Archive for February, 2008
Posted by: Peter Massey | 29.02.2008
It may sound like a Disney song, but “a whole new world” of doing business was on the table at a meeting I went to last night. It was to listen to a few ideas from Doc Searls latterly from Harvard, a pioneer of the internet having dropped everything in 1989: “I didn’t know why but I knew it’d be big”.
He’s perhaps best known for being a co-author of the “Clue Train Manifesto” which amongst its 95 declarations said “We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it”. So as you can imagine that appeals to us at Budd. In fact it reads like a catalogue of dumb things. It makes you wish you’d thought of it!
It also claims “Markets are conversations”.
One of the insights Doc shared was from a Nigerian pastor. “When you’re in a market and you see something you like, how do you open the conversation? An American would say: “How much does it cost?”. But a Nigerian wouldn’t. If you talk for 20 minutes and learn a lot about how it was made, who did it and why and so on – and vice versa, why the buyer is there, why they might want it etc - then what happens to the price? It will be different. It will represent a different thing.
He was explaining the difference between “two moral systems”. In the pastor’s view: money and relationship. Too much of the commercial or western world is based on money. Much of the world is based on relationship not money. The two clash exactly in that Robert Redford & Demi Moore film “Indecent Proposal” where the question is “what price for your wife?”. That clash is of systems is why marketing and CRM don’t work. Why sellers don’t really mean they want a relationship. Ultimately why companies don’t listen to consumers.
On the othe hand, if you go to the market to have a conversation, you’ll learn a lot and you may find something that works for both buyer and seller needs. Only then do you set a value on it. If you go to market to look for price, you will get what you get. Too much of the commercial world goes to market to sell things, not to start meaningful conversations.
The point is that, in our commercial world, we are trying to bring together two systems, of relationship and money that don’t come together, unless you look at the world in a different way. So what is this whole new world?
Well Doc is now focusing his time on this question. Because he thinks it will be as transforming as industrialisation, the internet or blogging.
He’s not alone in that many other groups have been interested for some while. Not least the snappily titled “Buyer Centric Commerce Forum” which started in 2002 around the work of author Alan Mitchell and his book “Right Side Up”.
It’s a space where consumers and businesses have equal power. Where marketing’s one way conversations of one to many and the buying of products by individuals is replaced. Information smoothes out the blindness to performance and price. So buyers can see what other buyers can see. The conversations on the web are too fast and complete to let ignorance of competitive offerings go unaddressed. Eventually buyer and seller power are more equally dispersed. But not without responsibility for the buyer.
So you can see this happening already. What is so radical? Well the next step…. Let’s see if I can exemplify it.
The key may lie in something called “vendor relationship management or VRM”. Sounds like CRM through the looking glass.
Buyers own their own data about themselves and businesses are vendors who are permitted to use the data for a specific purpose when sanctioned by the buyer. When someone wants something they describe their problem, specify it and put their need on line. Companies or vendors who can meet that need are allowed to look at that buyer information and the relevant personal information so that they can start a conversation and eventually decide what to “bid” as a solution and at what price to bid.
The company doesn’t need to buy, collect or hold lots of data in CRM systems. It doesn’t need to spam lots of people to find sales leads. It doesn’t need to advertise to generate demand. It doesn’t need to offer an approximate solution. It can have complete up to date data with which to have a good conversation with its potential customer. It can, if permitted, have relevant, accurate data from all its customers.
The economics of marketing change. The marketing costs can go down to zero. The cost of converting leads goes down to zero. The costs of considering needs and deciding what to sell will rise. And the speed of learning what sells will be instant. The tailoring of offers will be common place. It’s “just in time” buying where the customers set out their demand and vendors decide who and how best to meet that demand.
There could be an increased cost to the customer in time. Time to keep their data up to date? But in practice wouldn’t this be a saving? A saving over talking to many vendors who cant meet your need, who ask for the same old same old data to be able to understand who you are and what you want.
