some 35 brands. When he took the job, he realized that to succeed today, it no longer makes sense for brand managers to operate in silos.
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They had to focus on the customer, regardless of which brand interested her on any given day.
They had to become truly customer-centric, across the whole stable of products.
Their range is so diverse that the company has products for every stage of the customer lifecycle. The brands you want to buy at 13, 30, and 73 are not the same. But you are still the same person. So why not leverage the diversity of those brands to follow the customer for years, and always be able to meet their needs?
That’s the change in mind-set Aubut has been working on at L’Oreal for the past five years.
Going From Product-Centric to Customer-Centric
Traditionally consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, like Procter and Gamble, organized themselves by brand. Sometimes they’d even pit one brand against another, to see which could do a better job of grabbing market share.
One big problem with that model is that it loses the synergies all those brands could have if they took a total view of the customer, across brands.
One of the exciting things about technology is that it is now becoming possible to do so.
Where to Start in Changing An Entrenched Corporate Culture
For Aubut, the first thing was to start digging into the people side of things:
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What was the culture of the organization?
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What was really driving customer purchase decisions?
He had to be able to get staff “to see l’Oreal as an ecosystem of brands.”
He decided to start by setting up an e-commerce playground of sorts. Picking a brand to sell online so the company could get closer to its customers, who had traditionally only bought from third party retailers.
To understand the customer in a big, multi-brand environment, means collecting and understanding data.
Lots of data.
Data that crosses websites, channels, brands, and even countries.
Not an easy task.
“The first thing that you have to do if you want to transform an organization and be consumer centric is to collect the information the right way and be able to analyse it real time,” says Aubut.
That meant doing things like:
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Training all the marketing staff (not just those in the digital unit) to understand and use Google Analytics.
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Putting public relations staff and brand managers on teams together. They have to be able to work on a consistent story.
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Investing in technology that can connect online and offline data, including advertising and its impact, and, whenever possible, link it all to individual customers.
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Finding ways to give customers a reason to engage with the company, and particularly to want to share personal information with it. Think about it: how could letting you know more about them help your customers? With beauty brands, consumers want to know which products will make them look their best, so asking things like skin type not only gives l’Oreal information to use in product development, it helps the consumers.
Interview with Curtis Kopf, Vice President of Customer Experience at Premera Blue Cross, about his experiences there and at companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Alaska Airlines in working to improve customer experience. The biggest challenge: culture.
Have You Been Dissed on a Review Site?
Let’s face it: you can’t please all of the people all of the time. If you are in the type of business where people leave ratings, at some point you’ll be hit with a negative review.
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Surprisingly often, says today’s podcast guest, Daniel Lemin, author of ManipuRated: How Business Owners Can Fight Fraudulent Online Ratings and Reviews, what you read fraudulent. And dealing with the big companies that host them, like Facebook or Yelp, can be an exercise in frustration.
If They Are Frauds, Should I Even Bother With Review Sites?
Unfortunately (or fortunately, from the viewpoint of customers who want to be well-informed before making buying decisions), review sites are here to stay.
Increasingly these sites are starting to recognize the need to crack down on fraudulent reviews, but most haven’t got the problem solved yet. So in the meantime, what can you do?
Join The Conversation
First, don’t ignore them. You need to “focus on review sites because that demonstrates a commitment to customer experience,” says Lemin.
So be sure you are tracking what’s being said about you, and be ready to respond quickly. The sooner you at least acknowledge the complaint, the better off you’ll be.
Show Empathy
Approach your critics “from a place of empathy.” Let them feel that you are truly sorry they had a bad experience. Then offer to talk with them offline to try to satisfy them.
Don’t get defensive! Even if you know what they are saying is wrong. You won’t win that PR battle.
Don’t Pay People For Good Reviews
You can get in trouble for paying people (with money, goods or services) for giving you a five-star review. Don’t go there!
However, you can offer a token of appreciation as encouragement for people to give a review, whether it is positive or negative.
But Do Ask for Ratings
Most of the time, though, you are best not paying for reviews at all. Instead, form a connection with your customers. If they feel that connection, they’ll want to review you positively.
“The most important thing …,” says Lemin, is to “take good care of your customers, and in turn give them a chance to take care of you back.”
Speaking of Which…
It would mean a lot to me if you’d review the Frank Reactions podcast on iTunes. Apple uses review numbers to decide which podcasts to let people see easily. Here how to do an iTunes review.
I also got the first review of my new book, PeopleShock: The Path to Profits When Customers Rule. To my delight, it was a five star, and from someone I’d never met. (I have since then; just recorded an interview for his Nice Guys on Business podcast.)
And if you want to hear more from Daniel Lemin, check out the
When you are selling high-end appliances or other premium products, customers expect their whole experience with you to be exceptional. German appliance maker, Miele, knows that and does some pretty clever things to improve customer experience.
With 17,500 employees worldwide, it isn’t always easy, but Miele’s focus on quality and continuous improvement is even embedded in its logo, which includes the words “immer besser” (ever better).
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Get Creative to Improve Customer Experience
Today’s interview is with Eric Esguerra, Director of Customer Service and Operations at Miele Canada.
In it he discusses both the extraordinary (like hiring helicopters to deliver appliances to remote mountain-top chalets) to the surprising (like sending the appliance installers to gourmet cooking classes so they can relate better to the customers and answer questions about the products based on real experience as users).
Other ideas we discuss include:
Truly partnering with distributors
I wrote about the importance of working closely with distributors in Chapter 12 of my new book, PeopleShock (which is now available on Amazon, iBooks and elsewhere).
Miele gives distributors extensive training. It even flies them to Germany to meet with head office and factory staff. It wants them to truly be part of the family.
Getting Customer Service Reps Into The Field
If customer service reps never see how the products are made, sold and used, it is much harder for them to understand customer needs. Miele sends reps on the road with technicians to get a good picture of the consumer’s world.
“They absolutely love it and they crave it,” says Esguerra.
I’ve talked and written about the value of getting other staff doing some shifts in the contact center, but hadn’t come across a company before that also takes the opposite approach.
They also see the contact center as a training ground, and reps know they’ve got real opportunities in other areas of the company.
Esguerra started in contact center work, and he knows how demoralizing it can be to spend eight hours a day dealing with problems and complaints. He figures 2 – 3 years is the ideal length of time to be in such a job. It’s a great training ground for people who can then move on to work in just about any other department.
These types of initiatives keep Miele’s attrition rate for contact center staff is well below industry norms. They’ve actually had zero attrition for the past two years.
Eliminating Barriers to Solving Customer Problems Quickly
The company surveys customers at every touchpoint, and takes their comments seriously. Whenever a customer asks a question or makes a comment on a survey, the company answers within 24 hours.
Not only are comments answered quickly, customer service staff can go straight to the factory floor if customers report a problem. This gets things fixed fast.
Nobody likes to hear that they’ve messed up, but, as Esguerra puts it,
I’m on the road, and will be until late June, so rather than force you to endure bad sound quality (and, I confess, for me to be able to focus on a 25th anniversary celebration with my husband in southern Europe!) I won’t be publishing new episodes until late June.
In the meantime, why not go check out some of the episodes you may have missed?
And/or start reading my new book, PeopleShock. If you want a hard copy, buy it at Amazon and send me your receipt and I’ll send you the ebook version too, so you don’t have to wait! (Here’s the Amazon.ca link)
I’ll be back with more great customer experience podcast episodes at the end of June! Have a great month!
If your mobile strategy is going to work, it has to work for customers and staff
Renee Cacchillo, Senior Vice President of Customer, Brand & Technology at Safelite Group spoke about their mobile strategy at the recent CXPA Insight Exchange. In today’s episode we discuss some of the things they’ve done to improve both staff and customer experience, including improving the company’s mobile strategy.
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Safelite repairs and replaces damaged car windshields. About 75% of its workforce is mobile: they travel to the client to do the repair work.
The company decided a while ago that it had to refocus. Who was going to be it’s priority: shareholders, employees or customers? And what was it going to be as a company: Operations focused? Product focused? Customer focused?
The decision was to become customer focused, and to do so by also putting employees as higher on the priority list than shareholders. Ultimately, they concluded, shareholder value will follow if you focus on the people inside and outside your organization.
Should We Have A Mobile App?
Given that its workforce was mobile, and people were likely to be on the road when the need for service arose, a mobile app seemed obvious. But on reflection, maybe it didn’t make sense.
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How often is a customer going to need to use the app? You don’t need your windshield repaired regularly (unless you live on a very bumpy gravel road!), so odds are that by the time you needed it you’d have forgotten you ever downloaded it.
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What benefit would a mobile app offer over simply a mobile-friendly website? None.
So instead of building an app for customers, they focused on having a really mobile-first, phone-friendly website. That included thinking of things like minimizing how much typing one has to do on the website to submit a request or even to find relevant information.
A mobile app, however, did make sense for the technicians who were going out to do the repairs. They are now even going beyond a phone app for mobile staff: they don’t want workers pulling out phones while driving, so they are moving to smart watches for them instead.
Create a More Uber-Like Experience
Instead of fearing customer reviews, Safelite decided to embrace them. The reality is that customers will turn to reviews to decide who to use when they need things like car damage repaired.
Safelite was confident that its quality and reliability were good enough that those reviews would be mostly positive, so it made it easy for customers to instantly rate their satisfaction with the experience, on their phones, as soon as the repair was done.
If a customer isn’t happy, the request for immediate reviews also means that the company hears about it right away and can try to solve whatever caused the dissatisfaction promptly instead of having a grumpy customer simply telling their friends to choose a different company.
Don’t Assume You Know What Your Customers Want
Nobody likes sitting around waiting for a repair person to show up. So it seemed obvious that shrinking the window for a possible arrival time from 4 hours to 2 would make customers happier.
But the obvious isn’t always right.
If you’ve ever worked in customer service, there’s a good chance you’ve had to deal with cranky, unreasonable, lying (or at least, exaggerating) customers.
It can be sooooo frustrating!
And yet, we keep preaching that our front line staff have to be nice to customers. Be respectful. Be empathetic.
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Is that even a reasonable thing to expect of our staff?
The Point Is Not To Prove Who’s Right
Today’s podcast guest, Adam Toporek, author of Be Your Customer’s Hero: Real World Tips and Techniques for the Front Line, knows first hand about unreasonable customers: he’s spent many years in retail having to deal with them.
The trick, he maintains, is to give the customer the benefit of the doubt, but, as they used to say in nuclear disarmament talks “trust, but verify.”
He’s a strong advocate of documentation, because there are some customers who will try to take advantage of you. Ultimately you may have to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. Documentation will help you know when that time has come.
That said, when customers return products or want refunds or claim they’ve been mistreated, “the point is not to prove who’s right.” The point is to calm them down and try to turn the situation around.
So if you’ve got records proving that you had, in fact, left three phone messages for them and they insist you never called, you don’t want to get into an argument, but it may help to be able to say, “Well, our records show that we did leave messages at these three times, but I guess you didn’t get them, so now that we are talking, let’s try to get your problem resolved.”
Having the documentation will make you feel more secure and confident as you then flip the conversation away from arguing about who’s right and back to trying to find a solution that everyone will be comfortable with.
The documentation can also help prove the customer is right. Our memories and perceptions are not very accurate. We may firmly believe that we called the customer three times, when in fact, we thought about it several times but only actually called and left a message once. Having the documentation helps avoid exaggeration on both sides of the counter.
“It’s a balance,” says Toporek, “Sometimes you have to say no, but often small businesses go too far the other way.”
Empowering Employees To Really Help Customers
In the interview we also discussed the need to give customer service employees guidelines and training so that they know how to handle different types of customer problems, and what level of compensation they can offer without having to get permission. (Here’s a link to Adam’s extensive article on employee empowerment: http://customersthatstick.com/employee-empowerment/)
As Sue Miller discovered when she tried to give her customer service staff fu...
The way we’ve been running our workplaces is broken.
Companies that aren’t willing to make radical changes are going to die, says David Burkus, author of the book, Under New Management, in today’s podcast interview.
As Chuck Blakeman pointed out in our interview a while back, most rules were created for the factory era, on the assumption that workers were lazy and stupid. Like Blakeman (and me, in my soon-to-be released book, PeopleShock), Burkus also cites Frederick Winslow Taylor, father of time and motion studies, who saw humans as little more than extensions of machines.
