Archive for the 'CCO' Category

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

Our companies abound with “CXOs”: the CEO, the COO, the CFO, the CMO, the CIO. But what about the CCO, the Chief Customer Officer. The person who s accountable for the “Customer” in the business. Does your business have a CCO? Is your CEO the CCO?  In most businesses there is an operations director, a customer services director. In some now there is even a customer experience director.   This is particularly true in financial services in the UK. The regulatory body, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) is enforcing something called “TCF” or Treating Customers Fairly. Its intent is extensive. To change not only the reporting but also the culture and executive responsibility for the way customers are treated by financial services companies.   But is the need for a Customer Experience Director in itself missing the point. The point that everyone should be championing the customers’ cause. Everyone should be a CCO. There should be an army of CCOs in every business.  

For example take this organisation chart from Starbucks. There’s the customer and then there’s every employee. If only this were true in real companies we would not need a CCO.

In practice, the organisation chart looks very different. There are many layers of management above the employees who talk and deal with customers. Many staff who do not talk to customers but who have responsibilities, targets, accountabilities and obligations to shareholders.   The further up the organisation, the greater the perceived shareholder pressure. And the lower the perceived customer pressure. It is tempting to look at the customer vs the shareholder as the debate or the balance to be achieved. But what if they are not opposite ends of a  seesaw. But the same thing. What if we can get more value by getting both shareholders and customers to the same end of the seesaw rather than just getting a balance between their needs.

At the heart of the challenge, of the see saw, one needs to look at the time frames that the shareholders and customers use. The very short term. The very long term.  The two parties both want the same thing – to maximise the value they get from the transactions between them. But the customers’ view of value is frequently wider, longer and more complex than the shareholders’ view.  

When it comes to buying insurance, customers seldom forget how they were treated on a claim 10 years before. When their business bank is trying to sell pensions to their company, customers do not separate the bank from a poor experience of trying to replace a stolen credit card on their personal account. When offered free internet by their phone company, customers can turn the offer down because they have wasted so much time sorting out their mobile bills.  Yet businesses continue to play the short term game. To incentivise customers to buy with offers that they fund from marketing and sales budgets. Offers to stay, to buy more, to recruit their friends. Offers for better functionality, better prices, free add ons, special treatment. Companies need to make sales targets each month, each quarter, regardless of external changes.   These are all legitimate things to do. But so much more expensive or so much less expensive depending on whether the customers concerned are emotionally on your side or not. So much harder or easier to meet targets depending on what your customers have experienced from your company before. So much harder or easier to execute on plans if the staff who talk to customers are on side or not. We know these things to be true.  

But in business we “need” things we can measure. True representations of how customers behave are very hard to measure. Results are in reality based on complex interactions. Based on emotions which change rapidly. Much harder to measure than actual sales volumes, costs or profits. So how can a CCO compete with a CFO who can measure numbers in columns? How can he compete with the CMOs sales figures?  The answer is it’s very hard. But it’s started to happen. Many companies now take simplified customer measures into account. Customer satisfaction. Likelihood to recommend. None are perfect but they are bringing the customer into the board room. Over time the most advanced companies are linking these measures together and correlating them with internal quality measurements and external commercial figures. It isn’t easy to do. But some companies now believe they can say what a percentage point on a customer scorecard is worth to the bottom line. 

The further battleground for these more advanced companies is how to change these scores. How to change the real commercial results through doing things that customers like. Yes, better experiences. But not at any price. In most cases the relationship between experiences, satisfaction, researched statements and actual buying behaviour are far from linear. And not the same for each industry or business within it. 

A major shift is happening. From measuring to understand what’s happening with customers, to simply listening to customers to know what to do. And next to listening to customers in importance is listening to front line staff.  So what is the role of the CCO? To get the arguments into the boardroom? To get the customer measures in place? Yes but there’s something bigger. The true CCO is the voice of the customer and the voice of the front line staff who know what customers know. The CCO’s job is deeper than measurement or argument. The job is to get the business to take decisions based on what the customer knows about your business. Frustrations, competition, opportunities. And when this happens shareholder results change. Markedly. Not by small amounts.