No one has the mechanisms yet, but they probably aren’t complicated. Think of a series of web pages or feeds that you own: WhoIam.com; WhatIwant.com; Whatdoyouthink.com. And an equivalent set that the company or vendor owns: Whatwecanoffer.com. And what’s in the middle? WhatelseIcouldget.com. Whatsbestforyou.com. VRM? Not so very different maybe. But think about the way the process would have changed.
Let’s say I want to get a weekend away. I check whoIam.com is complete with my latest data. I go to a virtual coach on whatIwant.com and work out as much as I can about what I want. I then release a feed into the middle, into the VRM or whatever that “matrix” comes to mean. I get questions from whatwecanoffer.com and I decide what I want. It’s been run through whatelsecoudIget.com already so I know if its ok because of what lots of people say.
Not so different from a reverse auction on eBay. Or Amazon’s ecosystem maybe.
The fundamental difference? Behaviours of buyers and sellers would change. A buyer gets help to specify what is their need. Buyers who can’t specify their need, or who aren’t yet ready to buy, don’t come forward to absorb sales effort. A seller gets free buyer leads. It has all the data they need to sell the right thing. Sellers who try to sell things that don’t meet needs, change or disappear fast. The waste in traditional sales and marketing disappears.
It’s a frightening thought for wasteful businesses with big sales and marketing budgets. It’s great for upstart businesses who change their marketing $$ into listening $$. They change their approach and win.
But how will it happen in practice?
We don’t know, but that’s what this meeting was about. Maybe it starts with building some simple prototypes.
Maybe it’s already happening. A client told me the other day their business was changing. Their clients, insurance companies, were losing business very fast to the aggregators – moneysupermarket.com, confused.com etc. This is an early example – but its still in the old world. Its product and seller centric. Imagine those aggregator tools applying to everything you want and being you centric… . Data entered once into a secure facebook/eBay/Amazon for buying. A whole new world. Just around the corner
Get in touch if you’d like to stretch your thinking…. peter.massey@budd.uk.com
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Posted by: Peter Massey | 22.02.2008
Just for fun: An elderly lady actually wrote this letter to her bank. The bank manager thought it amusing enough to have it published in The Times
Dear Sir,
I am writing to thank you for bouncing my cheque with which I endeavoured to pay my plumber last month. By my calculations, three’nanoseconds’ must have elapsed between his presenting the cheque and the arrival in my account of the funds needed to honour it. I refer, of course, to the automatic monthly deposit of my Pension, an arrangement which, I admit, has been in place for only eight years. You are to be commended for seizing that brief window of opportunity, and also for debiting my account £30 by way of penalty for the inconvenience caused to your bank.
My thankfulness springs from the manner in which this incident has caused me to rethink my errant financial ways. I noticed that whereas I personally attend to your telephone calls and letters, when I try to contact you, I am confronted by the impersonal, overcharging, re-recorded, faceless entity which your bank has become. From now on, I, like you, choose only to deal with a flesh-and-blood person. My mortgage and loan payments will therefore and hereafter no longer be automatic, but will arrive at your bank by cheque, addressed personally and confidentially to an employee at your bank whom you must nominate.
Be aware that it is an offence under the Postal Act for any other person to open such an envelope.
Please find attached an Application Contact Status which I require your chosen employee to complete. I am sorry it runs to eight pages, but in order that I know as much about him or her as your bank knows about me, there is no alternative. Please note that all copies of his or her medical history must be countersigned by a Solicitor, and the mandatory details of his/her financial situation (income, debts, assets and liabilities) must be accompanied by documented proof.
In due course, I will issue your employee with a PIN number which he/she must quote in dealings with me. I regret that it cannot be shorter than 28 digits but, again, I have modelled it on the number of button presses required of me to access my account balance on your phone bank service. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Let me level the playing field even further. When you call me, press buttons as follows:
1– To make an appointment to see me.
