Archive for June, 2008

A customer on my train spent 50 minutes this morning arguing with the guard. The guard’s credit card machine had taken his transaction twice according to the receipts. The guard “knew” it hadn’t because it made this error before.

The customer wanted confirmation that it hadn’t taken his money twice. The guard couldn’t do that but asked the customer to write in. Naturally the customer did not want to waste his time when it wasn’t his fault. Both were locked in an impasse.

The supervisor was called by phone. The conversation was not understood by the supervisor. Several times the customer asked the supervisor not to talk over him. He eventually told him (“Jim”) that he did not believe that Jim “understood what I’m saying” since he hadn’t listened to him.

My point isn’t better training for the ticket man or the supervisor. It’s two questions:

Why didn’t the machine get fixed when the conductor knew it was broken?

How much time was wasted and how much damage done to SouthEastern’s brand?

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 ”What our customers are saying” (wocas) processes do 3 things

1) They let management know what customers and frontline staff know is obvious.

It’s a bit like this weather stone. Management create lots of feedback mechanisms because they are in the cosy indoors and can’t feel the rain to tell them its raining.

2) They motivate frontline staff to collect insights because management act on them (thus making the agent sound much more intelligent and allowing smart people to use their brains)

3) The systematic action – the bit most companies can’t do but high performing companies do (see our 2008 F+S survey of 71 UK companies in Q1 2008 in the library. It shows how high performance companies collect the same types of feedback as lower performing ones – and that the difference comes from what they do with it

Let us know if you want an inhouse webinar on the topic or a private session just for you! – peter.massey@budd.uk.com  

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A journalist asked me why businesses are poor on email responses. The thought that went through my head was “why should they be?”

-          Generation  Y consumers don’t use much email so why develop it further

-          It’s too late now! We’ve been trained, as consumers, that email doesnt work well when you send it most companies. Even if they respond at all, you don’t get any answers

-          email is very good for getting things wrong, it’s a poor 2 way conversation. So it’s better to phone back. Seldom happens but a great wow if a company does.

-          c2c communities are much more useful – insightful and supportive – if companies know how to foster them without interfering they are a great source of insight and support (Innocent is a good example) . Get in touch  (peter.massey@budd.uk.com) if you want to talk more about how you can develop communities in c2c or b2b.

More fundamentally email off cues from websites are usually a substitute for really giving customers the answers they want, how they want them and where they want them. That’s because most companies:

• Don’t have metrics that show them what contact they have in other channels because their websites dont help
• When customers get in touch they don’t ask for feedback on why they had to get in touch
• They can’t act on the feedback they have, let alone more complex feedback like that if they got it
• They don’t have fast pubishing processes that can get changes made in minutes rather than weeks

Read about how Amazon does some of these processes in the Skyline and “what our customers are saying” sections of our site or take a look at some of the papers in the library

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