Archive for the 'Customer satisfaction' Category

…perhaps they’d do something like this.

Spot on giffgaff!

Customer satisfaction, customer experience | No Comments

Most people know that First Direct are the kings of service in retail banking. They’ve topped polls from CoolBrands to thisismoney.co.uk, from Moneywise to MoneySavingExpert.com.  Even more impressive is that they beat the likes of John Lewis to win the Which? 2011 best customer service in Britain award. No mean feat for a bank.  Contrast that with Santander who are consistently rated as one of the worst on the high street.  More complaints than anyone else and horror stories over lost funds and ISA transfers.  So how comes they gained a million customers last year?  How comes we don’t all just up sticks and move to First Direct?  Someone once told me that it’s easier to get divorced than change your bank account.  I’m not sure if they were joking.  I can’t vouch for the divorce but I do know I’ve been on the verge of changing the bank account I’ve had since leaving school but just couldn’t face the hassle of ensuring that all my direct debits transferred correctly. Years of poor service had conditioned me to expect something to go wrong.  So I backed out.

Similarly, I’m pretty sure I could get a better deal on my gas and electricity but the effort to churn is just too great.  This is such a big problem in the utility industry that the regulator even has a name for it – “sticky customers”.  Sticky customers is one reason that the big 6 utilities serve 99% of the domestic gas and electricity market, making it very difficult for the newer entrants to get any market penetration despite their service being the best in the industry.  Why would the utilities want to spend money improving the customer experience when they have a near captive audience?  Why would they simplify their tariffs when it’s in their interest to make them as confusing as possible to prevent direct comparison?  Why when one reduces their prices do the others follow?  Not surprising that most of us don’t trust them.

Of course there are number of considerations to take into account at the time of purchase or churn.  Price, choice, performance, brand, aspiration and barriers to churn for example.  What about service?  Is it really a consideration?  Have we become so immune to poor service that it’s no longer a consideration in the buying process?  I can’t believe that.  Is it really that difficult to move or is the perceived difficulty creating this inertia.  I can remember when it was impossible to switch mobile networks and retain the same number.  Number portability regulations from Ofcom resolved that and now people move freely from one network to the other chasing the best deal.  But do they chase the best service?

What do you think?

Customer satisfaction, customer experience | No Comments

As Virgin Money finally managed to enter the UK High Street banking market we wonder if this will bring an improvement for customers?

There newest TV advert proclaims “40 years of better. Now in a bank” and I want to know if this is correct? Have virgin really revolutionised the industries they are currently in and improved in for us, the customers?

They state on there website that “Virgin has a history of entering markets to improve things for customers” but is this true? Thinking about Virgin Atlantic, Media and Trains, have they become market leaders or just competitors?

Time will tell but it will be very interesting to see how it plays out.  Add the fact that, for a number of years, Virgin and Tesco’s have been in competition to crack the high street banking market it could be a very different industry in a few years time.

We will certainly be paying close attention to the effect, if any, that this increased competition has on customer experience. Let’s face it, when dealing with many high street banks, it can’t get much worse.

Change, Compare the market, Customer satisfaction, Virgin, banking, customer experience, quality | No Comments

Netpromoter scores abound and it’s interesting to see the US NPS benchmarks now being published in competition with the American Customer Satisfaction Index ( ACSI ) . Recently colleague Bill Price in the US was speaking at a conference on customer happiness and we all continue to push the case for removing dumb things under the banner of reducing customer effort (search categories: “customer effort”), another way of measuring customers.

So many things to measure: likelihood to recommend, satisfaction levels, happiness and effort.

I just wish people would stop putting their money and energy into measuring and use it to change things instead. The top scorers in all the these measures are the same people. The Amazons, USAAs, Southwesterns. They don’t need to be told their scores in order to change things. They live that way. They’re always listening and changing. Open to feedback, honest and transparent towards their customers and their staff.

The attention is on doing the right thing, not on measuring if we did the right thing.

Take two examples yesterday and today.

The Apple store in Covent Garden. So good it makes you purr. Sales help given, diagnostic tool for iphone and service given, additional questions answered, no time wasted. No one has tried to measure me.

