Archive for the 'contact rate' Category
Posted by: Peter Massey | 22.12.2010
It seems very little judging by my experiences in the past week of moving my broadband and trying to fly out of Gatwick.
1) Both provide little to no information in advance of the journey or anything specifically useful via the website for the journey. A lack of publishing and sharing of knowledge with customers is at the root of the problem.
2) Getting to someone who can help you is then very hard and isn’t part of their process.
3) Suggesting someone else can fix it is part of their approach, so that the problem goes to someone else.
4) Having the obvious FAQs at point of need, is not something that’s available.
5) Managing the resolution easily has no structure, no triage.
6) After the problem, all appears to be very well done. Must be an expensive way to work.
If you’re interested why, then read on – its a bit boring – as detail often is.
Let’s take the airline first:
Gatwick departures board not available online all day so you can’t see the real situation and decide to stay home or not. Airline’s site shows half a dozen cancellations and a general warning. Nothing specific on my destination. Can’t get through by phone, not surprisingly. Nothing on twitter, except customers irate about the fact the website is still pushing Xmas offers and providing no data.
Departures screen shows delays back though the day. Self serve check-in is not working anymore so I must join the queue. I could see 150 people trying to get to 3 desks in a tidy crawl. Later discover this was only the part I could see and it was much longer. One lady has a clipboard and is besieged. I find out there is an intention to fly. So I join the queue and move a few metres in an hour. I give in and go home.
Appears to me that the snow isn’t the problem – ticketing passengers is broken. Obviously more desks would help, but failing that do 2 things. FAQs on white boards or flip charts – show us what you’re checking on your clipboard. Make it relevant to the outcomes. For example If you’re waiting for Belfast then a) if you are prebooked we have enough capacity once you get through the queue b) if you are not pre-booked you wont get out today so go home or get a hotel via desk xyz and c ) we are expecting all flights to go. And put this on your website – the whole queue is trying to find out anything via laptops and mobiles.
Secondly simply triage the queue by walking down it and checking for relevance and outcome – many people could have been sent home according to destination and seats/numbers. Many were probably in the wrong queue judging by the number who talked to each other and left. Many would have had certainty that it was the right thing to do.
Saying “the airport isn’t giving us slots” isn’t useful. If the airline and the airport haven’t worked out a plan, then it may be the only answer. But scenario planning should have taken place and the scenario be planned so that capacity is known and decisions, made in advance, enacted so there is clarity.
I get home and check the departures board and airline on the web – no information so I don’t know if the flight ever went. Brilliantly simple claim procedure for the ticket just using one screen and the booking reference. Let’s see if the money comes through as efficiently. Pity they cant be as efficient in the other things they do.
Customer effort? A wasted day.
What about the broadband journey then?
An order placed and MAC code provided. A welcome call about 10 days before to take payment details and tell me what was happening – a specific date but very general about the process. On asking apparently I need do nothing. They’ll send me a router but I ask them not to as I have one – they say you might as well as its free.
The router arrives in a plain box a few days later and goes in the cellar. I dont think I had any email confirmation – at least I have no memory of one despite several references to email later . A search now, shows I don’t have one. I suspect it was sent to their new email address that they gave me and I dont want/need/use.
By the day of swap over I’m already sceptical. An absence of expectation from a lack of information.
When I come home, the phone still works. Alas the broadband doesn’t. I have an idea and look in the plain box that the router came in – there is in fact a letter. No expectations but at least the account id, password etc is there. and lots of web addresses to check things on if any problem. But no phone number in case you don’t have broadband access to check things with.
I chill for the weekend and get by on my iphone checking all the obvious things on the website – but there’s nothing for “my service hasn’t cut over” so on Monday I phone the broadband number on the site. The IVR option 3 for faults is advertised on the site and the IVR is very simple. ( Later I get bored with it telling me I may have to wait up to 10 minutes and there’s a big queue – regardless of whether there is or there isn’t).
Eventually I get through to be told I’m through to the wrong broadband and am transferred. My phone battery dies before I get through. Later I start over and speak to someone who explains its due provisioning today – I retort that to me, it was due provisioning Friday. They don’t seem fussed. It’ll be done today.
Later I get a text to say its been done. It still doesn’t work. No response from a Twitter escalation.
It still doesn’t work Tuesday morning so I call again. Same number but I get a travel firm – redial and it goes through fine – weird. ( Later I have this again twice but to wrong routes within the company these times). This time they check and it will definitely be provisioned by noon and I’ll get a text. I get a text but no working service by noon.
In the afternoon I call again and get someone who checks and says the order hasn’t gone through but he’s getting it done whilst I’m on the phone. I ask if I’ll need to do anything else. He says no that the router is preconfigured with passwords etc. The first I know of it. So he stays with me whilst I swap out the router and reconnect everything. Still no service but he says it will be in the next half hour.
