Archive for September, 2010

What is often forgotten in improving the customer’s experience is that the customer would have preferred not to have had to do anything in the first place.

The reason for the need for contact is not in the contact centre. It is in the design of policies and procedures, in the speed or error rate of processing, in the expectations set or confusion caused by communications. Furthermore, the need for the contact to be by telephone or face to face is caused by an inability of customers to help themselves through online or other self service channels.  So the customer’s experience of the contact and the contact centre cannot, in reality, be seen in isolation.

Accordingly, the role of the contact centre is changing. It is no longer just to handle contact.  It is also to identify:

• Why telephone contact happened at all and how much occurred for what reasons.
• Why customers could not self serve themselves.
• How non contact and contact processes could be improved.
• What customers perceive, their insights and feedback.

Original telephony metrics for customer experience or customer quality need therefore to be changed to recognise these context changes and what it takes to operate contact centres professionally today.

Get in touch and share the changes you are making

contact centre, customer experience, metrics | No Comments

Off to Germany this week to help my colleagues there get our Chief Customer Officer Forum (www.budd.uk.com/chiefcoforum.html) started. Having seen the Yank, Australian and Indian CCOs, as well as the UK of course, I started running through the characters in my head to define what makes a great CCO great. Given German grammar makes your head spin I thought maybe I should start that way…amo, amas, amat and all that – darn it wrong language!

So thinking about CCOs… I, You, He/She, We, You, They……

I – CCOs have a personal awareness of what it’s like to be a customer. They don’t just put themselves in the customers shoes, they live there all the time. Somewhere in their careers they learned empathy, Empathy from the memory of serving customers in their youth and knowing how to do it well, with candour, with fun. Often they’ve been sales people for a while. Certainly they sell well all the time without necessarily being conscious of it. Empathy from being treated well or badly as a junior employee and knowing the difference. Now as a senior person, they have no airs and graces, but plenty of space and grace.

You (singular) – CCOs have an ability to turn the spotlight on people when talking to them, to think about them, not to be elsewhere in their head. Really listening. Using silence often, rather than just the power of their vocabulary and knowledge. They coach constantly. Themselves, their colleagues, their family. But they’re good at not coaching their friends, at switching off at the right times.

He/She – Although the group is of mixed sex, people tend towards using their feminine side more – less fighting, less macho, more conversation, more connections, more passionate, less reserved.

We – Undoubtedly team players, but more than that CCOs create and generate teams. You see people who respect them right across their companies and this is a key weapon in fighting for what customers want. They generate loyalty that travels when they travel across companies and countries. They make people feel braver so they can speak their minds even in the corporate kingdoms they inhabit.

You (plural) CCOs are endlessly positive and optimistic in a crowd. They exude energy and help others charge their batteries, never drawing others down, or flattening a solid idea. They stay open to others’ ideas. They must eat 3 bowls of stamina for breakfast each day to keep this optimism going. They are realistic about what can be doe now, but never lack ambition about what needs to be done for customers.

They  – CCOs are ever curious about what others are doing. They look externally before they look internally. For ideas, for what’s possible, for how to do things. Always proud to steal a good idea, they are never shy about lending their own learnings. They connect with people as much as they can. They never see an end point to working for their customers or a point in time when things will be good enough to relax.

Having looked at these things one of the things that strikes me is how young in mind they are, regardless of age. Active, gregarious yet professional.
Are you a CCO?

chief customer officer | 1 Comment

Boris Johnson during the launch of the capital's 'Summer of Cycling' in front of the London Eye Photo: GLA/PA Wire

Having launched a few businesses of my own and taken part in several others, I’m always fascinated by what it takes to get from idea to success. Its been great fun watching Boris’ bike scheme lift off over the past few weeks. I can rattle on for hours about start ups but I’d like to focus on a couple of factors in this 2 wheel enterprise – engagement and learning.

Why is this still so after several weeks?