Booking some Virgin Atlantic flights today. So poor I nearly gave up 3 times. 75 minutes in total. It was only the very poor chance of finding anything better ( in process terms) that stopped me. Measured in the middle of the process. And failed my feedback test: when speaking to the agent I asked what she’d do if I gave feedback and was offered the website as a place to put it.

There’s just no excuse for some of the obvious things…. the agent had to book my kids whilst I booked myself at the same time in order to get on the same flight for sure. Why? Neither she nor I can book flights on the same place out and different flights back – that’s got to be pretty common. Her price quote for me is higher than mine. The website rejected both bookings part way through booking and then changed the prices when I went back in. The webchat help can’t do anything to help as the process doesn’t allow. The credit card fees are per booking at £30+. I get pinged to give them webchat feedback scores on the agent – completely irrelevant and untimely. You can hardly hear the poor woman in the new Swansea call centre for background noise. She got off the phone pretty pronto when I started asking about sitting all 4 of us together.

And I’m writing this blog whilst I wait for my confirmation emails so I can book car hire and parking. 50 minutes and waiting. I’ll have to go back into the site and look up my arrival times.

OK so Ive booked with them but would I recommend them on any measure? Do they know these things are broken? Betcha they do.  Do they care – they got significant sum of money anyway.

I suggested the advisor bring up some benchmarks in her monthly feedback session – easyjet, the passport office, directgov. Will it change – I doubt it very much. It was like this the last time I flew with them and the time before and so on…..

So if you cant offer good service, if you aren’t already a benchmark, then don’t measure me – it makes my experience worse still. Talk to your front line staff – they know what the score is. And they know what to do about it.

Postscript: It’s now the day after. Needless to say the only pre book seats available are in 2s.

No confirmation emails came anyway, only a text for one of the bookings so I have had to ring and get the ref for the other. No answer on the customer services line so I gave up and rang using the sales option. Despite a vehement attempt to get rid of me, I hung on in and got them to give me the missing ref. Emails had been sent and failed apparently. They never send text confirmations apparently so that’s confusing.  So I called again, hung on til I got thro to customer services but couldn’t be helped. We, the agent and I, decided the only way to get 4 seats together in advance was to reach Richard Branson and get him to change the system. I really really wish I hadn’t given my money to Virgin til booking 4 people out, 2×2 back was solved. No wonder the first agent got off the phone fast yesterday when I mentioned seats.

Apple, Customer effort, Customer satisfaction, Virgin, airlines, broken websites, customer experience, feedback, netpromoter | No Comments

I flew to Stockholm last Thursday morning at 7.30am by British Airways from terminal 5. I’m just on the way to pick up my car, one week later.

Why did I fly? Because no one mentioned any possible disruption, despite the fact that 90% of flights were already stopped by 7am. Blissful ignorance.

Did they not have the information to give? Somehow I doubt that.

Did they think about the effort they would cause their customers downstream?  To quote Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon:

 “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”

The chain of ‘customer effort’ and frustration that BA have created for me is fascinating. And the amount ot work it caused other people and companies. All avoidable, had BA been open and honest. I’ll try and précis it.

• An afternoon of calls and web searches by me, my PA, by my concierge service, by my Swedish collague. To get information, assess options, arrange hotels, try to get a car. At least 3 calls into hotels, 6 to the office, several to local car companies, that I could see. Many calls, texts and emails to friends and contacts to try to get a car. Many calls on our behalf.
• 2 hours shopping for clothes and necessities.
• 6 texts and 2 calls to a colleague’s son whose friend had a car we could hire.
• Multiple attempts and 4 calls into 3 insurance companies to check cover for the car.
• The colleague’s son’s friend taking the morning off work to get the car test renewed before it ran out the following week.
• The son planning to fly to his sisters in London who would have to keep the car before he drove it back for his friend.
• The PA trying to get a car crossing for the channel and googling, texting  routes.
• The 26 hour journey across 7 countries by car.
• The 3 calls to HSBC for bouncing my card, presumably for being used in different countries. The very poor handling of which is resulting in them losing our business accounts. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
• The re-organising of picking up a new car back home.
• The colleague’s wife driving to Dover to pick us up.
• The re-re-organising of picking up the car ( with 2 subsequent re-visits, but that’s another story of customer effort)
• The abortive trip to Heathrow to move the car, but there were no shuttles. Big well done to BAA for waiving the car park fees!
• The actual trip now to Heathrow to pick the car up.