CCO, chief customer officer | No Comments

I got these quotes from a colleague who’s recently been reading Jeanne Bliss’s book on the Chief Customer Officer. I think these can apply in many walks of life, in and out of work.

• “Think small”
• “Worry about being better; bigger will take care of itself”
• “Think one customer at a time, and take care of each one the best way you can.”

How often do we try to build strategies from the top down and without the real customer context, needs and frustrations in mind? Starting at the frontline, listening to staff and listening to the individual customers is such a powerful way of collecting the most meaningful data on what you need to do next.
There will always be someone willing to put forward the next big thing but how will you know it will make a difference to the little things?

CCO, Strategy, Voice of the Customer, customer experience, listening | No Comments

What an amazing experience we had this week at “Dans Le Noir” - a unique place to eat in London.

At the start of our Chief Customer Officer Forum we all went to share dinner in the dark. And they aren’t joking about dark. Even after an hour and a half, your eyes cannot see a thing. So what is this food, where is that wine bottle, who said that all become strange and new events.

As someone who is very visual I found the whole thing totally relaxing. Immediately you are aware how much you use touch and hearing without knowing it. The loss of all body language tunes you in to the nuances in a voice, the direction of a head, the approach of a person behind you.

A great night out. Oh and then the credit card bounced……

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I’ve been struck lately by the correlation between 2 things:

• The people who return (or have returned for them) their phone calls and their emails
• The type of experience given to customers in those same businesses

One of our Chief Customer Officers, who is excellent with his personal communications despite being very busy, told an interesting story of Marks and Spencers.

He had a bed ordered to be delivered on a particular day in a new house, because he had guest coming to stay. It didn’t get delivered when it should have been so he escalated it of course only to be told it couldn’t now be delivered and that, no, there was no one he could raise it with.

Not happy. Our man isn’t one to take that lying down (joke, oh do keep up !!). He was going to go through all the various folk needed to get what he wanted. Ultimately the fruitless trail led all the way to the customer service director. He was told the customer service director does not speak to customers! Imagine his fury and his vehement retelling of this story. Of course he, the story teller, does speak to customers. It’s part of his job to be responsible in person. And it keeps him real. Maybe that’s why he returns his calls. Because he cares even when he’s busy.

M&S came up again in our weekly meeting - interesting things that have happened this week. Jo’s dad spent Saturday afternoon on the phone to M&S….. I expect the customer service director at M&S is a nice guy or lady. They’d probably cringe at the thought that they “don’t talk to customers”.

To quote one of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos sayings: “Be very afraid of our customers. They’re the ones who have the money”. Perhaps the customer service director was very afraid…

So who is in charge of representing the customer at M&S. I took at look at their board. It isn’t clear that there is anyone. Lots of product and logistics and so on. Now that can be a great thing - the customer is everywhere. Or it can be a bad thing - no chief customer officer to listen to, aggregate and prioritise what customers want done across the business and represent doing the right things for customers.

I know, I’ll mail this to Stuart Rose. Now he does talk to people. He even responds to mailshots to say no thank you. That’s the kind of eye for detail, care of your brand and personal responsibility that makes great companies great. I bet he returns his calls or has them returned.

One cannot expect great customer experiences from your company unless one represents that ethos personally.

CCO, Marks and Spencers, complaint, customer experience | No Comments

CCO | 3 Comments

You may need to be more of a management artist than management scientist to get somewhere as Customer Chief Officer in your business and make things Fast+Simple. At least judging by reactions of many CCOs this week.