Even in factories, though, successful companies like Toyota concluded that using your people as robots is not a great way to run things. Not only do the workers get demoralized, your organization doesn’t get to benefit from their ideas and experience.
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In today’s interview, David Burkus and I discuss ideas for transforming the workplace to meet new realities.
Revolutionary Workplace Ideas That Are Being Tried & Work
Some of the ideas we talk about will be hard for many mangers to swallow. Things like:
Full Salary Transparency
Burkus argues that your staff are already making guesses about what their colleagues earn. Let’s just get it all out on the table.
The great thing about transparency is that it forces pay to be more closely aligned with performance. It makes it harder for under-performers to coast along, and for managers to shy away from having the difficult conversations with them that may ultimately lead to firing.
Unlimited Vacation Time
Even with the current structure, 41% of American workers don’t take any vacation time, and a further 17% take fewer than five days a year, according to 2016 research by Skift.
So why are we so worried about trusting people to self-regulate (and bow to peer pressure)? If you can’t trust staff to make wise decisions, you’ve got a bunch of other workplace problems too.
Self-Directed Work Teams
We already discussed the value of self-directed work teams in episode 47 – my interview with Marcie Kiziak — and saw how they can improve both the atmosphere and productivity in the workplace. Burkus gives further examples in his book.
Peer and Subordinate Interviews for New Staff
Traditional job interviews have a lousy track record when it comes to hiring the right people. Google has done some fascinating research on how to improve hiring processes. They are strong advocates of team-based interviews, done by staff at all levels.
Not every company will go to the lengths Google does, but it makes sense for co-workers and the people who will be supervised to have say in who gets hired to supervise them.
I do worry about group-based hiring decisions becoming too insular.
Who doesn’t have a nightmare call center story to tell? And if you think it’s bad from the customer perspective, try working in one! (I know they are not all that bad, but…)
Fortunately, the times they are a changin’. And if your company hasn’t updated it’s call center model lately, odds are you’re losing customers.
Today’s podcast interview guest is Kevin Krempulec , VP and General Manager responsible for Canada of contact center technology firm, Genesys, and we discuss contact center challenges and the way forward.
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Time For The Connected Call Center
These days customers expect to be able to the contact companies from which they buy in any way, at any time of day. The modern contact center has to be able to cope not only with telephone calls for support, but also with
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live chat,
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text messages, and
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several social media platforms.
Although many people still use the term “call center”, these centers really are becoming omnichannel contact centers. In fact, according to Krempulec, this year there will be more digital interactions with contact centers than voice ones. If you have kids in their teens or twenties, this probably won’t surprise you; they hate using phones for speaking to people!
Most companies are still struggling to cope with the sudden surge omnichannel service expectations. They may be tied down by legacy systems, which don’t play well with others. That’s why you so often have the frustration of having to repeat the same basic information to one person after another as you try to get your problem resolved.
Companies like Genesys are trying to find ways to solve these problems, but it isn’t easy, and we are clearly at a time of transition on the world of customer support.
What’s On The Horizon for Contact Centers?
In the short run, says Krempulec, most companies will be focused on simply trying to come to terms with the reality of omnichannel customer service.
Video-Based Customer Service
That will include adding in new options, such as video-based call center conversations. Now your call centre reps will not only have to be pleasant on the phone, they’ll have to look good!
More significantly, video chat means that they won’t be able to deal with multiple calls at once, which will require a re-think of how contact center teams are structured and run.
On the plus side, the video connection may prove a much more powerful way to engage with customers and generate up-sales. And it might not actually end up costing more to resolve problems — think about the time currently wasted as both sides type, and then wait for the other side to type back, and get distracted dealing with something else in the meantime, which means that it takes even more time to resolve a problem.
One direct, focused video chat may be far more effective than text-based communications, and better able to provide an empathetic connection with the customers than telephone-only calls can do.
Proactive Outreach
Next on the horizon are more effective ways of proactively reaching out to customers at just the right mome...
OK, so to most of us the words “love” and “bank” don’t seem to go together, but when ATB Financial decided to research the emotions people had about their financial institutions, it asked them to write either a love letter or a break-up letter to their bank.
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Today’s guests, Tawnya Crerar, Director of Client and Marketing Research at ATB Financial, and Anne Coulter, Managing Director, RSG, set out to explore the psychoanalytics underlying how people feel about their banks. The letters they got were surprisingly touching and emotional, telling bad stories but also lovely ones.
In this episode, which was recorded after Crerar and Coulter gave a presentation on the research to the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA), we discuss:
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what psychoanalytics are
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how they used them
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the use of a simulation tool to help bank colleagues understand the impact of their actions on growing the bank’s customer base
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the trade-off between attracting new customers and retaining existing ones (and the clever balance they found)
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how ATB has changed its hiring and on-boarding processes to ensure that new hires fit into the customer-centric culture they are building
In a later episode you’ll get to hear their CEO’s perspective. If you want to make sure you don’t miss that one, sign up for the Frank Ideas newsletter, so you’ll always be alerted when a new episode comes out. Just put your email address in the box below.
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Entrepreneur Dan Lok comes across as a high-energy, high-hype salesman type. So I had two surprises in store for me when I interviewed him:
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Despite his controversial statements, such as saying it’s a myth that employee happiness key, we actually agree on quite a lot, and
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He had never intended or wanted to be a businessman in his youth.
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How to Make Employees Happy So They’ll Make Your Customers Happy
In today’s podcast, Dan argues that pandering to employees won’t make them happy for long, nor will it make them productive workers.
He quite rightly points out that if you give a year end bonus two years in a row because your company did well, but then have to give less during a bad year, employees will be angry. They will have come to see the bonus as a right, not a bonus.
Likewise, you may have a fun workplace with nerf balls and pool tables, but ultimately, true employee joy comes from within. It comes from doing their job well, and having a job worth doing.
So Lok tries to ensure that the people he hires are truly committed to the mission of the company, and excited to be working there.
That makes total sense, but where we disagree is that, to me, that attitude — and a workplace culture that reinforces it — is what creates employee happiness, and employee happiness is key.
Employee Happiness is Not the Only Myth
He raises some other excellent points in our conversation, such as:
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If you own a business it is unreasonable to expect employees to care about your business as much as you do. As Dan put it, if they had an “employer mindset” they wouldn’t be your employees. That said, profit sharing can change that attitude in most employees, because then they are owners.
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The best way to express appreciation for the work your employees do is with specific praise, not with free movie passes. (Again, though, I would argue that a bit of both could be beneficial.)
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You should set clear performance standards and expectations, and then manage for results. If people don’t know what is expected of them, you are unlikely to get it.
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Having a specific goal they are working towards will motivate employees more than money. If someone wants to earn $15,000 to go on a dream vacation, help them break down what results they would have to accomplish to earn that money, help them track it and have a picture of that vacation destination on their desk. That will motivate them more than if they were just counting the dollars themselves.
What Other Myths Do You Think Exist About Employees & Motivation?
Please add your thoughts below.
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One of the biggest reasons company owners and CEOs want to avoid social media is because they’ve heard horror stories about companies that made little mistakes and then were attacked on social media.
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Often the attacks aren’t even fair; some people just love to gripe publicly.
As Jay Baer, author of the new book, Hug Your Haters, puts it
So why should you risk even talking to customers on social media?
Two answers to that:
- You really don’t have a choice anymore.
People will attack you on social media if they want to. Of course, others may defend you, and still others will compliment you. One way to make a little problem turn into a huge one is to ignore it. Ignoring online haters is as effective as throwing a blanket over your head and saying “you can’t see me!” Actually, it is even worse than that, because of social media’s ability to quickly point out to millions of people that you are hiding.
- Handled right, you can turn your enemies into allies.
In my interview with Renee Racine, of Indigo Books, she talked about reaching out to people who had complained about the company and inviting them to join customer panels. In today’s interview, Jay Baer told a similar story from Le Pain Quotidien restaurant chain. They actually turned those who had complained into mystery shoppers for their chain, giving them coupons for a monthly meal at a different restaurant in the chain each month in exchange for giving a frank assessment of what the experience was like. Brilliant! (Even if it is a little worrisome to companies like mine, that do mystery shopping for clients!)
In the interview we also discuss:
Why you shouldn’t just move customer service staff from phones and email to social media.
Most people still try to get service in a private way first, so it is hugely important to serve them well in those private platforms. Instead, we are training people to complain publicly by only answering them quickly in social media.
These days, you’ve got to be fast in public and in private.
The mistake of comparing your customer service levels to others in your industry.
We’ve all been trained by what I call “the Amazon Effect“: expecting service quality, speed and pricing comparable to Amazon. So if you think you can get away with slow or sloppy service because “that’s the way this industry works,” you are wrong.
In a purely local market where there is a shortage of people available (such as plumbers here in oil country when prices were still high), you can get away with it for a while, but pretty soon you’ll be losing out to new competitors who’ve decided to make customer service their point of differentiation.
The advantage small and mid-sized businesses have when it comes to customer service.
Large companies are struggling to deal with huge customer data systems that don’t yet communicate smoothly with each other. It’s why, for example, you often have to repeat your account number to the call center rep even though you already keyed it in when the automated system told you to.
People who work in retail often believe they can spot the mystery shoppers who come in to their stores. Mobile phones are making it easier for them, since a growing number of mystery shopping, or secret shopping, companies are asking their shoppers to film the stores they shop.
While I see the appeal, there’s no way that you can go into a store with a regular camera or phone and film without it being obvious that you aren’t a real customer. If you use a button-hole camera, maybe. But that’s not what the companies are asking their testers to do.
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Mobile Does Have A Place In Market Research
That said, mobile can be tremendously valuable for market researchers, as today’s guest, Daniel Weber of iTracks, told me in our interview.
Now that we are all becoming so accustomed to filming everything and making spur-of-the-moment videos, it no longer seems as unnatural for friends or family to film what goes on behind closed doors.
That makes “ethnographic” research — where a researcher studies people in their natural environment — potentially much more comfortable and realistic.
I know the theory is that people stop noticing the researcher who sits in a corner watching what their every move, but I’m not convinced that’s so true. You’d have to be there for many weeks or months for them to forget you completely and act the way they really would without your presence.
But with mobile, they can easily film themselves and give researchers “in the moment” feedback about their thoughts, feelings and experiences. This is tremendously valuable.
Data Overload
The challenge that remains, though, is analyzing the data and selecting excerpts to present to colleagues. If you have more than a handful of users the volume of data to analyze quickly becomes overwhelming.
Daniel pointed out that even uploading the videos users film can be a huge ordeal. Often you want to do this kind of research with people who don’t live in big cities with fast, reliable internet connections. It is super-frustrating to your testers if every time they try to upload their video the system crashes part-way through. That’s why iTracks has developed special technology so that you don’t have to start all over again if that happens.
What About Text Messaging and Chats for Market Research?
Later in the interview we also discussed a growing interest in using chat apps on phones for market research. I can see it having value when trying to reach teenage and 20-something testers, who have fast phone fingers.
Some people are trying to hold focus groups that way, and here too, I’m a bit skeptical. If you’ve ever followed an active Twitter chat, like #custserv (one of my faves, which is on Tuesday evenings at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time) you’ll discover how hard it is to follow a conversation when there are several participants scrolling by. You can jump in and out, but it is almost impossible to follow everything that is going on.
Of course, I think focus groups tend to be overused even in-person.
They can be valuable at the beginning of a research process, to give you insight into what issues may arise when you go to real user testing, and to help you formulate good survey questions.
Patient Experience is Often Frustrating for Doctors, Staff & Patients
The American, Canadian and European health care systems all have their advantages and drawbacks. I’m not about to wade into an Obamacare debate, but here’s a model being tried in a few places that really seems to improve patient experience, as well as the experiences of doctors, their staff, and allied health professionals. It also has customer experience lessons that can benefit all of us, regardless of industry.
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Today’s interview is with Doug Craig, General Manager of the Edmonton Southside Primary Care Network. The network he runs lets doctors expand their clinics to offer related on-site health services such as access to nurses, behavior consultants, dietitians, exercise programs, respiratory therapists, and social workers. The goal is to lower the risk of people developing health problems and to improve chronic disease management.
Who Benefits?
It’s a win for all concerned:
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Doctors can be more efficient with their time, focusing only on the things that actually need their level of expertise. By being able to easily get related services and counselling for patients, their time is freed up to take on more patients and shorten waiting lists.