I could go on……. but I’m distracted by the effort in resolving how Fiat sold me a “previous model” as a new car without telling me and hoping they’d get away with it. 

One small omission by company, many large effects for customer. Huge customer effort…..

So my message is….. think about the effort you cause your customers downstream. They will. To quote Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, again: 

“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”

British Airways, Customer satisfaction, HSBC, airlines, banking, complaint, customer experience, dumb things | 1 Comment

For many companies, customer complaints are an irritation – they would rather not get them and they handle them grudgingly. There is no effort in getting complaints, they seem to arise naturally from everyday operations and find their way to you; and dealing with the ‘noise’ they create is considered a necessary chore, and simply part of doing business.

But, is that enough? The vast majority (90+%) of dissatisfied customers do not complain – they are the silent majority. How do you incorporate their voice into your business strategy? And what is the impact of focusing on complainants and trying to convert them to be loyal customers – whilst ignoring the others who do not engage with the company?

A new article on Budd Life this month explores these issues and offers guidance on how to engage successfully with this disengaged part of your customer base. It concludes as follows:

“ Wholehearted and sincere customer care is an absolute priority for all organisations in today’s hyper-connected, and hyper-competitive, world. You must care, and you must treat dissatisfaction seriously, because it hits both the top and bottom line.  ….

Customer retention may well be critical to survival, and excellence in maintaining loyalty may be a significant competitive differentiator. If so, the quiet voices of the silent majority customers who are dissatisfied with their experience but do not complain are the key to success.”

Let’s hear it for from the silent majority!

Customer satisfaction, Strategy, Voice of the Customer, brilliant basics, complaint, customer experience, dumb things, feedback, success factors | No Comments

3 examples of possibly genuine companies affecting their brand trust & creating lots of avoidable contact.

I received a letter the other day. It was from a company called PCN Debt Recovery and Prosecution Service. It said I’d had a parking ticket in March at my local station and I owed them £90. Send your bank details and sign here. It smelled like the typical email from a prince in Africa asking me to claim my lottery winnings…… Phishing.

Nevertheless being a conscientious and curious person, I rang the non geographic number for payments several times. Each time it transfered to a foreign ring tone and was never answered. Eventually I rang Southeastern rail enquiries to see if it was a genuine company. They didn’t know of it and knew a company called Meteor run the car parks, not PCN. So it was probably a scam? They’d check it out and come back to me.

Meanwhile I finally got through to PCN so it existed at least. They couldn’t identify themselves as genuine. They had no process for this. They had no data to prove it. DVLA had given them my details based on my car registration number. Interesting who DVLA will give my private data to.

Anyway, they had no record of the ticket anyway and suggested it be dropped but I send them a note so it wouldn’t bite me later.

This morning I got a letter from Dan Westlake at Southeastern confirming nothing. It just referred me to Meteor. They obviously weren’t listening as they got my name wrong and answered a different question to the one I asked.

So is PCN a genuine company or a scam? I still don’t know. Do I trust Southeastern more or less than before?

I’ve had the same thing earlier in the year with a company called Assets Reunited apparently working for Aviva. It even had their logo on it. Their “phishing” letter said they were working for Aviva and had found £3000 that Aviva owed me. Just fill in your bank details and sign here.  Hmmmm – would you? It has a number but a professional phisher would. I tried 2 routes to prove their id. I sent an email from the Aviva website form. They never replied. I emailed a contact in Aviva Life. They didn’t reply.

Is Assets Reunited a genuine company or a scam? I still don’t know. Do I trust Aviva more or less than before?

But the third example is different. HMRC sent me a letter saying we had our own business address wrong – doh talk about a dumb letter. It asked for all my details including bank accounts and a signature. Hmmm phishing? I phoned the number, got through and asked the lady to ID&V HMRC. Not in the least thrown by the question, she answered my address and last payments questions and we sorted it out. I asked my standard question of “what would you do if I gave you feedback?”. Instead of the usual “derrrrr” or “we don’t do that, send it to the website” she said she had a process with her team leader and would pass on my comments about looking like a phishing letter.

Do I trust HMRC more or less than before?

All are great examples of avoidable contact but let’s not start on that just now? Would your company pass an ID&V test? Would your outsourcers pass your ID&V test? Let me know your thoughts….