At our Executive Breakfast seminar we had some fabulous discussions about what practical people are doing to “stop doing dumb things to customers and people”. Hosted with Darren Cornish of Norwich Union, we had a great time with liked minded people who passionately believe this a mission worth fighting for! Though I’m not sure about the Canon&Ball analogy, Darren… rock on Tommy

“Proving the $ value of what you believe in, steering the ship by numbers, swamping the operations with metrics which are not actionable – none of it necessarily changes anything as far as the customer is concerned” said Peter Massey, Managing Director of Budd. Whoops, thats me quoted in a press release. I could also say that some people just dont care enough about the detail of what happens to customers - they accept poor delivery and poor service, poor management. They substitute training with numbers, personal attention with reports. They just don’t spend enough time at the coal face, or getting the right information to them every day. Chief customer officers are different. They share a mad passion for all these things - they are not prepared to sit back and do nothing, to say nothing. As my colleague Jonathan says “what’s the opposite of honesty?” No its not dishonesty, its silence!”

Some of the practical learnings shared this week were:

• There’s too much emphasis on putting in complicated metrics and measurement, compared to the effort going into “moving the dial” and actually getting things done that change the working and customer experiences people have. The science of managing interactions seems to have taken over from using human skills of motivation and common sense
• Resistance to change across the organisation shouldn’t be seen just as not “getting it”. Often people have been poorly equipped, by their experience so far, to deal with a customer focused world. They need support and coaching - in the boardroom, particularly the middle ranks, not just the front line
• Stop wasting customers’ time with surveys and concentrate on getting their up to the minute, actionable feedback to the people who deliver sales and service at the front line. By the time most feedback gets collected and analysed, it has aged. It lacks meaning to the people who could do anything about it. To people whose behaviour must change as part of their coaching.
• Yes complaints get fixed, but removing systemic problems and changing people’s behaviours is really the focus if you want to “move the dial”.
• Business cases never convince non-believers in management, so stop doing them. It’s by winning hearts and minds of senior people that things change. If they dont believe prima facie cases then how will a logical business case do that. Its a smoke screen. It still wont get believed, said many people.
• “Bringing the customer experience message to the marketeers and financiers is a challenge; it’s about empathy and understanding how the customer thinks – not just about hard measures”, commented one participant.
• “We need more techniques that will help to win the hearts and minds of senior managers. Delivering a good customer experience is not just about numbers in the end”, concluded another participant.
• “If I could only do one thing again, it would be to concentrate on feedback that changes behaviour. This is where we move the dial, where we change the experience”
• We dont think enough about the positive emotional states of the customer and what we have to do to create them
• “Getting the board to accept that their customers’ experience is as important to the company as understanding the financials is key to driving action across the company”, said another champion.

Our 2007 annual Fast+Simple research is going to look further into this last point and the evidence for investments into customer initiatives. If you want to take part talk to marion.howard-healy@budd.uk.com

We agreed we need more cross industry sharing at senior level and so we’ve formed a group, like our US and Australian CCO groups, to meet again in May. By invitation only, so contact us if you think you are a CCO, whatever type of artist you are!

CCO, measurement, seminar | No Comments

Are you the CCO? WOT????

Well a CCO is a “chief customer officer” - the person who screams, scratches, bites and kicks the company to make it better for the customer. The one who “stops dumb things happening to customers” !! You may have a rich seam of them in your business or be a lone star

Of course given our mission of “how do we stop doing dumb things to customers” we are mad keen to meet and help as many CCOs as possible.

So two things are in train and we’d love your input (email me on peter.massey@budd.uk.com)

1) March 21st is a directors’ breakfast seminar being jointly hosted with the heroic CCO Darren Cornish from Norwich Union. It will be a couple of short blasts on the horn from Darren and I, then facilitated discussion of what it takes to get your organisation acting on all the wonderful feedback customers give ( expletives deletives or whatever !)

2) Our 2007 4th annual Fast+Simple survey will be kicking off shortly and we’re looking for chief customer officers and their CEOs to interview

Elect yourself to the role of CCO and get yourself a seat at the table !

CCO, chief customer officer, dumb things, march 21 | No Comments