There’s a great big obvious design problem. All the bike racks are full of bikes. There are the same number of bikes as racks in the system. Its like playing that kids game of moving the 8 letters around a 9 space square, only there are 9 letters and 9 squares and no space to move. All the customers know this. Because when they gather around docking stations in frustration they talk about it.

The front line staff all know it – because if you do get through by phone, they say the know there’s a problem. But try and suggest anything and its “talk to the hand”. I’ve tried talking to the hand – email – and got no sense of listening, only reasons for things and complaint handling language – which isn’t what I was trying to do. The staff sound brow beaten already.

They had a poor guy on one of the stations in Soho Square yesterday to collect bikes in piles – a temporary solution…… He looked so dejected from the “advice” he was getting from customers who have been so frustrated – because they all love the scheme and want it to work.

The difficulty is that Boris’ Bike Scheme isn’t designed to listen. I’ve tried. By phone, by email, in person.

I ask my favourite question of what they’d do if I gave them feedback and its obvious there is no formal listening process. It’s a member only launch so they get it right according to the letters – but they cant “listen” so how will they get it right?

So if anyone reads this at the scheme or at Boris’s office or at sponsor Barclays, here’s 3 easy things you can do to make it feel like it isn’t a bike scheme designed by a bank

a) Put the stickers on all the maps at all the terminals not just some – the stickers that say some of the terminals don’t exist yet

b) Take bike capacity out of the system to make it work- most of the time there are just too many bikes standing and not enough space. OK, when you have many more members and more bikes are on the move, then add capacity back but not yet

c) Put in a formal listening system, make it part of front line people’s jobs to learn and feedback what customers know. Make it part of manager’s jobs to aggregate the feedback and identify top issues, allocate them to the right people and fix them in real time.

If you don’t, you’re going to build a business that’s great at having crises and fixing them. Whereas a smart business would be good at listening and avoiding problems.

For those of you starting a business, here’s a few thoughts about launching and listening:

1) It’s never “right” from the outset, despite the best planning and design. You have to build in room to change. Look at Egg, starting as an online proposition that rapidly had to move to telephone.

2) The take off ramp sets the trajectory for the business. A classic comparison is when Orange and Mercury One2One launched in the UK. Orange built brand and capacity and credibility with customers. A much slower acquisition of customers who in turn recruited others and so it became large – imagine a growth curve that looked like a smooth but steepening slope. Whereas One2One decided to give free calls in the evening, the first time anything like that had been done. Instantly capacities were overwhelmed in all directions and the business shot up to shoot down again – imagine a growth curve of an oscillation.

3) Staff think it’s brilliant on day one – well if they don’t what’s wrong with you !

4) Staff talk to customers lots right from the start so they know the issues from 100s of conversations about the same things. If nothing gets done about these things they weary quickly.

5) Customers spot everything so they can talk about the issues intimately. And many can see the solutions with clarity. And if you don’t fix the dumb stuff, they will tell their friends. Reputation is very important to adding customers. ‘”Customer effort” is very important to growth.

6) How fast you learn and react to what customers know is critical to your growth trajectory. Client WorldPay is a great case in mind, sold recently for £2billion. When we put in place the listening processes in 2003 they were tiny. The CEO knew he could grow much faster if he didn’t have to build infrastructure to cope with dumb things.

7) Consistency is more important than being brilliant at some things and cracks appearing elsewhere. I love the bike scheme – but if the basics aren’t fixed soon then it will fall out of use for me

Better to put the listening, learning and action processes in place before you launch not after when the business is ‘bigger” or the cracks have started to appear. Listening to customers is something that is so simple to design in, so hard to add later costing millions, but more importantly making your business ordinary, destroying differentiation. Companies like Amazon, Skype and Google grew without marketing costs because they were so easy, so on target and so word of mouth.

So here’s wishing luck and listening to Boris’ Barclays Bike Scheme – but more than luck I wish you ears.

Barclays Bike Scheme, Boris Johnson, Launching a business, listening | 1 Comment