2– To query a missing payment.
3– To transfer the call to my living room in case I am there.
4– To transfer the call to my bedroom in case I am sleeping.
5– To transfer the call to my toilet in case I am attending to nature.
6– To transfer the call to my mobile phone if I am not at home.
7– To leave a message on my computer (a password to access my computer is required. A password will be communicated to you at a later date to the Authorized Contact.)
8– To return to the main menu and to listen to options 1 through 8
9– To make a general complaint or inquiry, the contact will then be put on hold, pending the attention of my automated answering service.
While this may, on occasion, involve a lengthy wait, uplifting music will play for the duration of the call.
Regrettably, but again following your example, I must also levy an establishment fee to cover the setting up of this new arrangement.
May I wish you a happy, if ever so slightly less prosperous, New Year.
Your Humble Client
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Posted by: David Naylor | 18.02.2008
I’m not planning to take the stock market by storm but thought it was about time I signed up a share dealing account. I’ve been an interested, occasional reader of the Interactive Investor website (www.iii.co.uk) for many years and use it to track a few funds I signed up to at the height of the dotcom era. Needless to say I could have done better by stuffing the money in an old sock.
Give I was already registered I thought that I’d use iii for stock trading but you have to go through another registration process first. I can handle that but can’t handle the stuff that demonstrates this established online company hasn’t even got the basics right fills me with doubt that I’ll ever trade with them. Here are a few of the more frustrating things:
1. Debt card issue number - No matter what I did it would not accept ‘3′ as the issue number. I changed and checked everything time and time again. Every time it just came back and said ‘invalid issue number’. I then discovered i needed to enter it as ‘03′. Of course, my mistake.
2. Terms and Conditions. I never read them. Do you? On this occasion I thought I would. I also had to do the usual, tick the box, to show I’d read them. So I clicked the link. Broken. I ticked the box anyway.
3. So I recevied my confirmation email and thought I’d reply to let them know the link was broken. The email is pictured below. Notice anything contradictory? Who sent the mail, who should I contact, what does it say at the bottom?
How many people must sign up to this account each week? Why must these little things continue to happen?
I’ll be sending the email to the address given with a link to this blog. Perhaps if Interactive Investor followed the lead of other stock trading companies like Wasabe I’d be straight on the phone to the CEO. Read the news article on this in Business Week. You might say that only small companies can do this. Well Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon is reading customer feedback daily. You can hear how he listens to customers on this BBC radio programme. The bigger you are, the more you need to listen. Don’t you think?
Amazon, CCO, broken websites, dumb things, feedback, financial services, the best service is no service | No Comments
Posted by: Jo Sparkes | 18.02.2008
Now that the Royal Mail has implemented its ‘Revenue Loss Prevention’ handling charges on any all odd sized, over heavy, under stamped post, it must have stopped quite a few people getting it wrong.
But of course people still make mistakes. Last week we received a note in the mail bundle saying a letter was being held at central post office due to lack of correct postage and no-one in to pay excess. I actually took the mail bundle (we share offices with 6 or 7 other businesses) from the postman that day, and guess what? no mention of excess to pay on any letter.
So I walk to the post office address advised on the form, hand the form over and wait for results. The chap behind the counter had evidently had a bad day. I tried smiling, did not work, tried chatting, did not work. Oh well can’t have everything. Hand over the form, off he goes and comes back with letter. That’s £1.24 he says. I look in my wallet; see I have only a £20 note left. In typically British style I hand it over, apologising that it is all that I have got. The chap behind the counter eyed it dubiously. “Can’t take that, would take all my change, you’ll have to come back tomorrow” with strong undertones of ‘how can you be so stupid as to try and palm off a £20 note, do you think we are running a public service here! So being British, I slink off.