No service a few hours later.
I call again and they say there’s a fault and it’s been reported to BT. I say there can’t be a fault because it hasn’t been provisioned yet. How can BT check something that isn’t provisioned. He says that’s tech support’s process and that’s that. I ask for escalation – he says there isn’t anyone. I cut off and immediately dial again to talk to someone else who goes through the same excuses. I ask what the SLA is with BT for faults even if there were one – you guessed, 5 working days. Escalation – there isn’t one.
I cut off and escalate with a little help from my friends.
The chief exec’s office call within 10 minutes and an engineer 10 mins later. And the engineer’s boss ten mins later. The engineer does some triage, finding out the story so far, runs a line test and says the line is dead and there’s a BT physical problem which I challenge because nothing physical had been touched until the router was swapped. I agree to change the line filter and dismantle the wall socket and he phone’s me back. No change. I’m not willing to give in and he listens and we swap the router back to my old one and he repeats the line test – heh presto there is no BT fault. “You’ve got a faulty router, we can send you another one”. Hmmm Xmas post. We try to configure my router and whilst he’s helpful, we can’t do it. Later I manage to crack the router config using my iPhone to get a website that helps. And it works first time.
The new router is in the bin, as will the second one be if they send it by Xmas post.
Customer effort? I lost 5 days working and several hours of my time.
All avoidable by some really simple stuff around setting expectations, being transparent and sharing set up processes, providing information that’s specifically relevant to the scenarios ( eg what you will have to do, how to troubleshoot etc) and doing proper triage from the outset. Will I be surprised if I get problems with the billing? You can imagine the start date for service wont have been updated ….
And when they call for a netpromoter score I’ll refer them to this blog post.
Customer effort, airlines, contact rate, customer experience design, reduction in contacts, self service | 1 Comment
Posted by: Peter Massey | 31.07.2008
The contrast in use of tax payers resources, the politics and the bigger system and the good news….
Is my tax £ being well spent?
I love Jeremy Clarkson’s idea that the police shouldn’t be allowed to fine you for car parking until they return your stolen goods!
I was struck by the contrasting use of resources around Soho Square as I walked into work yesterday. In Greek St, there was a police cordon around a bar. Uh oh must have been a murder. Two officers, once taking photos of the scene. At the opposite end of the square, parked opposite Soho St, was a Smart car with CCTV on the roof. It was aimed up the one way street from the wrong end. Presumably to catch cyclists going the wrong way up the street, since cars cant turn into the street the wrong way easily given the shape of the traffic islands on Oxford St – itself a street only for buses and taxis so unlikely to generate much “driving” crime. There were two guys sat in the Smart car reading the Sun.
The contrasting focus of manpower is striking in a time of newspaper headlines about knife crime, rising prices and taxes.
The wider system
Not only do cameras everywhere make me feel less safe, but they make me aware of government. It strikes me that everything that is government charged, privatised and vaguely regulated (and I use the two words specifically), or is an effective monopoly is just going through the roof. Parking fines rising to £120, gas going up 35%, my station car parking going up 17%, fuel rising to £1.34 – but more noticeably the gap between unleaded and diesel jumping from circa 6p to 14p. Yet the money raised doesnt seem to make any difference to the services offered.
It seems that an economic downturn is a great excuse to screw customers. Does the government thing that people don’t see the connection between the way government governs and regulates, the way business works and the way investors invest.
Maybe Mr Brown would be better trying to make the adjustments in pricing happen in the stockmarket, not in the high street. Centrica and British Gas is a great case in point. Poor old British Gas has to hike prices whilst Centrica raises its dividend to shareholders, claiming poor old pensioners need the money from their pension funds. Doesnt matter, its still the customers who fork out more to investors via a business and weak regualtion/competition. It feels like we are just paying for the fact that the government sold all the family silver years ago and can no longer control large multinational players, many foreign owned, who will do what they need to do to keep their shareholders happy overseas as funding gets harder to raise.
So Mr Brown – go find a better lever to pull – talk to the analysts and investors. Unless they expect and accept that profits will suffer as markets restructure, without sacking CEOs or ransacking share prices, the CEOs will continue to pump customers for short term gain.
But what about the good news?
The good news is that there are richer pickings for CEOs and government to be made from removing waste than even pumping customers for money they dont want to give. The Cabinet Office agenda is to save 50% of “avoidable contact” with citizens from every goverement department. Not to sack people and save money, but to free people up to do more valuable things (than catching cyclists….). Now this I get. If CEOs set the same challenge to remove 50% of unncessary contact then there would be real change in the customer experience. At the moment there’s a lot of pussyfooting around with cost savings, not fundamental change.
