I’m often struck by how many businesses look for silver bullets. Other people’s silver bullets at that. We want to visit this or that, we want to copy this or that, where can I get an idea for x or y.
One thing I’ve learned from nearly 15+ years of judging awards is that silver bullets don’t work. The best businesses realise they need to connect everything, deliver consistently to their promise and work really really hard at making brilliant basics feel exciting. They need all the factors to be aligned around something – a common vision, a purpose or a set of values for example.
One of the companies which has made an outstanding differentiation from brilliant basics and sticking to its values is first direct. I interviewed one of the early MDs of first direct, Kevin Newman. One thing he said has stuck in my mind.
“Culture comes from leadership. I have a strong philosophy that the level of service to any set of customers is related to the culture of the company. If an agent is in the 8th hour of their shift our whole business is down to the way they speak to that customer. That’s driven by how they feel about themselves. We have to make people feel valued. You can’t force it – they feel it or they don’t.”
Of course its much harder to focus for years on brilliant basics – delivering what customers want and doing it really really well. Its harder to be famous for it, Its hard to do. You have to align so many factors from brand to sales experience to service to process to infrastructure. It isn’t all shiny and fast like a silver bullet. But it is what customers appreciate.
So what brought these thoughts to mind? 2 things.
1) This morning I screwed up the location for a meeting by forgetting part of our own brilliant basics. Setting up a meeting to work.
2) The awards I was at last week and why some people won and some people didn’t. You can see some brilliant learning case studies on the finalists at the Professional Planning Forum Awards.
At half one there was anupdateto say move away from the front of the buildings but stay inside.
At half three afinal updateto say the risk was over but there was still disruption.
What a good use of commercial lists even if it did break a data protection routine.
Proactive communication like this avoids lots of queries, is straight from the horse’s mouth and minimises disruption as much as possible. One of the principles of “The Best Service Is No Service”.
This article from HBR “Good data won’t guarantee good decisions”is an interesting view on spreading the analytical and information skills to make the most of the analytics tools available to businesses.
Back in 2005 we conducted side by side trials using various speech analytics tools. The learning was that the difference was nothing to do with the tools. It was all about the analyst. Not only good analytical skills, but also great communications skills, a deep understanding of the language of the business and of the organisation itself and its people.
So many clients are experimenting with many new kinds of analytics and therefore management information is getting more complex. Not only speech analytics & social media in many forms, but also the myriad of data in the data warehouses from core systems, contact systems, financials.
The 3 critical success factors are:
1) Growing communities of analysts and analytical skills in the general population of staff
2) Business staff who understand how to self serve using analytical tools rather than read standard reports presented for them. They need not be analysts themselves, but they do need to know how to make the most of the tools and the analysts
3) Decisionflows that take the right data to the right people, using infographics, business rules, well designed data structures and consistent process
As the article says big judgement for big data. But this judgement isn’t accidental, it needs to be designed. It needs to have the customer voice designed into the decisions. That takes a lot to get right. Its what we’ve been doing in the past few years in our Best Service Is No Service methods.
Take a look at our point of view in our newanimation on decisionflow and let us know what you think.
This week started unusually when Peter returned from a visit to India straight into a Monday morning meeting with David Cameron and Boris Johnson at our offices atCentral Working. The topic was entrepreneurialism. A small group of entrepreneurs were invited to put forward their insights ranging across supporting growth, flexible space, banks, government schemes and red tape.
…perhaps they may have responded to this tweet in a different way.
You can imagine the scenario. You’ve gone away on holiday or on business and you’ve either forgotten or didn’t know that you get charged for downloading data when you are abroad. Even more likely nowadays with the ubiquitous nature of “all you can eat data” as part of the standard contract. When you get your next bill…well, you know the rest.
Maybe our brewing friends with the great strapline will have seen this as an opportunity to show what thoroughly decent people they are by refunding the roaming charges. At the same time using Twitter to reach people like me who aren’t T-Mobile customers now, but might be next time we’re looking for a new contract. OK, so maybe it costs £100 or £200 (but probably much less) and you can’t do that every time. But how much new business might that bring for a simple and cheap piece of marketing? How much goodwill through Twitter “word of mouth” might that bring?
Today we went along to the Responsible Business Convention in Islington – a terrific event and a real chance to see what charities, social enterprises and other companies are doing to make a change. Whilst we were there we bumped into Creative Connections (http://www.creativeconnection.co.uk/), a company we’ve worked with before at our Stop Doing Dumb Things Unconference in November last year and are working with at our future one in June (see the website for tickets if you haven’t already got one http://www.dumbthings.co.uk).
They are fantastic at taking an idea (aka pro bono) and making it really creative, here’s what they whipped up with our idea!
With the Kony 2012 video going viral – 77 million views on YouTube when I last looked (albeit only about 10% of Justin Bieber’s Baby video) – it struck me that this is activism on a massive scale. Infact, it’s a form of crowdsourcing a solution to a longstanding problem that for most of us, would have otherwise continued to be largely unknown. Social networking has fuelled the interest through word of mouth. I started seeing references to it on Monday and thought I should know about it. I was late. It was released on March 5th and by last Friday it had already had 26 million views. The film has caused a storm with lots of controversy reverberating around the Internet over who funds Invisible Children (the organisation behind the film), what’s the real agenda and is this some kind of spoof or conspiracy. But, regardless of what you believe, you cannot fail to be impressed by how it’s got the twittersphere chattering. It’s certainly got people talking.
Coincidentally, I was watching a TED talk recently from Luis von Ahn, the guy who invented Captcha codes – those annoying squiggly words that you’re asked to enter on website pages that prove you are a human rather than a computer. I was interested to hear that I’d been participating in a massive crowdsourcing initiative and didn’t even know. Captcha codes, or to be precise ReCaptcha codes, are being used to digitise books. Some old books, due to discolouration and damage, cannot be digitised using optical character recognition (OCR). They need human intervention to confirm some of the words. To pay for this would be prohibitively expensive. Now, ReCaptcha codes present two random words , one of which is the word that authenticates you as a human, the other is a word that could not be verified by the OCR computer. By getting the authentication word correct means that you are likely to get the other word correct too. A random sample is checked and hey presto, we are digitising books, one word at a time at the rate of about 100 million words per day or 2.5 million books per year. And all for free. Genius. von Ahn’s next mass collaboration project is to translate the web into each of the major languages. It’s estimated that to completely translate Wikipedia from English into one other language would cost around $50m – to translate the whole of the web, too many zeros to contemplate. Check out http://duolingo.com/ to find out how he plans to harness the power of the crowd to translate the web. For free. More genius.
Do you have any examples of mass collaboration that you’d like to share? I’m particularly interested in your experience of how businesses are using innovative crowdsourcing and crowdservicing solutions to solve longstanding business issues. Start the discussion!
I was impressed today in Starbucks in Bangor. There was a little sign that said something like ” we noticed lots of our customers are buying extra shots with their larger size drinks. So we’ve added an extra shot at no extra charge. Tell us if you don’t want the extra shot.
That’s impressive use of data, interpretation of what’s being said ( Starbucks tastes like hot milk…) and doing the right thing for the customer at no extra charge. Impressive.