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Patients get better care by being able to access all these other services. It can also be easier to get in to see their doctor when that’s who is really needed.
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Related health care professionals and counselors love it because they have much more flexibility, don’t have to find their own clients or work in a hospital, but do get to work in a supportive team environment.
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The health care system benefits because it avoids costly hospital care for patients with complex needs, and it lowers the risk of more people developing chronic conditions like diabetes.
Patient Experience is Linked to Employee Experience
The Edmonton Southside Primary Care Network has won several best employer awards. As we’ve noted many times on this blog (and in my upcoming book, PeopleShock: The Path to Profits When Customers Rule), happy employees are essential if you want happy customers. In this case, the customers are patients.
The things they’ve done to create happy staff can apply to any workplace:
Hire for personality; train for skills
Yes, medical professionals have to be licensed to practice their profession, but Craig explains that they soon realized it was more important to focus on personality in hiring than looking for a specific clinical skill set. Even the orientation process now focuses more on teamwork and relationship-building skills rather than just clinical skills.
Trust your staff
In this case, staff are hired centrally by the Primary Care Network, but they work in medical clinics all over the city. So there is no way to do close, daily supervision. Many of their clinicians came from a hospital environment where they chafed under tight supervision, so this was a fantastic change for them.
Trust your colleagues to do what’s right in the moment
There are overlaps among the professionals, and sometimes it is more important to give the patient the support they need right aw...
Counting how many people enter a store is nothing new in the retail world, but Headcount CEO, Mark Ryski, used to find it frustrating that so many clients weren’t acting on his company’s market research reports.
The data he gave them went way beyond just telling them how many people crossed the threshold: his insights gave them lots of ideas about how they could improve to convert more of the visitors to their stores into customers.
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So why weren’t the clients taking action?
It’s a problem familiar to many consultants. In today’s interview, which followed a presentation Ryski gave recently to the Alberta chapter of the Marketing Research & Intelligence Association (MRIA), we discuss:
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The clever tactic his company now uses to get clients to act on market research results.
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The value of having a skilled human analyst look at data instead of relying completely on computer algorithms.
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Mistakes that are easy to make in interpreting data from traffic counts or other market research.
Great Market Research: Why No Action?
Ryski points out in the podcast that there are several barriers to getting action:
Problem: User-Hostile Reports
Many companies get sold on slick software with fancy dashboards that claim they’ll tell you everything that’s happening at a glance. The problem is that our brains can’t take it all in at a glance.
Often there is too much presented, it is shown in ways that aren’t intuitive to understand, and it isn’t obvious how to pull out only the data that is relevant to the user.
In fact, in many organizations software is bought by higher-ups, who love that it can tell them so much, but the people who actually have to use it haven’t even been consulted. The data dashboards that impressed the buyer may not present the information in a way that is useful to the user.
Solutions
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If you are a vendor, simplify your reports and test them with real users. Find out what they need to see and what format is most useful to them.
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Include training when you sell your software tools so they’ll start seeing the value immediately.
Problem: Lack of Resources
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: unless and until you’ve mistreated them, most staff want to do a good job.
The managers who get the market research reports want to use that expertise to do a better job. But life gets in the way. They have competing pressures for their time and budget.
So a store manager may know that the till lineups are too long, but if they can’t get permission from head office to hire more staff, what can they do?
Solutions
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Present your results in a way that will help them make the business case to their superiors about why they need extra resources.
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Offer suggestions about low-cost or easy ways to start implementing the needed changes with existing resources. There may be other areas within their budget that you’ve discovered do not provide much value to customers, so maybe money or staff time can be shifted away from those, for example.
I don’t normally share much about my personal life here on the blog, but over the past couple of weeks both my father and my father-in-law died. As a result, I don’t have a podcast episode for you this week or next.
They were both impressive, multi-talented and kind men. We will miss them.
I’ll have new episodes for you in March. Until then, here are three things you can do:
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Tell your parents that you love them. If that’s no longer possible, tell others you care about that you love them.
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Check out past episodes here or on iTunes. And while you are there, please give us a rating and write a review.
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Sign up for the early notifications list for my new book, PeopleShock: Why People Matter More Than Ever in the Digital Era & What That Means For Business, at http://bit.ly/peopleshockfirst.
Thanks.
More people die each year in the US from preventable medical errors than in car accidents. Think of it as 2 or 3 jumbo jets crashing every day. Many of these deaths result from dysfunctional cultures. Today’s guest, Bea Bohm-Meyer, of the Bohm-Meyer Group, knows how important culture change is in “high reliability” fields — situations where a mistake can mean death.
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Even when lives aren’t on the line, culture change is often the key to keeping your business off life support.
5 Drivers of Culture Change
There are some differences between “high reliability” organizations (the ones where screw-ups mean death) and others. One is that you must look more closely at “latent risk” — what happens if something goes wrong? Or, as astronaut Chris Hadfield puts it, “What’s the next thing that can kill me?”
But other factors are as important for culture change in any organization:
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Leadership
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Collaboration
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Communication (in both directions)
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Engagement
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Accountability
While leadership from the top is crucial, it is important to remember that leaders exist at all levels. If you want to transform the culture in your organization, look for cultural transformation “cheerleaders” throughout your organization and work with them to make things better.
As your culture is improving, it is important to keep reinforcing the values you are trying to instill, otherwise you risk backsliding.
Understand Your Staff to Understand Your Culture
I was startled when Bohm-Meyer said that “there’s truth in everything”, but I think the point she was making is that whether or not the objective “truth” agrees with how somebody perceives a situation, their truth matters. You can’t discount it, especially if you want them to change.
Try to find out why the person is resisting the change. That can be an important starting place for weakening resistance.
Remember that most employees want to do the right thing. They want to do their jobs well. But sometimes they are in a culture that makes that difficult or impossible. Like the classic example of a patient who dies from an infection because the doctor didn’t wash his hands but the culture was such that the nurse couldn’t remind him. Sounds crazy, but that sort of thing really does happen.
Mentioned in this Episode
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, By Atul Gawande Fantastic book. Read it!
Tema’s interview with Bruce Croxon, founder of Lavalife
Peter Aceto interview, CEO of Tangerine Bank
What advice do you have on culture change?
Share your tips, suggestions, ideas below.
I’ve written before* about the importance of having motivated employees if you want to deliver consistently excellent customer experiences. An ESOP – Employee Share Ownership Plan (or Employee Stock Ownership Plan) – is one way to add motivation.
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Benefits of ESOPs
According to today’s guest, Dan Ohler, of ESOP Builders, employee-owned companies have:
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double the customer loyalty
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20% higher productivity
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200% lower turnover
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3.5 times more job applicants
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less absenteeism.
Business owners are often frustrated by employees who don’t seem to care about the company as much as the owner does. But, if you think about it, why would they? Regular employees don’t reap the rewards of owners, and the business wasn’t their brainchild.
Once they become owners, however, they see things quite differently. In fact, research shows that employee-owned companies are more likely to survive during tough economic times. As with founders, once they are owners they will do what it takes to keep the company alive.
ESOP As Exit Strategy?
As the baby boomers hit retirement age, many of them are considering this route to deal with succession. According to Ohler, 70% of small and mid-sized company owners in Canada are looking to retire within the next 5 – 10 years and 70% of them have no succession plan! The US data is likely similar.
A friend of mine recently sold her business and the buyer wasn’t someone she had confidence in to carry on the customer experience focused tradition. Selling to employees instead of strangers can be a way of generating that retirement income while leaving your company in good hands.
Should You Consider An ESOP?
Despite the many benefits (which can also include tax benefits for both founders and employees), switching to an ESOP model is not easy, and should be done with the help of experts. Some of the issues to consider include:
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Do you want all employees to be eligible, or just certain key ones? (Personally, I think that including all employees makes the most sense, but many owners aren’t ready to take that big a step initially.)
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How will you help employees finance share purchases?
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What will happen if somebody quits or needs to be fired?
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What if they want to still work at the company but sell some of their shares?
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How should the shares be priced? (Hint: bring in a professional business valuator.)
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What are the legal and tax implications of the structure you choose?
Tips for Successful ESOP Implementation
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Get professional advice.
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Get employees at all levels involved in developing the plan and setting the rules around it.
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Teach employees to read and understand financial statements.
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Manage employee expectations. Just because they own a few shares doesn’t mean that every one of them suddenly has a say in every decision.
*See, for example,
Want to Grow Your Business Quickly? Focus on Employees First!
Wish Your Staff Were More Productive?
Interest in customer journey mapping has skyrocketed in recent years.
Today’s podcast interview guest, Ian Williams of UK-based Jericho Consulting, worries that it may just be a fad. That companies are doing it just to say they have, rather than to actually improve anything for the customers.
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Seems crazy that companies would invest in a process such as journey mapping without following through. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m sure every consultant who’s worked with big organizations has seen money invested, work done, recommendations made, only to have the process stop there.
I suppose as long as they’ve paid the bills it shouldn’t bother me when it happens, but it does. My colleagues and I put a lot of effort into trying to help our clients improve and succeed; it’s not all about the money! But I digress…
According to Williams, companies should start by doing Voice of the Customer (VOC) research to find out what’s really troubling their customers. You can collect this information from:
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your contact center records,
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interviews with customers and others in your target market,
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social media listening.
Then move to journey mapping, focusing first on your most important customer segments. Look at what their actual journeys are, and, based on your research, what their ideal paths would be like.
From there, start mapping out your internal processes to see how they are affecting the customer’s journey. Where are the misalignments with what customers desire?
Don’t Confuse Customer Journey Mapping With Process Mapping
The terms “customer journey mapping” and “process mapping” often get thrown around as though they meant the same thing, but they don’t.
Customer journey mapping takes the customer’s point of view. What do they experience from the time they start thinking about using a product or service like yours, all the way through to the post-sale service, support, and possible future purchases.
Process mapping, on the other hand, looks at what’s going on inside your organization.
The problem if you start with process mapping is that you won’t see the frustrations your processes may be causing customers. So while you might make things more efficient internally, you may well lose sales and goodwill.
Once you know what the customer’s ideal journey is start examining your processes to find out how to streamline them so that not only will you have happier customers, you will be more efficient and cost effective.
That’s the great thing about customer experience process improvement: it can increase sales AND lower costs! Cool!
Customer Journey Mapping: Where’s The Customer In All Of This? (Image courtesy of integrationtraining.co.uk)
Member Engagement vs Customer Engagement
Association staff sometimes look at people who work in companies and think, “They’ve got it easy. They’ve got money to study customer needs and really serve their customers well.”
People who work in companies sometimes look at association staff and think, “They’ve got it easy. They don’t have to make money, and their members are naturally engaged with them, so it’s easy to know what they need.”
Turns out they are both right and both wrong, says today’s podcast guest, Matthew D’Uva. He’s the Executive Director of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and until recently was the President and CEO of SOCAP International (the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals).
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Association Member Engagement
Association members are the customers, so customer knowledge is baked right in to the system. Members decide what the association should be doing. They serve on its board and committees, they hire and fire it’s executive director.
Associations are typically smaller, so there are fewer layers of bureaucracy if it wants to get involved in social media. Since they are member driven they usually find it easier to let members (i.e. customers) jump to its defense if it is being bad-mouthed online.
There are some pretty big downsides, though.
First, many associations are tight on funding. Staff are chronically overworked and there simply isn’t the budget for the sophisticated social listening tools some companies use. There may also be less money for training staff on how to use social and digital media.
Also, it can be difficult serving all members, given wide variations in geography and generations. You need a high degree of transparency and good feedback mechanisms, says D’Uva.
Associations and companies both suffer from one other problem of the current era: people who are massively overextended. There are so many more demands on our time than there used to be. So it is no longer as obvious that a rising executive should get involved in an industry association rather than focusing on the job itself, or doing other types of volunteer work.
(That said, based on my experiences, I’d still say association involvement should be a high priority for your time if you want to further your career. The things you’ll learn and the connections you’ll make are bound to help you going forward.)
Association Member Engagement Trends for 2016
Increased Customer / Member Expectations
Associations, says D’Uva, are feeling the same heat companies are for ever-increasing quality standards when it comes to customer service (member service).