Why is contact rate so important to the experience and the economics? Take for example, last week I had to get my divorce papers done. I really dont like paperwork, but 8 years hanging around is ridiculous. But heh it’s easy – I managed the hard bits easily with only 2 contacts. (Dont let that give you ideas!).
A visit to directgov led to all the forms and how to fill them in. A copy of the marriage certificate within 24 hours all done online. The only contact was to check the fee to pay – it looked like the figure it was, but it didnt say “divorce” on it, so I called to check – all details being quickly available to do that too. The other contact? Meet with the ex to sign the forms too, of course. Job nearly done. A great experience, very little work for me or anyone else, for a complex task.
Then there was splitting a pension. I shall keep the innocent unnamed since they were very helpful. But suffice to say, after looking at the website and even starting with a personal contact, it took several people to get involved to clearly establish what needed to happen. No action has been taken yet, but I can see why their SLA is 4 months to act! I havent counted the calls or emails but it must have been a dozen. Must have cost them a fortune.
So maybe the goverment’s transformation agenda is working better than we notice. Maybe private business can learn a thing or two. Certainly government is giving The Best Service Is No Service serious attention. And we’re going to try and help with an event on the 29th September – a goverment summit we’re running with Contact Centre Clinic in Liverpool. The Cabinet Office will be speaking along with several top public and private companies. But mainly we’ll be causing people to talk to each other and take back specific actions they can take in their government department, police force, NHS body or local authority. And of course private companies are welcome to learn too. Get in touch with joanne.sparkes@budd.uk.com for more details. PS and its £250 – good experiences are always less expensive to give than dumb ones!
Government, Healthcare, Uncategorized, contact rate, customer experience, the best service is no service | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 6.04.2008
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.
Amazon, contact rate, customer experience, fast+simple, the best service is no service | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 2.01.2008
For 4 years now, Budd has been championing the cause, developed at Amazon, of “The Best Service is No Service”.
With our passion for “How do we stop doing dumb things to our customers and people?” we remain focused on how companies can drastically improve their customer experiences by reducing contact by 20%+ per annum, with its consequent impact on operating budgets.
But, and there is a but, many companies appear to be adopting the strategy of saving 20% of their operating costs without a good understanding of what it takes to avoid inflicting pain on their customers.
So – your strategy is to reduce unnecessary contact by 20% in 2008 – but how much damage or how much good will you do for your customers?
The most common problems are:
— A focus on cost not the experience. The focus must be on the experience first with cost savings as a consequence
— Starting projects to fix the problem. It’s about implementing proven, sustainable processes that constantly take out unnecessary contact. Projects rarely sustain the behaviours required over years
— Trying to do too much too fast. The first wins are critical but they need to be part of a coherent approach
— Leaving out the frontline staff. Regardless of new tools to gather data, tapping into what the frontline staff know and their engagement is key to sustainable success
— Doing again what worked a year or two ago but lapsed as soon as the next focus appeared
Budd brings proven processes that can be embedded to make the savings year on year. Our top clients are saving 80% of their operating budgets now.
On a £100m operating budget, you’d be saving £20m per annum in the first year. That’s £1.67m per month, £400k per week. If it’s done well you’ll be a hero. If its done badly it will cost another £100m to regain your brand’s reputation. Do you feel lucky? Or do you need to get it right first time?
Contact us if you’d like to talk through your ideas – peter.massey@budd.uk.com
contact rate, customer experience, dumb things | No Comments
Posted by: Peter Massey | 17.11.2007
Why is it always me that gets cloned? Well at least a useful comparison was possible this time….
My HSBC business credit card was cloned several weeks ago. By my reckoning the first call took place on the 2nd October. It’s now the 17th November and the replacement is still not set up properly. There have been more than 20 contacts so far.
My first direct personal credit card was cloned last Saturday the 10th November and the replacement was with me and working by Wednesday 14th. It would have been Tuesday but I was away.
First the right way to do it. I’m shopping with my daughter in London and the first 2 transactions bounce so I call first direct. They transfer me to the fraud unit and a lady abroad ( sorry forgot to ask whether it was Malaysia or India – betya it’s an HSBC centre though) asks me if I’ve tried downloading songs from iTunes that morning which I haven’t. So bang goes the Xmas shopping on the credit card. I wasn’t happy. 
She tells me the card will be with me within 5 to 7 working days and I’m thinking “oh yeah?” given what I’m going through with the business account. Anyway I get home Wednesday to find it there and I’ve had no problem using it subsequently. Bingo – one very satisfied customer.
Could it have been better. Well yes. They could have called me before I had the embarassment of a snooty waitress at Harvey Nicks bouncing my card. They could have had the first person I called ask me about the iTunes transactions, rather than a rather lengthy transfer tying up me and the agent. The second agent could have spoken more clearly and been more understanding at my protests of being without a card for a week. They could have said that the card would go out same day and be there Tuesday and I’d have thought they were really trying to make it quick.