Next day it was back to the post office with lots of loose change in my pocket. Obviously a better day, as really nice cheerful man goes to find the letter. “What security do you need?” I ask. “Just something with your name on it” comes the reply. But the letter is addressed to our business with no mention of my name on it. “Oh that’s OK as we accept anything with a name on it if you are paying excess.
So with thoughts of security rattling through my mind I go back to my office and open the letter. And now comes the real reason for writing this blog –
It was a direct marketing campaign from Monster on line recruitment and they had conveniently forgotten to frank the envelope
So I had wasted at least 1½ hours going to and fro from the post office, it had cost me £1.24 (it’s the principle of the thing) to get a letter that went straight into the recycling box! Miffed, definitely
So come on Post Office, get your processes right, and make your staff more focused on looking after your customers
And Monster, how many other people have had to pay for your marketing campaigns, is it a ploy to keep your costs down? Not very conducive to make me use your services if you cannot get a mailing right.
Customer satisfaction, customer experience, dumb things | 1 Comment
Posted by: Peter Massey | 11.02.2008
This cartoon from the front of our 2008 calendar has struck a chord with so many people. Lots of people have been downloading it and the others from the library at our website.
Tonight (31.1.08) it happened exactly as in the cartoon. The AA lost out and M&S benefited. If you cannot make renewal simple, what can you do !!
Here’s the potted story…..
Renewal notice for building insurance with quote arrives some time ago. I carry it around in my bag along with 2 others (M&S travel and one of the cars with NFU). Due today so have to make the time. Daughter gets little attention on one of her nights with me as I spend about an hour sorting it all out. That upsets me.
First stop is an aggregator to check the price is in range since it feels steep compared to last year. I go thro all the forms on Moneysupermarket.com and find AA is one of the cheapest, But £100 less than the quote they gave me.
So I try to save them and me a lot of work by calling the renewal hotline on the notice to ask them to meet the price. I go through the IVR and talk to the agent. He can’t just match the price. He explains the difference as being not an AA quote but the aggregator’s quote and questions if it’ll really be there. He says the cover will have different parameters. He cannot look at last year’s parameters on which his renewal notice was based. So he cannot bring it up to date with my parameters (and he cannot get that I know them best!). No he cannot give me any discount to get near the price. I give up.
I go thro the aggregator’s link to the AA page to try and get the lower price. It’s blank so I have to fill in all the data again.
The last item on the list is to add previous claims. I press and it blanks all the data I added. Sugar! Luckily it comes back when I press the button again. I try again. Nope. So I pretend I have no claims to get past it and proceed to the next page. I have to give my previous contents insurer but there’s no option for “self insured” and anyway it’s not relevant to buildings only. I have to give my previous buildings insurer, but the AA isn’t an option. There are no “other” categories. So I give in! I cannot proceed.
So I ring the 800 number on the page to look for web help.
This time I get IVR routing and IVR security digits to enter from my renewal letter, my postcode and birth date. You’ve guessed it..when I get through the agent asks for the postcode and birth date. On protest she blames system issues.
I try for blind help with the web site functionality, but the notes are obviously good and she spots I just came through before. So I have to go back down the story. The same track. No result.
In vain I try to ask for web help. Can’t do. Got a number for web help? No. Can you get one? Nice but no? Can I speak to your supervisor? I give up waiting on hold and start again.
In fairness someone phoned back later, but I was on the other phone getting through my third call to the AA. No one had it in their job to spot the problems and get the root causes reported. No interest at all.
So now practiced in AA processes, I go thro the 800 number IVR and ignore the fact I’m a customer. Much simpler, I get to a good agent. A modicum of interest. A tiny bit, but not nothing. I go thro the new business process and get a fresh quote. It’s £100 more than the renewal letter!! But at least she does have the ability to go through the criteria and we tweak them til we get back to the exact sum in the renewal notice. And on a tiny push she can give discounts and I get a further £50 off, so I’m halfway between the AA price on the aggregator and the original renewal letter.