New Ways To Get Member Input
For a long time associations relied on annual member surveys to gauge how well they were doing and learn what new offerings would interest their members. Now, thanks to digital media, there is a much wider range of ways in which members can let their views be known. It is also much easier than it was in my days back at the Canadian Bankers’ Association in the 1980s to collaborate with far-flung members. On the flipside,
How An Old-School Manufacturer Became a Results Only Workplace
Dennis Malacek, CEO & President of electronic equipment manufacturer, Dynatronix, transformed his “old school manufacturing facility” to a results-only work environment (ROWE™), and the results have been impressive. For example:
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One product line’s manufacturing time dropped from 54 to 32 man-hours.
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A good employee turned down an $8,000 raise offered by a competitor because the competitor had a traditional work environment.
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We are hearing more these days about companies moving to a results orientation. A fast-changing global marketplace has put pressure on companies to become more efficient and effective, and technologies have reached the point where working from anywhere instead of an office is easy to do.
In today’s podcast episode I interview Malacek about what it took to make the change and why he’s happy they did.
Experiences From A Move to a Results Focus
A few highlights:
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One of the big initial challenges is breaking old stereotypes, such as commenting when people come in late (or early). “You learn that time doesn’t matter; the result does,” says Malacek.
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Another shift was getting people past imagining that a results-only work environment meant working from home. Sometimes it can be working from home, but you can’t bring the whole factory home. What it does mean is finding a way to get the work done well, by the deadline, in whatever way makes sense for the workers and the project.
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Oddly, many workers feel guilty if they leave “early” because their work is all done. Malacek used a farm analogy to help them understand: “If I had 600 acres of corn to plant, I didn’t sit out in the field when I was done planting if it was only 3 in the afternoon. I went home,” he told them.
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One of the benefits, but also the challenges of going to a results-focused system is that it forces you to document everything and set standards. It forces you to think through what may be outdated policies or procedures, to clearly set out expectations — what results are needed.
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Not all employees will adapt to this new approach. Some will choose to leave. Some won’t be producing the results, and so will have to leave.
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The hardest part? “As a manager, you’ve got to let go.”
Have You Considered Moving to a Results-Only Work Environment?
Please tell us about it below.
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In episode 52 of Frank Reactions I talked about the 1st P in the 3P Profit Formula: Promise. The other two Ps are People and Process. Today we talk about People, and the 8 different categories of people who influence your business success.
People With Power To Make Your Business a Success
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When we think about the people factor in business, we typically focus on two categories of people: customers and employees. But they are far from the only ones we need to think about. There are 8 general categories of people who we need to deal with well to succeed. They are:
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Employees
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Prospects
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Customers
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Suppliers
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Distributors, Resellers and/or Franchisees
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Investors and lenders
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Influencers, including mass and social media, and friends and colleagues of your target customers
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Competitors.
Many of these I’ve covered extensively in other episodes and blog posts, so let’s touch on a few I haven’t discussed as much yet.
Lenders and Investors
One thing I hear over and over from people is that, at least when it comes to public companies, they don’t take customer experience improvements seriously because the investment in improving customer experience is long term, but the stock markets reward a short-term focus. This is a problem, but as more and more senior executives are telling their investors that improving customer experience is now a strategic priority, hopefully this is starting to change. The reasons private companies don’t invest in customer experience in are usually a little different.
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Often the founder is still the CEO and s/he doesn’t believe there’s a problem. As long as the company is still making enough money for the owner to be satisfied, why mess around with change?
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Others are just too busy running off in all directions to really focus on customer experience and the challenges of improving it. This is a typical problem in small and mid-sized businesses, which are often under-staffed.
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Owners who are thinking of selling their company may feel the same sort of pressure as publicly traded company executives to cut costs and show high short-term profits, even if that may hurt things in the long-term.
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Some private company executives may be getting pressure from their bankers who have set financial ratios the company must maintain to be in good standing.
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If lenders were friends or family, there is often a perceived pressure to repay those debts as soon as possible.
These reasons are all understandable, but not wise if the company is to be successful in the long term. Public expectations about customer experience quality are going up faster than most companies are managing to cope with. You can’t simply ignore them if you want to survive.
Media and General Public
We hear a lot about the impact of social media on people’s perceptions of your company, and there is no doubt that it does have a huge impact.
Part of the impact is not what it says directly to people who might be your customers, but the fact that the mainstream media now turn to sources like Twitter as a first place to find new story ideas, information and updates. And mainstream media still has a huge impact on public perceptions.
Grinch Alert: I’m a skeptic when I hear words like “mindfulness” and “holistic”, especially in the context of business. But today’s podcast guest, Dorota Ulkowska of the Potential Project, has a point when she talks about the benefits of mindfulness at work.
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According to Dorota, 46% of the time our minds are wandering. [Did I remember to send that email? Has Suzie’s fever gone down? Is this bloody call going to end before I have to leave for my next meeting? Damn, that doughnut looks good! Oops, time to get back to writing this article.]
She’s right that many of us need training and practice to learn to still our minds and focus on true priorities. This can be especially important for customer service staff, who are often caught up in stressful situations, yet have to stay calm. It’s also huge when it comes to dealing with co-workers.
Mindfulness at Work: STOP Then ACT
With the help of two clever acronyms, here’s what the Potential Project proposes.
STOP
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S = Silence your mind. Shut up the background chatter.
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T = Tune In – Pay attention as though this were the first time you’d ever heard something like this (even if it isn’t)
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O = Open your mind – Battle “cognitive rigidity,” the tendency to tune out because we “know” what they are going to say, or because we are too focused on how we’ll respond.
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P = Present – Be present in the moment with the person you are talking to; focus entirely on them.
It takes training to learn how to do this, and sometimes visual reminders can help while you are solidifying the mindfulness habit.
Once the person you are talking with has had their say, respond mindfully, don’t just react.
ACT
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A = Appropriate – The way you respond should be appropriate for the person you are talking to. This can encompass the wording used, the tone of voice, and the overall message.
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C = Compassionate – They could have a very good reason for being cranky that has nothing to do with you. Don’t take it personally. Try to empathize.
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T = Timed well – Don’t speak over others. Don’t interrupt. Sometimes even silence can help.
How Mindfulness At Work Helps Change Management
If you think about our ancestors, it is hardly surprising that we are programmed to instinctively react negatively to change. Change signaled potential danger: the tree branches started rustling because a tiger was hiding there, about to pounce.
Our conscious mind, says Dorota, processes 7 bits of information per second, but our subconscious processes 11 million of them! So of course our subconscious springs to attention at the threat of change, even if, rationally, we know that the proposed change is a good idea. Being mindful, she says, will help you overcome the subconscious and let the logic come closer to being in control. It still won’t be easy, so you have to keep questioning your reactions (and – in a nice way – those of your colleagues) to make sure you are doing the right things.
So apply mindfulness techniques to dealing with yourself and your co-workers when change is needed.
It’s become a cliché: The only constant is change. But it is also true. In today’s interview we discuss change management, starting with changing your own acceptance of change, and then how to be a leader at times of change.
I spoke with Sandra Woitas, a long-time educator & expert in resiliency and change. She’s an advisor to governments, non-profits and businesses. (She’s had a bit of a change herself: her most recent gig is with the Edmonton Oilers hockey team!)
She was granted an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by the University of Alberta last year, and if you have time, you really should read her speech (opens in new tab). I wish I could find a video of it, but so far no luck.
Mariana Konsolos is a serial entrepreneur who’s soaking up the sun in Miami right now, having recently sold a successful fashion accessories business she created from nothing 15 years ago, when she was an immigrant in a new country where she barely spoke the language. She’s dealt with a lot of change herself, and as an employer of many immigrants.
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Change Management Begins With You
To help others deal with change, we need to deal well with it ourselves. Sandra pointed out that we tend to be too harsh on ourselves, comparing our weaknesses to other people’s strengths. Ooh… did that ring true! Her point was that you need to:
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Know your strengths and weaknesses, and
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Accept and focus on your strengths.
If you do that, she says, you will be less afraid of change, because you know you have strengths you can bring to the new situation.
Also, recognize that your colleagues or employees are likely feeling threatened by the changes too, so try not to take criticism personally. Mariana deals with it by reminding herself that “it’s not all about me!”
Change Management Within Your Team
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Don’t hoard information and decisions. The more people understand about what’s changing and why, the easier it will be to accept.
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Look for and bring out the strengths of those around you.
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Don’t pretend to have all the answers. “Asking for help is a sign of competence, not a sign of weakness,” notes Sandra.
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Ditch the “me boss, you not” pecking order. Being the boss doesn’t mean you always know what’s right.
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Be patient. Sometimes we agents of change have to remind ourselves that most people don’t love change. It will take them longer to adjust.
A final change management tip from Sandra:
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As many of you know, I’m finishing writing my new book, PeopleShock: The 3P Profit Formula for the Digital Era. The 3Ps that lead to profit are Promise + People + Process. In today’s podcast episode, I take you through Chapter 5 of the book.
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Behind the Brand: Vision, Mission and Values
I’d love to get your feedback on it! If you have time to listen to the whole episode and/or read the full transcript, you’ll get to hear the fun stories that go with the key points. But if you are time-pressed, here are the highlights:
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Have a strong, clear, memorable rallying cry, or purpose. That will make it much easier to develop customer, staff and supplier loyalty. It also gives you a filter to help you make difficult decisions on priorities.
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The whole team should be involved in developing a new mission statement. If it is imposed from the top it will have little impact.
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Your mission or vision statement should be one sentence, and not longer than about 15 words. If people can’t remember it, they’ll have trouble living it.
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You can support your mission statement with a list of core values. Again, try to keep the list short enough to be memorable.
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Simply saying you offer great customer service won’t be enough; everybody claims that. What is your unique selling proposition (USP)?
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Have a firm base of values and principles. That will help your organization deal with the challenges when things go wrong.
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Breaking your promise to customers is one of the hardest customer experience mistakes to overcome. This is especially true of misleading sales or marketing promises.
Do you want to hear or read more of the book before it is released?
I’d love to get your feedback on it. Drop me a line at tema [at] frankreactions.com. Thanks!
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This is Part 2 of my conversation with Bent Dalager, Managing Director for Financial Services Nordic at Accenture in Copenhagen, about the role of robots in customer experience. Click here for Part 1.
It seems that this robotic seal can do as good or even a better job than nursing home staff in calming agitated dementia patients. How long till we can develop an online version that will work for agitated customers?
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That’s a tougher challenge, for sure, as looking at a video of a cute, cuddly creature won’t solve your problem with the wrong product having been delivered, or an incomprehensible billing statement from your cell phone provider. But as robotics and artificial intelligence combine with neuroscience and psychology, it seems likely that it won’t be too many more years before automated customer service systems will be able to do at least as good a job — and often a better one — than customer service reps. Until my conversation with Bent Dalager, artificial intelligence expert at Accenture, I believed that robots were still a long way from being able to effectively mimic human empathy. But he points out in this interview (part 2 of 2; see part 1 here), huge progress is being made in giving robots an EQ (emotional quotient) that comes close to matching their already overpowering IQ (intelligence quotient).
Smart Machines Working With Less Capable Humans
In this part of our interview, Dalager says it is not just front line customer service reps who are at risk of being replaced by robots. The future for even jobs that now require years of education and experience will be one of “smart machines… working with less capable humans.” The “experience part” of customer experience, however, will still come down to human elements in some ways. Although researchers are making progress on machines that can empathize with customers, it still may be several years off before they can do it nearly as skillfully as humans. So your human customer service rep’s role may be more about calming an irate customer than solving their problem. The problem solving part will be handled in real time by the rep’s automated partner.
What Can Humans Do Better Than Robots?
Ironically, given that robotics in business started with taking over physical tasks on assembly lines, robots are still a long way from being able to replicate the fluidity of human movement. It seems that developing empathy and ever-increasing intelligence is easier than learning to move gracefully. But even once a robot can cut your hair as effectively as a human hairdresser, there may still be a role for the hairdresser. The future for humans, says Dalager, will be in areas where we seek human connection, and particularly in areas where we want to compare ourselves to other humans. So there are 3 main areas where there seems to be a future for humans:
- Sports. While the dividing line between the technological element and the human one is getting blurred, people do still tend to find it more exciting to see which human can perform best than to watch to machines battling it out. Even the machine on machine battles people watch (do demolition derbys still exis...
If you’ve suffered through those automated telephone systems (and who hasn’t?) it may be hard to believe that robots may soon wipe out most customer service jobs. But recent breakthroughs in robotics are bringing that reality closer every day.