What about HSBC then? I’ll try and remember as many of the contacts as I can…..
1) The first call came at about 9pm from an Indian sounding lady saying she was from HSBC and could she have my credit card number, date of birth etc. Strangely enough I said “no – she couldn’t until she could prove she was HSBC and not some “phisher”". We got nowhere as the process says she can’t talk to me til I’ve been through security and since security was evidently silly I wasn’t willing to and they should get somebody sensible to ring me (lucky I had that glass of wine or I’d have been uptight by now !)
2) & 3) I then had a call from my colleague who’d had an earlier call from HSBC about the card. He’d told them they’d have to ring me. He explained they’d told him the card had been cloned.
4) Another Indian gentleman called me and attempts to take me through security again. I again refuse and ask him to go through my security checks. Tell me which company name is the card in? He can’t tell me anaything until I’ve been through security. Tell me the HSBC phone numbers on my credit card – he gave me 2 and both failed my identity check. So we parted company there.
By complete coincidence I had a conference call the following day with the nice guy at HSBC who runs the offshore centres and gave him the feedback on the security process.
Then I did nothing for a couple of weeks. The bank did nothing. Exactly as a phisher would do. My card stopped working though so heh maybe they were real. I just starting using another card from another bank.
Two weeks later on the 17th October I was speaking at the Institute of Customer Services Conference. I use several real examples of “dumb things” and this was at once added to the repertoire.
5) At the end of my talk, no less than the Customer Service Director of first direct comes up and wants my details to sort it out. He may not be HSBC directly but he takes it on personally – that’s fabulous. At the end of the conference I pick up my voice mails.
6) The first direct guy has called the right person in HSBC
7) He or she has obviously called Claire….
& 9) …..who has called me and left 2 voicemails whilst I have been in the conference
10) I return the call but she’s not there so I leave a message and…
11) ….she returns the call and we speak. She’s taken up the case and will sort it out. No security checks required, I notice.
12) & 13) When I get back to email, I find that Claire had emailed me to. I mail back and say thanks
I wait for the card over a week but nothing comes. In fairness there’s a postal strike.
14) Eventually I call Claire again and she checks it has been sent and it must be in the post.
15) I wait some more and eventually it arrives. At my colleague’s house. I get it next time we meet in a few days time. Then I wait some more for the pin number to arrive.
16) & 17) I email Claire again. She emails back. The card was preset up with the same pin so no need to have waited at all ! How dumb do I feel? But heh it didnt say that on the letter with the card….
I use the card and it works… YES ! But wait…. I try to use it on the web to pay for wireless access. This requires my address. The card bounces again. I try again. No. It bounces.
18) & 19) I ask my PA to call the number on the card and get the address corrected which she does. Of course they cant take her instruction as she cant pass security. So she passes the phone to me, but the computer says no. No I cant have my own address on my own card as I had before. Her insistence that it has never been possible drives me to distraction and I pass her back to my PA to escalate to the supervisor. After 20 minutes on hold she hangs up.
20) & 21) So she emails Claire at my request. Claire emails back to say she can’t take my PA’s instruction as she’s not a named contact on the account.
22) I email her back and confirm the instruction to have me on my address. And not to swap my colleagues onto my address!!!! No security but it apparently happens.
23) Last week my existing pin number arrived in the post under one of those sticky flaps in the letter! Not something I was happy with from a security point of view, since as with many people I’m sure, its the same one I use on my other cards.
I haven’t yet tried to use the card with my address details so I don’t know whether it’s really fixed. But I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t. And I wont be dsurprised if a colleagues card stops working.
Have I complained? No, I’ve done enough work. Will I move banks. No – its tons of work and wont be any better. I’ve used many banks and see no differences.
And do I feel like putting our insurance business thro HSBC? You guessed it – about 23 times less likely than going to first direct. Oh when will they start business banking !! Then it would be worth moving.
So an extreme story? – I dont think so judging by our personal experiences of dealing with banks. And we have further evidence from our work with the Amazon Skyline processes. One of our banking clients has reduced their contact rate by 81% in the past three years. Another US client has quadrupled the size of their business and decresed their contact support headcount by 20% at the same time.
If you work at HSBC and want to talk about how we can save you up to 80% of your operating budget then contact me on 07802 793515 or peter.massey@budd.uk.com
If you work at first direct and are reading this – fabulous, thank you and yes – when are you going to start business banking ! ??
If you are just a blog reader – Hi, thanks for reading and you can get more in our white paper “100 things you can learn from first direct”in our library
100 things, HSBC, contact rate, first direct | No Comments