By now how do I feel? She was good, but she did what the first guy should have been able to do, half an hour before. That’s a waste of my time and I’m not renewing unless they are last resort. I ask for a number to get back to her, but she can only offer to call me back. 7.15? Good technique to try and make me delay my decision until after I get other quotes. Incidentally she didn’t call and I went out at 7.25 - perhaps by then she read the notes and gave up on me. Still she said 7.15. Obviously didn’t want my business either.
I need a rest so I try renewing my M&S Money travel insurance. The figure is close to last year. I am NOT going to try looking around after all that…… I phone the number on the renewal letter. Just renew it. They just renew it.
Do you do buildings insurance? No.
I’m thinking I know they do…..
But I can transfer you. Phew ! Ring ring etc and eventually I’m through.
By now I can give the answers to the next three questions in the exact insurance language before the questions are asked. How old is the house? Pre 1851, brick, tile roof, detached. French windows? Yes, security locks at the top but not at the bottom, all other windows have locks, burglar alarm but not that Nas standard thingie. It’s a bit like the 2 Ronnies doing Mastermind!
The price is where the AA price was on the aggregator web site. Done deal. It’s that price because I was asked what excess I wanted and given options. Simple stuff. I took a bigger excess. That’s probably why the AA aggregator price was where it was. If I’d been offered the higher excess by the first man or the last lady from the AA, they’d still have got the business.
So if you recognise the cartoon, give us a call……
AA, customer experience | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 11.02.2008
Sorry for radio silence. As you can see we have a new site going live and the blogs will now resume!
Call me sad, but I found a dumb thing at first direct at last! I have given them the feedback - it’s worth it because I believe they will act on it.
Unlike the guys at Swindon station today after I trod on a loose flagstone outside the front door of the station. It had a huge puddle under it that went straight up my legs. At least I was too wet to look like I wet myself!
Telling the ticket clerk, it was clear she had no way of dealing with what customers say. “Tell that guy in the orange jacket over there”. I didn’t bother.
So what did first direct do? A classic in the web site. Click on mortgage sales and it asks you to log in if you’re an existing customer. You log in and click on mortgages. It asks you to proceed to log out and look at mortgages. Back where you started! ! Tee hee.
The other dumb thing is quite interesting. And another classic. Marketing versus operations.
Marketing obviously made their mortgage offer way too good. Not only couldn’t I be put thro now, they couldnt call me back until Monday as they were booked solid!. It’s the classic oversell or underpricing that generates more demand than can’t be handled. Even assuming the forecasts were notified. The customer experience - frustrated. Being a fan I’ll wait. But it doesnt reflect well.
Bet operations are getting it in the neck not marketing.
I asked “Could I do it myself on the web?”. The answer ”We’ve taken it down because of the demand….” !!
Trying again a week later, the same problem. But the agent said “I’ll keep an eye on the queue for you through next week and call you back personally”.
customer experience, first direct | 1 Comment
Posted by: Ian Morton | 7.02.2008
If only I could. Do British Airways really not mind losing business or are they so focused on other things that ensuring customer satisfaction is low on their agenda? Before Christmas we booked a long weekend trip to the South of France for ourselves and a group of friends. Due to work commitments time was short and we wanted to maximise our stay by travelling out on an early flight and returning on a late one. Objective being to get nearly two extra days in the South without the rain and cold of a British winter After searching on the web we came up with the best flight times and cost. Using BA we could fly into Marseille early, pick up a car and be at our destination by late morning. The return was late evening, allowing us a leisurely day. Great! So tickets booked and car hire arranged to pick up from the airport. All sorted, or so we thought. Weeks went by thinking this was all planned and paid for only to receive an email a couple of weeks before departure stating that the return flight was now cancelled – the only alternative offered was an morning flight that lost us a precious day away. Departure from other airports would cost us more than the original flight (and I am sure that BA would not pick up the extra for returning the hire car to a different location even though this was booked through their ‘partner’) So, we say, lets cancel these and get other flights – we will just take our business elsewhere. Easier said than done. Has anyone else out there tried to cancel a BA flight recently? After repeated attempts to get through and being advised of the fact that “we are experiencing a lot of calls at present” so expect ½ hour waiting in a call queue, we went to the web site – should have done that first you might say, always quicker – only to find that the superbly names ‘manage my booking’ section was not working properly So BA, do you operate a black hole policy that once you have the money you don’t care about managing any fall out? Or is it that you have fine tuned your organisation to such an extent that anything out of the norm cannot be handled efficiently? I realise flights get cancelled due to a whole raft of reasons, but surely handling the knock on effects well is critical to maintaining customer satisfaction and long term relationships, especially in such a competitive market! I want to support BA, but if this level of service continues it will be Ryan Air all the way!