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Robots on the Customer Service Front Lines
We are a long way from the fantasy perfect companion virtual robot of the movie Her, but according to today’s guest, Bent Dalager, Managing Director for Financial Services Nordic at Accenture in Copenhagen, robots are already replacing tens or hundreds of thousands of customer service related jobs, such as insurance claims handling, and are fast encroaching on the contact center.
Spy Mode Lets Robots Teach Themselves
For as little as $10,000/year you can get and train a virtual robot to handle masses of queries or back end paperwork, at much higher volumes, speed, accuracy and consistency than humans can manage. Global consulting firm Accenture has already replaced 8,000 full-time equivalent jobs with “virtual robots” and another 16,000 will go this year.
Technology Breakthroughs
The breakthroughs making this possible have been:
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The ability for the robots to use self-learning, or cognitive computing,
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A new-found ability for them to switch between computer programs, so you don’t need special software to connect all your systems.
Result? In the back office, for example, you no longer need IT to do complex integration programs, and you won’t have to ditch your expensive legacy systems. “Spy mode” lets the computers watch how your human agents process things and do the same, even when it means moving data across systems. (I must admit that somehow it does seem unfair that staff are having to train their automated replacements.) When it comes to customer service, robots can do first line triage of problems, solving many of them without having to escalate to a human being. And they learn from what happens if problems are escalated, so over time fewer and fewer queries need to get the human touch. There’s an insurance company in the Netherlands, says Dalager, that already has 80% of the incoming customer service chats handled by a robot. This may sound dystopian, but look at the bright side for consumers: a robot can handle multiple chat queries way faster than a human.
But Don’t Customer Service Reps Need Empathy?
They do. This is the challenge preoccupying leading artificial intelligence companies. According to Dalager, robotic technologies are getting much better at being able to recognize and respond appropriately to customer emotions. When you combine the self-learning skills of IBM’s Watson with the increasing empathetic and context-sensing abilities of IPSoft’s Amelia, the robotic revolution will go mainstream. That’s only a year or two away, thinks Dalager. Amelia can already use context instead of just key words to be able to tell the difference between “I want to see red boots” and “I don’t want to see red boots”, and to detect the emotional pitch of a customer’s voice...
When Sue Miller walked into her new job as President of computer products vendor, Softsel, she knew it had problems. While it's US parent company was successful, the subsidiary she would be leading had not yet turned a profit in its 5 year history. It had a puny market share and a reputation as "box movers" versus the high-end competitors who were knows as product pros. Sales stood at about $20 million. By the time she was done with it, sales were up to $850 million and the company ranked #1 in the industry vendor listings. Here's the customer service based turnaround strategy she used.
You wouldn’t expect a book called the Resource Management And Capacity Planning Handbook to be high on the reading list of someone interested in customer experience improvement.
You’d be wrong though. Because if your employees are chronically overloaded, they won’t be able to deliver great customer experience.
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(He wanted to give it a livelier title, more like that of one of his other books, Napoleon on Project Management.) Fun title or no, this important book helps companies come to terms with what is a potentially profit-destroying problem in many organizations: chronic worker overload.
Overloaded employees are stressed, they make mistakes, and that doesn’t translate into good customer experience. @jerrymanas
He argues that most organizations “plan to infinite capacity”. They “take on everything and people have to suffer because of it.” Or they do the opposite and miss opportunities.
Instead they should make it a practice to review project needs in terms of human capacity before agreeing to take them on. Basically, many companies need to do a better job of setting organizational priorities. This means getting all the relevant department heads into a room and hashing out priorities. Jerry suggests evaluating projects through three “lenses”:
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Strategic alignment. How do the projects on our plate rank in terms of their ability to support the organization’s strategy?
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Risks versus benefits. No project has a certain outcome. So evaluate each on the balance of risks to anticipated benefits.
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Classifications. This lens is a little less clear. He suggests in the interview it could be things like wanting to spread project support among divisions, or focusing on the growth potential of projects. One that strikes me as a highly useful classification would be to evaluate each project’s potential impact on customer experience. Given the link between improving customer experience and long-term profitability, this seems like a natural.
Other capacity planning tips
Don’t over-complicate the process. This doesn’t have to be a full-blown, complex resource management analysis. Take a lean approach. Using the filters, or lenses, mentioned above, combined with human judgement and having the right people in the room to hash it all out, may well be enough to at least get you going in the right direction. Consider using project portfolio management (PPM) tools. While there are highly sophisticated tools for large organizations, there are simpler ones for smaller companies. But even the simple ones will likely take you beyond where you can get by just trying to use a spreadsheet. Have a “process party” to eliminate “process creep”. By getting rid of those nasty processes that, over time, creep up and start clogging the ability to get things done, you can free up internal capacity for more productive work. The notion of a “process party” sounds very similar to what Marcie Kiziak described in last week’s episode as a “Start/Stop/Continue” meeting.
Human Resources Vice President, Marcie Kiziak, got a chance to test out her HR theories on how to improve staff morale and turn around a dysfunctional workplace. She was thrown into an industrial coatings company as an interim Operations VP after several others had tried and failed to turn the company around.
Six months into the experiment at Magnum Energy Services subsidiary, Corrosion & Abrasion Solutions Ltd., she’s led an amazing transformation. Quality has improved dramatically, and turnover, absenteeism, and lateness are way down. Equally important, the staff are enjoying working together, and have regained pride in their workmanship.
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Staff Morale Turnaround Process
“We had quality issues, we had all kinds of issues… but at the end it was incredibly evident that it was a people connection issue.”
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Get in the trenches and ask questions. You can’t figure out what’s really going on if you stay at your desk all the time. Get on the shop floor. Ask questions. Learn how your operations really work. Most people will happily answer your “stupid questions” if you show them you really are interested in what they do and how they do it.
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Identify the disconnects. Marcie pulled staff from all departments together for a “start/stop/continue” meeting. By having them each go through what was working well (continue), what needed to be done but wasn’t happening (start), and what was happening that shouldn’t be (stop) from their perspective, they were able to identify the key issues.
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Understand the personalities. There are several assessment tools that can be helpful. They used the DISC tool to uncover the work style preferences of each of the staff members. It went a long way towards explaining why there was so much conflict. Going through the process also helped staff learn better ways of interacting with each other. They even put stickers indicating each person’s preferred style on their hard hats!
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Be honest and transparent. It is easy for staff to assume that “the boss” is making money, regardless of how well or poorly the staff are doing their jobs. If you open the books, and let staff see the impact of their work on the company’s financial results, they may well be shocked to discover what a difference they can make (negative or positive). Marcie meets weekly with plant staff to examine the profitability of every job they are working on, and this information is shared with all the workers.
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Have clear responsibilities. The company removed shift barriers so that people weren’t passing off half-finished jobs to someone on another shift. When that happened, it was too easy to blame somebody else if the job was poorly done. If one person has full responsibility for the work, they’ll care more about doing it well.
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Change processes that get in the way. By having staggered start times, based on the type of work each worker was doing, they were able to keep things moving smoothly with one shift instead of two. Instead of having everybody come in at, say, 8:00 a.m. for an 8 hour shift, they would have those whose work had to happen first come in earliest. Then the next type of workers would arrive when that first part of the job was wrapping ...
Change Management Sucks
At least, that’s what most employees seem to think. So do a lot of their leaders.
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Hardly surprising, when 70% of change management efforts fail. And yet, change is happening in every industry so quickly that organizations have to get good at dealing with change if they are to survive. Vik Maraj and Kevin Gangel argued in a blog series a while back that change management is dead. If it is, then how the heck are businesses supposed to cope with all the changes being thrust upon them? In today’s podcast episode Vik and I discuss (and sometimes debate) what he sees as the failings of the traditional process, and a different approach that his company uses.
Brainwashing Doesn’t Work With Employees
Traditional change management is mainly about propaganda argues Vik; about “staying on message” and repeating it so often that people will start to believe what they keep hearing. It is about the “things” we need to change, and training people on how to do things differently. But the fact is, employees aren’t gullible. If anything, all the past failed change management efforts make them especially cynical. You can train them all you want, but if you haven’t given them a reason to care about the change you are after, it won’t work. (Avoiding losing their jobs, surprisingly to some, is not enough of a reason.) So you are starting your process by digging yourself out of a hole.
4 Things To Do Differently To Really Change Your Organization
- Change Your Thinking
It starts with the senior executive team examining what needs to change in their view of the world. We are all stuck viewing situations from our own frame of reference (or paradigm, or context, depending on whose terminology you want to use). Sometimes it takes an outsider to help you see things through a new lens. Take, for example, Kodak, which I discussed with Kodak’s former Chief Marketing Officer, Jeffrey Hayzlett, a while back. They needed to stop seeing themselves as a company in the business of making and selling film, and instead realize that their true business was about helping people preserve memories. If they had realized that a bit sooner Kodak might still be around today. Unfortunately, in a fast-changing competitive landscape there’s a tendency to hunker down and try to do more of what you’ve been doing, but faster and cheaper. What’s usually needed, though, is a radical shift in what you are doing and how you are doing it.
- Take Risks
That means taking big, scary risks. One of the best discussions I’ve seen of this comes from Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. (It’s one of the best business books I’ve read, and I would urge anyone who wants to learn more about business and leadership to read it.) Several times he had to make major changes in direction when an awful lot of money and reputation were at stake, to keep his companies alive.
- Be Honest
You May Be A Victim of The Growth Paradox:
When Business Success Creates Failure
Congratulations! That little company you’ve slaved over is hitting the big-time. You are grabbing new customers like crazy. Everything looks great.
But…
There could be a killer in your closet. If you are just looking at the number of new customers you are acquiring, you might not even know it’s there until it’s too late!
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Growth Creates Complexity
When growth happens quickly, things tend to get out of control. You and your team are scrambling to keep up. Nobody has time to plan, to hire the right people, to train them well, to follow up with all those new customers.
The Result?
Customer service suffers. And you might not even realize it, because in the rush of excitement over new customers it is easy to overlook the ones you are losing. This is just one of the dangers that Robert Sher, founding principal of CEO to CEO, and I discuss in today’s podcast interview. He also discusses many of these issues in his book, Mighty Midsized Companies: How Leaders Overcome 7 Silent Growth Killers .
As organizations grow so do their challenges.
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Processes that used to work no longer do.
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Loyal employees may not have the skills to manage effectively in a larger company.
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Things like moving to a new, bigger office, take longer to implement.
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Communication within the organization suffers.
All of these problems ultimately lead to declining customer service.
What Can You Do?
Robert Sher’s suggestions for dealing with these changes include:
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Diagnose the problem. Do you have the wrong people? Do procedures need to be put in place? Does your company even have a clear plan of action? And have you communicated that plan to all your employees.
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Accept that change starts with you, the leader.
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Hire a no-man (as opposed to a yes-man) with operations expertise. One who will tell you when you are being unrealistic about what can be accomplished and how quickly. Someone who loves to implement your brilliant ideas.
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Communicate. Don’t assume others know what you are thinking or planning.
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Measure the right metrics, and monitor them regularly.
This is a Great Time For Midsized Companies
I really believe that business success is yours for the taking, more easily than ever before. But you have to keep an eye firmly planted on what your customers are experiencing. Get that wrong, and you’ll have a hard time surviving, let alone growing.
Who’s Got it Worse?
Do you think it is harder to be a small company or a mid-sized one? Please scroll down and share your thoughts below.
Happy Employees Produce Happy Customers
According to Cuban immigrant and entrepreneur, Chris Izquierdo, if you want to grow your business quickly you need to focus on having happy employees.
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When he launched DevFacto Technologies he based the company on his belief that happy employees lead to happy customers. Eight years later, he’s got the research to prove it. The company’s net promoter score (NPS) moves up and down in sync with its eNPS (employee net promoter score). They track both scores monthly. In today’s interview, Chris discusses some of the many tactics they’ve used to keep employee engagement levels high.
- Start With The Why
Work with your team to make sure everyone buys into the company’s mission, and why customer service is a key part of that. Reinforce the message regularly. Make sue new employees are fully tuned in to the company’s “why”.
- Move To The How
Get all your employees involved in the “how” step. DevFacto, for example, has a 3 day staff retreat twice a year to discuss how things are going, and how they could be improved. They also have group meetings where employees share examples of how they went the extra mile for customers, and the best of those are shared in the company newsletter.
