The book of “The Best Service Is No Service” is already up to 12th on Amazon’s best seller list and people such as Guy Kawasaki are blogging it.
The FT ran an article on it on March 27th
It’s going to be big…. More importantly the idea that its not ok to do dumb things to cause your customers to contact you is even bigger.
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?
I loved the Oct HBR interview with Jeff Bezos especialy where he said: “Years from now when people look back at Amazon I want them to say that we uplifted customer centricity across the entire business world”
Of course, we are intent on helping that happen by sharing some great Amazon processes such as Skyline and WOCAS.
He comments on the strategic significance of such processes:
“..we know that when we put energy into defect reduction which reduces our cost structure and thereby allows lower prices, that will be paying us dividends ten years from now.”
And on what we in Budd call “the best service is no service” - the name of the book to be published in April next year:
“…that execution factor is a big factor and you can see it in our financial metrics over the past ten years. It’s very obvious when, for instance, we look at the number of customer contacts per unit sold. Our customers don’t contactus unless something’s wrong, so we want that number to move down – and it has gone down every year for 12 years”
And relative to our common sense loop which says the customer knows best:
“when we can’t decide what to do, we try to convert it into a straightforward problem by asking “what’s best for the consumer?””
And a lovely quote relative to why these processes are so important to get on with:
“I think most big errors are errors of omission not commission. The times when they were in a position to notice something and act on it…and yet failed to do so”
Thanks Jeff
Jonathan Wilson is moving from our advisory board (see www.budd.uk.com/people.html) to lead Budd’s executive coaching and change management. He reminded me the other day about the Gallup data on the 12 key questions to ask your staff ( and yourself !) if you want to know what happy bunnies they are.
I won’t fire them all at you, but the first four are an interesting self test. Try them:
1 Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2 Do I have the right materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3 At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4 In the last 7 days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
Let us know what you find…. Email us - peter.massey@budd.uk.com
I started to find the 12 questions by Googling but, as is too often the case these days with Google, lots of intermediaries are top of the list. Luckily Amazon was one of them. I pressed one click to go to the book that contains them “First, break all the rules”. I pressed one click to add it to my basket, one click to check out and one click to confirm. Approximately 20 seconds. That was Thursday and the book arrived today Saturday. That’s what we call fast+simple.
Had any similar experiences? Email us with them - peter.massey@budd.uk.com
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