airlines | No Comments
Posted by: Ian Morton | 7.02.2008
Why is it that when we try and fix problems we tend to forget it’s the little things that make a difference between good and bad customers experience. Monday last week was a case in point. I travel up from the South coast into London Victoria on a fairly frequent basis. The train I catch is the 6.57 that goes all the way and ours is the first (or last, depending how you look at it) stop on the line. Most mornings I’m usually to be found sat in my usual seat (predictable, I know) working away on the PC. Now all praise to Southern Rail, they have significantly improved services over the past few years with new carriages, more frequent services at peak times and they normally run on time. This Monday was different, a broken down train somewhere around Hayward’s Heath was causing utter chaos. I arrived at the station to see a train pulling out that should have gone ½ an hour before, so I knew I was in for some travel problems that day. The digital indicator board was still saying my train was OK, although the ticket sales guy was muttering he did not know what was going on. So, out onto the platform into a cold, misty and wet January morning. Just the type of day to really enjoy waiting for the train.As you can imagine not many passengers where too impressed. They became less and less impressed as the conflicting and confusing updates came over the tannoy and occasionally from the ticket office man. From the tannoy came the “we are sorry to say….” dutifully repeated every 10 minutes. Occasionally informing us that “The train for…” was delayed. From the ticket man a message informing us that “a broken down train is causing a blockage, not sure when it’s going to be cleared”. From the digital information board – 1st train due, 2nd train due, 3rd train due. So everyone hung around, hoping for the best, as you do. My train, the 6.57, was kept on the digital indicator board, although others were clearly shown as cancelled. Even though the message came up delayed till 7.13, then delayed till 7.20, delayed till 7.25, delayed till 7.30 I still had hope, because the message was still there! Then it disappeared off the screen, no note of cancellation, just gone.At this point I became frustrated of Seaford and went to join the queue of people trying to get info from the poor ticket man. No hope there, so reclaimed my ticket cost (which took the poor man a considerable time although he must have got faster by the end of the morning with all the refunds he had to do, good practical training there!). So what caused all the confusion? All the elements were there. Good visual indicator boards, clear audio announcements, local presence in the ticket man. But none of them told the same story (actually the ticket man was closest, and I should have listened to him). End result were deep rumblings of discontent the next day that could be heard from my, now thawed out, fellow commuters.All the good things that Southern and National rail have put in were forgotten, to be replaced by the most recent event now linked to every other time something had gone wrong. Effective communications, always difficult, are even more important when things go wrong. If the man on the spot had been kept informed and in turn kept us informed, if he was able to ensure consistency of information over the tannoy and information boards, he could have potentially turned a negative situation into a positive one.
Customers will put up with a lot when asked to, and trains break down. That’s part of life (well a commuters one anyway). It’s when people are confused or kept in the dark (and rain!) that it becomes a problem. And at that point people always remember the bad, not the good.
So come on Southern, get your communications plan in place and staff trained and supported in handling adverse situations. Then we can all focus on how well you have done, rather than on the occasional failure.
Uncategorized, dumb things, train | No Comments