- Provide Good Working Conditions
Despite the enormous amounts of research showing that interruptions kill productivity, most companies try to save costs by using open office plans and cubicles. They may try to convince themselves that it is better because there will be more employee interaction, which spurs more creativity, but I have not seen any research showing that the increase in interaction/creativity is enough to offset the loss of “flow” each time an employee gets interrupted. That’s why DevFacto provides private offices with natural sunlight for all employees. You do need to provide other ways to ensure that interaction isn’t completely lost. At DevFacto they have:
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A daily 15 minute stand-up meeting to make sure everything is going smoothly.
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A games room
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A nice lunch room
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iPads on the walls showing what’s happening in the other office locations, and making it easy to chat with staff in other cities.
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4 p.m. “Beer O’Clock” on Fridays
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Hire The Right People
Technical skills are crucial when you run a technology company, but they aren’t enough. For those who pass the technical stage of the employment process, potential new hires are then brought on a social outing with several other employees. They want to make sure that the new hire is someone they’d enjoy working with.
- Monitor
If it seems that someone is routinely working more than 40 hours a week, senior management will have a discussion with the staffer to find out how they can help with the workload. Does the employee need more training? Are they bad at scheduling their time? Have they taken on too much? There are times when a project will need long hours to meet a deadline, but this shouldn’t be happening all the time. Let’s face it, burned out brains don’t produce great work. Nor will they help grow your business!
Hard to imagine, given that Canada is still way behind when it comes to e-commerce, but Staples Canada was in the first wave of companies in the world to test the online waters. The secret to their success, says its CEO, Steve Matyas, was a strong customer focus, right from the beginning.
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That customer-centricity has helped Staples experience double-digit online growth since their first e-commerce site went up in 1997.
“We’ve taken every opportunity we can, because we are so customer centric, to interact with our customers and engage them in finding out what it is that they’re interested in: what they like, what they dislike.”
What Does Customer Focus Really Mean Online?
According to Steve, it means that:
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Customer experience and usability have to be at the core of what you offer.
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Usability testing should be ongoing.
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Think Customer Lifetime Value, because it will likely take more than one purchase before the customer becomes a profit generator.
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Have a single point of contact for customer issues, especially those raised on social media.
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Empower your customer service staff to make your customers happy.
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Pay attention to social media. As Steve puts it, “you can be involved in the conversation, or you can play the ostrich, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t talking about you.”
How Do You Rate?
Think about your organization on these criteria. Where do you need improvement?
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Have you thought through what the customer’s experience with you is?
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Have you done recent usability testing on your website?
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Do you know the average lifetime value of your customers?
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Do your customers get the run-around if they try to contact you?
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Are your customer service staff trained and empowered to solve your customers’ problems?
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Is someone responsible for ongoing social media monitoring?
(This interview was first aired on July 1, 2013)
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Are you sick of having customer service employees beg you to give them a perfect 10 in the follow-up surveys? I kind of feel sorry for them: they tell you that if they don’t get a 10 they’ll be penalized. But in our quest to be more customer-friendly, too many companies make the mistake of focusing on the post-transaction surveys.
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Why Is This A Customer Experience Metrics Mistake?
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There are many people (like me) who rarely give a perfect 10. For me to give a 10 the service has to have been extraordinary, not just good. When I’m buying shampoo, I’m OK with good. I just want to find what I want and be able to pay and get out quickly. The cashier shouldn’t be punished for that.
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It gives employees the wrong incentives. They shouldn’t have to be trying to guilt-trip their customers. This may make me feel bad enough that I will rate them a 10, even when it wasn’t great service. So the company isn’t getting accurate information, and the customer feels unpleasantly pressured. Double-negative. (Which does NOT lead to a positive.)
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It measures the wrong thing. This is what Lynn Hunsaker, of ClearAction, and I discuss in today’s interview. The problem, says Lynn, is that it is a “lagging indicator”. By the time I’m doing that post-sale evaluation, if they’ve screwed up it is probably too late to fix the problem. Instead they should be focusing on “leading indicators”; metrics that will tell them how to prevent problems rather than fix them after-the-fact.
It’s like with weight loss: instead of focusing on what you want the scale to say, you need to focus on things like diet, portion control and exercise. Get those right and the scale and the fit of your clothes will get where you want them to be.
What Leads Up To That Customer Experience?
When it comes to improving customer experience, you need to figure out what are the elements that go into creating a good (or bad) experience. If, for instance, many customers are complaining about defective products, don’t blame the poor customer service rep who has to try to pacify the angry customers. Instead, focus on what is the cause of all those defective products.
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Is there a problem on the production line?
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Are staff not adequately trained?
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Do you need to have a final inspection process before the products get packaged?
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Is the packaging sturdy enough?
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Is your shipping company not handling them with due care?
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Are the usage instructions clear?
Those are the types of “predictive customer experience metrics” that you should be focusing on, says Lynn. Get them right, and the final customer experience will take care of itself.
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When customer experience experts talk about creating loyal customers we often start by telling you to figure out what your customers’ needs and wants are. Next, we tell you to look at how you are treating your staff. But there’s another component that’s often overlooked: your suppliers.
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Today we hear from Jeff Booth, CEO of BuildDirect, which has built a successful business by solving a problem on the supplier side. Hands up if you’ve ever been annoyed when a home you were having built or a reno was delayed because supplies didn’t show up on time…
via GIPHY
Yep, that’s pretty well everyone who’s ever come in contact with the home building or renovation business. While we may give flack to the contractor, Jeff was that contractor and he was every bit as frustrated.
There were so many layers of middlemen between the manufacturers and him that often he couldn’t even find out where the supplies were, let alone when they’d arrive at the work site. When Jeff and his partner studied the problem they realized that the suppliers themselves had a problem. Manufacturers of building supplies are often small companies, that can be anywhere in the world, and have no real marketing staff or expertise. So they are at the mercy of a cumbersome network of distributors.
Build Loyal Customers & Loyal Suppliers For Business Success
Jeff realized that to solve his customer problems the best answer was to go straight to the manufacturers and take away the suppliers’ distribution problems. It wasn’t easy, and in this episode you’ll hear about some of the challenges. You’ll also hear about other smart ways his company has built customer loyalty, beyond the ability to get their supplies on time. This is actually a reissue of the very first podcast I recorded. My focus then was on the advice for building a better e-commerce operation, so you may want to check out that post. But rereading my notes I was struck by the links he made between solving the customer’s problem and solving the supplier’s problem.
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Have You Helped Your Suppliers Lately?
Have a look at your supply chain. Is there any way you can help them, that will also help you, and build loyal customers for your business?
When I talk to leaders of manufacturing and construction companies about improving customer experience, I often hear one of two things:
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We are so damned busy, why would I waste time and money on trying to get even more customers?
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We can’t afford to invest more right now.
Lori Schmidt, CEO of GoProductivity, hears the same thing. But the things that will help a company be more productive are often the same things that will improve customer experience.
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When it comes to the first reaction, many CEOs would find that if they took a bit of time to assess how they are doing things — their processes, staff training, responsibilities — they would bring some sanity to their overworked lives. They also would be a lot less vulnerable to smart competitors springing up who are more productive, have better ways of doing things, and can steal their market share as soon as the economy slows even a little bit. As to the second reaction, as Lori puts it in our interview:
You can’t control the dollar value, falling oil prices or changing governments. So look at what you can control!
Are you using your resources — including your people resources — as effectively as possible? Odds are that you are not. Often, as Lori explains it, “you don’t really realize when those inefficiencies start to pile up until tough times or you are being squeezed by your customers.” Rather than waiting till things hit a crisis point, it is better to review all your processes at least once a year. (Ideally more often than that.)
Don’t Blame Your Workers
Most employees want to do a good job. Or at least they start out that way. Over time, if they get bogged down by unproductive processes, unpleasant co-workers, or unsupportive bosses, they may lose that positive attitude. If you are starting to lose them, here are a few things to do:
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Talk to them. Listen to them! Find out what is frustrating them. You may be able to do something about it.
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Review your processes. If your employees are stuck in an inefficient system they can’t possibly provide the sort of efficient and effective service that leads to satisfied customers. (Let alone satisfied staff!)
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Empower all levels of staff. The Ritz Carlton hotel chain gives all employees, including the housekeeping staff, $2,000 they can use with no advance permission to “make things right” for a customer. Sounds like a recipe for going broke, but it does just the opposite. Employees don’t abuse the fund, but they do use it to create customers who are loyal advocates of the Ritz Carlton brand.
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Engage employees from all departments and levels if you want to make changes. Imposing change from the top is not only likely to meet resistance, it is often going to result in changes that do not make things more productive. You need to involve everyone from the start both to ensure that you really understand all the variables that affect how things are done in your company, and so they feel a commitment to the decisions that are made.
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Toughen up. As leaders, says Lori, “we need to learn to receive feedback better.” It is natural to get your back up when employees (or customers) suggest better ways you could be doing things. Stay calm! Give yourself time to think about what they’ve said.
Ever Feel Like You Are Spinning Your Wheels?
It’s a feeling I know all too well. I’m always struggling to get more done, and especially more of the important things that will move my business forward. So I was thrilled to interview Michael Bungay Stanier, Senior Partner of Box of Crayons and author of Do More Great Work.
In the interview we talk about:
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The barriers employees face in being able to do great work, and ideas for overcoming those barriers,
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How the challenges and success strategies differ in big bureaucratic organizations versus small, disorganized ones,
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Ways you can inspire co-workers and even your boss to do great work (and to let you do more of it).
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When Good Work Goes Bad
Michael says there are three types of work:
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Bad Work. The soul-crushing, time wasting, drives-you-crazy work.
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Good Work. It is productive and gets things done, but it keeps you stuck in a comfortable rut.
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Great Work. The kind of work that gets you really excited. That has the potential to make a big difference.
Some good work has to be done, but if you want to do more great work, you need focus, courage and resilience. We discuss each of these in the interview.
Links Mentioned in the Podcast
Virtual Great Work MBA
It’s got an all-star cast of people like Chris Brogan (The Impact Equation), Scott Stratten (UnMarketing) , Roger Martin (former Dean of my MBA alma-mater, U of Toronto, and Playing to Win), John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing), Jill Konrath (author of Selling to Big Companies), Mitch Joel (
Customers’ top 3 call center irritants, according to Ameyo Callversations, are:
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The “IVR Abyss”
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Long holding times
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Agents who cannot resolve the issue
Today’s interview guest, Jim Rembach, of Beyond Morale and Customer Relationship Metrics (www.metrics.net), and host of the Fast Leader podcast, has worked with call centers since the 1990s. He’s seen the good, the bad and the ugly.
In this episode we discuss some of the common call center mistakes that companies make, and how contact centers can make themselves valued by the rest of the organization.
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(Note: I was a guest on this episode of the Fast Leader podcast. If you check it out, let me know what you think. Very different style podcast from Frank Reactions!)
Prove Its Value
Does it drive you crazy when you are at the checkout counter in a store and the rep takes a phone call instead of helping you?
You’ve probably also been on the other side of it though, when you are trying to reach someone in a store and the phone rings and rings and rings because the staff are all too busy dealing with the customers in front of them. One of Jim’s first jobs was with an auto parts retailer that realized that making retail staff also handle phone calls was a recipe for bad customer experiences. So instead it created a call center that, even in the pre-Internet days, was taking orders on the phone that customers could pick up in the store.
The call center was a huge success, lowering the amount of time customers had to spend in the stores while driving the average sale value way up. It rapidly grew to over 800 agents in two centers. Sadly, when new senior management took over, they closed the call center, concluding that it was too expensive. They sent the calls back to the stores.
It may well be that at 800 agents it really had got too big to be effective. Ultimately bureaucracy sets in and lowers the marginal returns in any organization as it gets bigger. But at the same time, Jim believes that the shutdown was the result of a common senior executive miscalculation: they looked at the cost side of the call center and not the value it was creating in increased sales and customer satisfaction.
To get respect (and ongoing funding) those responsible for call centers must learn what’s important to the executive team. Then look for metrics that can prove the center’s value in terms of helping them achieve those metrics.
Make It Great
Effective contact centers do add measurable value to their organizations. They:
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increase sales
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lower the need for product returns (which cuts costs)
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improve customer satisfaction (leading to repeat and referral business)
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are tremendous sources of insight into what is important to your customers (which leads to more successful product development and sales).
But if your company isn’t handling things right, they won’t be effective.
Focus on Coaching, Not Controlling
The other day I went for coffee with a very frustrated marketer.
She had been hired by a manufacturing company that claimed they had decided it was time to invest in marketing.
Unfortunately, they didn’t really mean it. She’s been stymied at every turn. Nobody is seriously interested in changing what they are doing.
Why Mess With Success?
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Their business is doing well. Still growing. No obvious customer dissatisfaction. (At least not more than normal.) And everyone is busy, so rethinking their haphazard (or non-existant) approach to marketing just isn’t a priority. Today’s guest, Roger Pugsley, Director, Service Excellence at Oxford Properties Group, faced the same situation with some of his company’s managers. Although overall the company is clearly committed to improving customer service and customer experience, there were some managers who had a “why mess with success” attitude. They were doing well. Why change?
Customer Service Improvement Strengthens The Bottom Line
The answer, which Oxford Properties has now been able to demonstrate, is that those units that have adopted a more customer focused approach have been even more successful. They have higher levels of employee engagement and are more profitable. Roger also knows that the world isn’t standing still. Customer experience (CX) is a crucial competitive battlefield these days. “There are so many examples of organizations that have sat still and then been killed by competitors,” he notes. “We can’t stop. If we do stop, we’ll get overtaken.”
Oxford Properties’ Customer Experience Initiatives
In today’s interview we discuss how this diverse, global company, which owns and operates office towers, shopping malls, residential apartment complexes, industrial complexes, and high end hotels, approached changing to a more customer-service focused culture. This included:
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A senior executive who came to realize how important consistent customer service is, and how delivering that relies on engaged & empowered employees.
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The Oxford Commitment Cube, which pops up on every employee’s desk to remind them of the core service principles.
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An ongoing system of facilitated meetings between managers and groups of no more than 20 employees at a time to discuss CX ideas. Having an outside facilitator seemed odd at first, but it turns out that it really helps.
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The surprise discovery that employees wanted to serve customers better, but didn’t feel empowered and supported in doing so. (I hear all you employees out there saying “Duh!”)
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Their inclusion of outside contractors and suppliers in their customer service programs. They even include them in a program that gives every employee & contractor $500 to use at their discretion to make things better for customers.
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The highly successful O-Positive platform, which combines Pinterest and Facebook-type features to showcase employee initiatives that have helped customers. This has proven to not only be a great way to share successes, but a gold mine of ideas that can be transferred to other areas of the organization.
Would your company trust employees and contractors with $500 each to sp...
Jay Baer, of Convince & Convert, the Social Pros podcast, and author of the wonderful book, Youtility, says that the way to compete in today’s world is to be ultra-helpful.
How Can You Help Your Customers & Prospects?
We’re not talking about what you sell here, but about what else you can offer that they’d really value.
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Is there a way you can offer something useful as a smartphone app, so they’ve always got you in their pocket? He gives examples such as the Charmin ‘Sit or Squat’ app, which tells you how clean (or dirty) nearby toilets are. They don’t have any control over those toilets, and there probably isn’t Charmin toilet paper in them, but it is related to what they sell and it’s something you’d find very handy.
But What If We Can’t Afford To Build An App?
It’s true, not everyone can afford to build an app. In fact, the process almost always costs a lot more than you think it will. Jay thinks that we’re all going to move to apps, with websites being left just for the boring stuff. I’m not sure I agree. I’ve already lost track of all the apps on my phone! They aren’t very useful if I don’t remember that I have them or what they are for. And even Jay admits that there are other ways to provide Youtility. To start with, have a fantastic website. One that answers every possible question your prospects or customers might have. You don’t have to answer them all overnight, but if you plug away at it, you’ll discover that you are showing up higher and higher in search results. [Tweet “People search for answers. So provide them.”]
Artists of the World, Rejoice!
One thing we do agree on is that the creative types in the world have a future that is looking brighter than ever before. If your kids is studying arts at college, don’t despair! There is a growing need for artists of all types, especially those who can:
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Write well
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Tell a good story
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Take great pictures
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Film beautifully
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Be funny
Now all we need to do is tack on an entrepreneurship and self-promotion class as part of the standard Arts curriculum! If you haven’t subscribed yet, go to iTunes or Stitcherand do it right now, so you don’t miss the great interviews we’ve got coming! And if you like this podcast, please share it with your friends and review it on.
When you need to buy some new clothes, do you go to more than one store or website to find them? How do you decide which stores to go to?
Today’s guest, Tim Keiningham, author of The Wallet Allocation Rule: Winning the Battle for Share, became controversial when he challenged the Net Promoter Score, with the help of some pretty solid research data. Part of his argument was the we don’t consider brands, even those we like, in isolation.
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He didn’t manage to knock the score off its pedestal — huge numbers of companies still use the Net Promoter Score as their key measurement of customer satisfaction — but he did make a strong point that it should not be the only thing you rely on.
The Problem With the Net Promoter Score
The problem, he says, is not the metric itself, but a key assumption that underlies it: the belief that if people are our Net Promoters, ours is the only brand in our category that they promote. In fact, people tend to use several brands of most products, and what matters most in terms of your company’s growth potential, says Keiningham, is not the absolute NPS, but the relative rankings of the brands. He also points out that the number of detractors is likely to be artificially low if you are surveying your current customers, because many detractors will have already left you.
What You Should Be Focusing On To Grow Market Share
Once you understand how you rank relative to other brands your customers use, the key is not to keep improving what you are already winning at, but to find a way you can offer something that will be at least close enough to what your competitor offers that it won’t be worth the customer’s time or effort to go to them. Going back to our clothes example, if I shop at Nordstrom for the customer service but also at Petite Collection because I’m only 5 feet tall (yep, that’s my real height!), Nordstrom might get more of my business by stocking more petite clothes. I’d probably start with them, instead of starting with the Petite store. I’d sure be happy if I could find what I was looking for at the first store.
Also In This Interview
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How to measure the rankings effectively but simply.
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Why you should not explicitly ask people to rank order the brands or companies.
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New research that shows that, on social media, positive brand-related comments tend to be posted 3 times more often than negative comments on the same brand. (Unless it really screws up!)
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The need for the marketers and customer experience folks to share their metrics.
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The Zipf Law, which helps explain why rankings are so important. (Here’s a relatively simple explanation of the Zipf law courtesy of http://io9.com/the-mysterious-law-that-governs-the-size-of-your-city-1479244159
“Back in 1949, the linguist George Zipf noticed something odd about how often people use words in a given language. He found that a small number of words are used all the time, while the vast majority are used very rarely. If he ranked the words in order of popularity, a striking pattern emerged. The number one ranked word was always used twice as often as the second rank word,
Back in 2001, when I first started selling usability and 360 degree customer experience (CX) testing to companies through Web Mystery Shoppers, I made a huge mistake.
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The Logic of Customer Experience & Usability Testing
You see, I thought that the logic of why it was important to test these things would prevail. I mean, obviously if your customers can’t figure out how to navigate your website or use your shopping cart, or if your call center staff have no idea what the returns policy is, of course that is going to lose you business. Testing should be a no-brainer. My first client, the Royal Bank of Canada, agreed, but now that I think back on it, I hadn’t been trying to sell them. I had asked their top e-banking guy if I could take him to lunch and get his reactions to an idea I had for a business. At that point, the business was nothing more than an idea. Luckily for me, he understood the vision and bought into it.
Logic ≠ Sales
But then I had a series of rejections from companies that should have easily understood the value. I realize now that I was approaching it all wrong. Instead of telling them the value and making a business case for the testing, I should have started with a demo. Not of my software, but of theirs. If I had taken them on a walk-through of what it was like for a prospective customer to try to use their websites, far more of them would have bought in. A walk-through approach is a big part of what CX expert, Jeanne Bliss, advocates in her new book, Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine. Although we keep hearing about how customer experience and online marketing need to prove the ROI — and they do — before you get there you need to get emotional buy-in. And seeing how customers struggle is a huge part of getting that buy-in.
Help Your Executives See The Customers’ Struggle
Jeanne’s book is an indispensable guide for people who have been tasked with improving their organization’s customer experience. I highly recommend it. I won’t recap it all here (just read the book!), but there are a few things that really struck me, and that she and I discuss more in today’s interview.
- The Power of Language
We’ve touched on this before at Frank Reactions (see for example, the John Deere interview) but using language that your audience is familiar with can make a huge difference to getting your ideas accepted. So Jeanne, for example, talks about:
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“Net Customer Assets” – Using that terminology with top executives helps them realize that customers themselves are assets. Like any assets, you want to make sure they are well looked after so they retain or increase their value.
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“Defector pipeline” – Sales executives are quite comfortable with the concept of a sales pipeline, but often tend to focus on customer acquisition and forget about the impact of losing customers. Just like the sales pipeline, there are predictable stages in the “defector pipeline”. Only here the goal is to stop the flow instead of inc...
Systems Integration: Not Sexy, But Very Important
One of the biggest barriers companies face trying to improve customer experience is the challenge of systems integration.
All the wonderful tools we have now to help us do more effective marketing need to share data quickly, easily and reliably. But how do you get them to do that?
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In today’s interview with Robin Smith, co-founder of Virtual Logistics, we discuss:
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What a systems integrator is
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The process your company should go through in deciding what technologies you need.
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What to look for in choosing new systems and tools to be sure they’ll work with the rest of your software.
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What to ask a potential systems integration partner.
It Starts With Strategy
As with everything in marketing, before you can decide what you need, you have to start by deciding who you are. What does your company want to be known for? What makes you unique? What sorts of experiences do you want your customers to have?
Once you know the answers to those questions you can start figuring out what types of data will be important so you can deliver the desired customer experience. That means thinking through your entire process.
Chris Hadfield, in his book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, talks about a question that he and his fellow astronauts ask constantly during their training and missions:
Well, in planning your processes, you need to keep asking what could go wrong? What will we do if that happens? How can our system be set up to handle that automatically?
So if, for instance, a product ends up out of stock, how will you notify the customers who had ordered it? How will you keep them informed if it is backordered? How will your payments system deal with the need to delay charging their credit card? How will your accounting system deal with that?
Dealing With Ever-Changing Technology
Often, says Robin, companies get into trouble by adding bits and pieces of software and connecting them “point to point” as needed. In other words, setting up direct links between, say, your online shopping cart and your inventory management system, but not connecting them to your shipping or accounting systems.
The problem is that with technologies changing so quickly, and especially if your company is growing, those ad hoc connections can quickly become a “spaghetti of links”.
Instead, argues Robin, it is better to use a “hub and spoke” model: have one central source of data and connect all other systems to it. Then if you change one spoke (e.g. your shopping cart), you just unplug it from the central data source and plug in whatever new one you want.
If Only Tech Firms Would Use Plain English!
Yes, technology is complicated, but it is too bad that most tech firms, especially those who handle the difficult things like systems integration, make it sound scarier than it is. And the result is that too many of us avoid dealing with it, or are swayed by less competent companies that are smoother talkers.
Here’s a non-techie explanation of some of the common jargon:
EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) – Software that transfers information and d...
United Airlines Paid a Big Price For This Customer Service Screw-Up!
If you haven’t heard Dave Carroll’s United Breaks Guitars song, start here:
I’m one of a great many speakers who use this video to show how NOT to handle a customer complaint. I also use it to show the power of social media to spread customer service complaints that can really hurt your brand.
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It boggles the mind how badly United muffed this one.
Customer Service Mistakes Made
Where did they go wrong? Let me count the ways:
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Poorly trained and/or supervised baggage handling crew. Why the heck where they throwing around his guitar in the first place?
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Failure to apologize immediately. There were witnesses. It was pretty clear that their staff had messed up.
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Failure to take the complaint seriously and offer immediate reparations. All he asked for was the $1200 it cost to repair the guitar. The brand damage done has been many multiples of that.
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Gave customer the runaround. For nine months they had him running through a customer service maze. Then, after he warned them he was going to release videos about the incident, they had seven more months before the video launched, but they still didn’t take him seriously.
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Too little, too late. It wasn’t till after they saw how quickly the video was blowing up on social media that United execs even reached out to him. And, as he discusses in our interview, they still didn’t handle things appropriately. He even gave them a golden opportunity to get in on a 3rd video, but they brushed him off.
What Else Can We Learn From This Story?
Fundamentally, United Airlines had (still has?) huge internal problems. Dave believes they never fully understood what motivates customers. Yes, customers like to fly in new planes, and on-time performance is important to them. But…
Customer Service is About People
Even more important is how they interact with people. All people. Their customers, of course, but also:
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Their staff. It’s pretty sad that Dave has had so many emails of support from United pilots and crew.
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Their suppliers & partners. I don’t know if any of the customer service folks or baggage handlers were outsourced, but if they were…
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The public. They just didn’t believe that this could blow up into something so huge. Certainly most social media complaints don’t. But is it worth the risk, especially when your organization was so clearly at fault?
Why Did United Breaks Guitars Go Viral?
Nobody can predict which videos will go viral, but this one had several elements that really helped:
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Humour. People love to share things that make them laugh.
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Catchy Tune. People also love music and rhythm. And music makes things easier to remember.
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Well-Structured Story. The video tells the story beautifully, following all the classic elements of good storytelling.
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A Problem Many Of Us Relate To. Anyone who has flown more than a couple of times has probably had some bad airline experiences. So we immediately identify with him and his pain.
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Emotion. The video provokes feelings of outrage (and empathy for Dave), which also makes people want to share it.
What Are Your Favorite Examples of Customer Ser...
Bernard Rosauer's 3 Bell Curves that go into creating solid customer experiences are similar to what I've been calling the "3 P Profit Formula":
Promise (the "why") + Process (the "work") + People (the "who") = Profit
As you know, the Frank Reactions podcast is focused on customer service and customer experience in the digital era.
But when I first asked Internet marketing super-star, Pat Flynn, to be a guest back when I was doing the Frank Online Marketing Show, the focus was the broader topic of online marketing.
Our schedules were such that we didn’t pull it off that year. When we chatted at this year’s New Media Expo (NMX ) and he again agreed to be interviewed I worried about whether his comments would still be relevant. Turns out, his talk this year was totally about customer service!
If you aren’t familiar with Pat, he’s got to be the most loved guy in Internet marketing. Check out his Smart Passive Income podcast and I bet you’ll become a fan too!
3 Key Customer Motivations
In today’s interview, Pat discusses three core elements of what motivates customers:
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People Want Convenience. In what he calls “the era of availability”, convenience meant some time saving thing was finally available for purchase. Things like pre-sliced bread, or vacuum cleaners. Then came the “instant era”, with things like Uber, Netflix and podcasts making it possible for us to get what we want when we want it. Next, says Pat, is the predictive era, where companies know and present you with what you need before you’ve even thought to ask them for it. Big data is starting to make this possible now.
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People Want To Be Heard. Not just that, but they want to know you’ve heard them and are acting on what they’ve said. The proactive era of being heard, says Pat, is reaching out to customers before they’ve asked for help. Staying in touch, in a friendly, helpful way. I argue that there’s a fine line here though: you don’t want to waste a customer’s time with a “what’s up?” call; make sure you are either providing value when you touch base and/or that you do it in a non-intrusive way, such as a tweet.
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People Want to be Loved. This is where the little, unexpected signs of affection help. Things like handwritten notes, public recognition, and what my mother used to call “unbirthday presents” enter in. Mark Holowaychuk, founder of Vitamart, had some great ideas on this when we chatted in Episode 20 of Frank Reactions (iTunes link).
In addition to today’s interview, you can watch Pat’s full NMX keynote presentation at https://youtu.be/9s43rVJn1SE.
Productivity: A Secret Weapon That Helps You And Your Customers
We also talked about productivity, and work-family balance.
I love that Pat so openly puts emphasis on the importance of spending lots of time with his family. One conclusion I reached when I wrote Canada’s Best Employers for Women: A Guide for Job Hunters, Employees & Employers,
How To Sell Senior Executives on Customer Experience Improvement
More from the CXPA Insight Exchange on today’s episode, including an interview with Lorraine Schumacher, Director of Marketing Transformation (previously the Director of Customer Service Strategy & Planning) at Verizon. She’s taken the concept of personas, which many of us use to understand our customers better, and applied them to her internal customers.
She’s developed personas for the different types of people who have to be “sold” internally. What are the strategies that will work to win support from each type?
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They include such lovable characters as:
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Fearful Freddy, who worries about how to protect the reputation of the company, and can be found in any department
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Competitive Carol, who is often found in sales or operations, and really wants to be the top dog
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Samantha Smartypants, who always does her homework and expects you to have done the same
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Harry the Data Hog, who can be won over if you give him the numbers to prove your case.
Lorraine points out that, realistically, our goal as customer experience (CX) professionals is not to work ourselves out of a job, because providing top-notch customer experience is an ongoing effort. Rather, she says, “Our goal as cx professionals is to get customer experience embedded in every employee.”
More from the CXPA Insight Exchange 2015
Today’s episode also includes more useful tips that I picked up at the CXPA’s Insight Exchange a couple of weeks ago.
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Bruce Temkin‘s advice on anticipatory customer experience. (Pat Flynn also discusses this in the interview with him that I’ll be airing next week.) If you want to hear more from Bruce Temkin, check out this interview I did with him a few weeks ago.
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Lesley Boucher, of the Pensare Group, described a simplified alternative to customer journey mapping, that helps employees get engaged in the customer experience process and gets them identifying and acting on changes that are under their control.
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Gavin Winter, of CXAct, focused on “guided customer experience” — identifying which channels are the ones where the customer is most likely to be able to get their problem solved on the first contact, and then guiding them to those channels.
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Sandra Fornasier, of Ciena Corporation, found that the Net Promoter Score (NPS) was not the best approach for her B2B-focused company. She discussed an alternative to NPS that they found works better when dealing with business customers.
If you work in Customer Experience, you should check out CXPA.org. They’ve got a ton of great resources and an awesome forum were folks in the CX trenches answer each others’ questions.
Speaking of which, I’d love to know more about your customer experience questions so I can make sure this podcast continues to bring you the most relevant and useful information for CX practitioners and business leaders.
What Are Your Top CX Questions?
Please post your questions below. (Or if you feel shy, you can send them to me by
Is It Possible To Compete Against Amazon on Books?
[NOTE: To see my full notes from the eTail conference, scroll down to after the notes on my interview with Renee.]
At the recent eTail Canada conference I interviewed Renee Racine-Kinnear, VP of Customer Experience for Digital Channels, at Indigo.ca. Some people find it amazing that chains like Indigo still survive. We’ve seen many, like Borders, die in the face of Amazonian pressure on profit margins. In today’s interview, we discuss how Indigo aims to compete through better customer experience, online and off.
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One key is to really understand one’s customers, and appeal to those who are seeking a different experience from that offered by Amazon.
As in their physical stores, Indigo tries to provide a calmer, more peaceful atmosphere in its web store than does Amazon. Here’s an example of how that translates:
First Page of Business Books
There’s no question that the Indigo experience has more white space, and that will certainly appeal to many readers and site users. I remember writing a blog post years ago about how others should not copy the Amazon site design because it is too complex and confusing for new entrants. Amazon succeeds because so many Internet users have grown up with it. We are used to its structure, and put up with its frustrations because we value the massive amounts of content (and great prices). But it is not for everybody.
Is White Space Enough?
It may be. One thing we discuss in the interview is Indigo’s extensive use of customer panels and customer feedback to find out what’s really important to its customers. Through consumer research they learned that their customers were not after an action-packed, high-tech, atmosphere. They are looking for an oasis of calm.
On the other hand, Indigo can’t completely ignore the online pricing of the behemoth rival, and it poses severe omnichannel challenges. For instance, they realize that they have to compete on price in their online store, but try to recoup some of the difference in the physical stores. But, as Renee points out in the interview, how do you explain to a customer who’s in a store about to buy a book why you won’t match your own, lower, online price?
We also discuss:
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How to build and use a customer panel
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What is an IdeaAgora, and how can it help you
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The sneaky tactic that can win budget and backing from a CEO
More From Etail Canada 2015
I attended several other talks at the eTail Canada conference. Most of my notes were done via Twitter, so I’ve put together a Storify document for you with my notes as well as tweets from others. I’ve just included the content tweets; not the many talking about what a great conference it was. That said, kudos to the organizers for a job well done!
Have you ever thought about the challenges of delivering consistent, excellent customer experiences when you have to sell through third parties?
Today’s episode brings you interviews with two speakers I met at the B2B Online Conference in Chicago who grapple with that challenge daily. The 3rd parties in question are distributors, in the case of John Deere, and eBay sellers in the case of eBay.
Customers Attribute A Bad Experience to Your Brand, Even if It Was a Reseller or Distributor Who Messed Up
The challenge is that how people perceive you, although strongly shaped by your brand, can be messed up by the intermediaries. If a distributor doesn’t have the right attitude or product knowledge, that will reflect badly on your brand. People think about buying a John Deere tractor, and don’t stop to realize that the distributor is not employed by John Deere.
Get the Erin Wallace Transcript Here!
Likewise, we talk about buying something on eBay, but we are actually buying from an individual eBay seller. There’s only so much control eBay can have over the sellers. If a seller takes a week to ship the product you bought, you may think badly of eBay, even though it was not their platform that caused the problem.
Get the Raj Sivasubrammanian Transcript Here!
Use Training, Coaching and the Voice of the Customer
Erin Wallace, Global Manager of Customer Experience, John Deere (@Redejong), and her team work closely with distributors and managers to let them hear and understand what customers are really thinking and saying.
They have used many innovative approaches for customer feedback, such as their “Chatterbox“, which is a recording studio in a trailer that gets set up at trade shows and events. Customers can go in and record their thoughts about what they are experiencing and what is frustrating.
They also have a “Customer Experience Multiplier Program“, which provides extensive dealer training in person; assessment, monthly coaching, and performance reviews against operational models.
They teach distributors to really understand their customers’ business, and are willing to leverage other parts of John Deere to help them in ways the customers might not have imagined the company would be able to help. For example, they collect a lot of data on agronomics, and can help customers figure out how to get greater crop yields.
Customer service & customer experience expert, Shep Hyken, tells a story in today’s interview of walking into a hotel. Instead of having a square of chocolate waiting for him on his pillow, this hotel gave him a full chocolate bar and bottle of water when he checked in.
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Nice little customer service touch, you think. But the thing is, at the prices they were charging for the rooms, this would have cost them about 6% of the room rate. (Who knew that big name speakers don’t always get to stay at five star hotels?) That’s a pretty big hit to the bottom line.
Was it worth the cost?
In our social media era, absolutely. Why?
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It made the hotel visit memorable. You wouldn’t think a little thing like that would make such a difference, but I had a similar reaction the first time I walked into a hotel that had fresh baked cookies at reception. I still remember the name of that hotel (Adara, in Whistler) and tell others about it. A chocolate square on the pillow used to work, but now it has become so common that, even though we like it, that won’t be enough to wow us anymore. Think about what you can do that would add a little touch to make a big difference.
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Shep Hyken speaks to thousands of people a year. The experience impressed him so much that he talks about that hotel. (Unfortunately for them, he didn’t mention the name of it in this interview, but he probably has at other times, and he has definitely recommended the hotel to colleagues who will be travelling in the area.)
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It leverages the principle of reciprocity. When people do something nice for you, you are more likely to do something nice for them. This special touch makes visitors much more likely to take time to do a positive hotel review on Trip Advisor, Yelp, or Booking.com.
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If it gets even one person to book a night who wouldn’t have otherwise, it has paid for itself many times over. It doesn’t take a lot of word of mouth for those chocolate bars to help keep the hotel’s rooms booked.
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Other Customer Experience Thoughts from Shep Hyken
In the interview we talked about the challenges of getting buy-in across the organization. “If it doesn’t start at the top,” he warns, “it’s not going to work.”
Hyken’s 6 Ds of Great Customer Service
This 6-step process is key to having a good customer service/experience culture, says Hyken.
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Define it. What does customer experience mean in this company? Develop a common terminology so everyone understands and discusses it the same way.
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Disseminate it. Get the desired experience communicated effectively throughout the company.
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Deploy it. Do a lot of training, and keep on doing it. “Customer service & experience training isn’t something that you did, it’s something that you do,” says Hyken.
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Demonstrate it. The CEO and other senior leaders must show, through their actions,
This advice for how to win support for and implement citizen service improvements applies to non-government organizations and companies too.