Customer satisfaction, customer experience, data protection, dumb things, phishing | 1 Comment

My heart sank as I entered the check-in hall at Luton airport – a massive queue for the Dortmund flight desks. Not sure why I was surprised as I have had this experience before, but I was. Also a bit angry at the anticipated waste of time. And waste of time it almost was.

Standing in the queue, brain in neutral, I was idly thinking that I hadn’t looked at Twitter for several days, and I pulled out my phone to check the latest messages. Somehow, the trivial nature of Twitter content seemed a soothing prospect.

Naturally, my frustration with standing in the queue led to a tweet: “easyJet check-in queue not moving at all”. To be completely truthful, it took two tweets as the predictive text on my phone managed to put ‘doping’ instead of ‘moving’ the first time. I later discovered that the input language was set to German – I guess we will never know if it was my mistake, or over-eagerness by a super-intelligent phone, as I stood queuing for a flight to Germany!

I felt no better having sent the message and so resorted to talking to those around me, who were equally unhappy at the mystifying delay. I finally checked in after a one hour wait and the rest of the journey was completed perfectly satisfactorily.

At some point, it occurred to me that I had heard someone from easyJet was active on Twitter and so the next morning, with a few minutes to spare before a meeting, I opened up my laptop and logged back in.

Sure enough, there was a reply from @easyJetCare: “easyJetCare @imptwo I will pass your feedback on to Liz our airport manager for Luton. Usually they move pretty quickly. Hope you had a good flight ^PH”.

A Wow! moment. Direct customer engagement from easyJet, I was genuinely impressed. I had to test how far this would go and so responded: “imptwo @easyJetCare thanks for replying – others around me were unhappy with the 1 hour wait too. It’s raining here – can u fix that too? ”.

Again a reply – in a couple of hours: “easyJetCare@imptwo I will follow up, it is essential that you are informed about your delays. I wish I could fix the rain but I’m not that good ^PH”. This exchange now had a real human feel about it, and, curiously, just getting a response did make me feel better.

Nothing had actually changed and I am pretty sure the experience will be repeated. And the defence that a low-prices means low standards only goes so far; there are minimum standards of treatment and respect to which everyone is entitled.

But, a simple human contact (albeit technology-mediated), tempered with a little humour and I am prepared to forgive – which I guess makes me the very epitome of a loyal easyJet customer. Do you think I should worry about myself?

What it does demonstrate is the powerful principle that delivering a service of any kind is a person-to-person transaction, and don’t ever forget it when designing customer experiences. Now, if only easyJet were to send me a “you said, we did” message to let me know what has changed as a result of my feedback, that would be a great end to the story ….

Customer satisfaction, complaint, customer experience, customer experience design, fast+simple, feedback, humour, listening | No Comments

Ever had to get a taxi from Heathrow, but not into London? Then you’ll know this story. Its happened to me twice recently. Fixed fares. What that means is the taxi driver gets £40 i.e. the fare back into central London, Regardless of a short local journey e.g. 5 miles.

Is this the way to represent the UK at its foremost border post?

When asking taxi driver, taxi wallah, taxi desk, BAA desk, the answers are the both the same and different.

Where they are the same is that it’s not their fault, they don’t know who you take it up with and sorry but nothing you can do about it. Where they differ is who made them do it.

So  maybe I should send an open letter to all those who were cited as causing the poor taxi driver to have to charge £40. Dear Lord Mayor of London, CEO of BAA ( hola!) and Chief Constable of Surrey Constabulary. Of and all taxi drivers.

Snr CEO – Why do BAA charge taxi drivers £5.50 to pick up customers. Surely your airport would be rubbish without taxis.

If local runs are not what taxi drivers want because they’ve sat 2 hours waiting to get to the head of the queue, why not have 2 taxi ranks – London cabs and local taxis rather than a monopoly on cabs?

Mr Lord Mayor, why should you allow tourists and business men who aren’t going to central London to have their first rip off experience of London in their first hour in UK?

Taxi drivers – if your time is so valuable, why not just drive straight back to London rather than sit in a queue for 2 hours? And do a local fare on your way out please

Mr Chief Constable – I think you’re forgiven as the taxi driver just made that up….

BA, Customer satisfaction, taxis | No Comments

I was asked 3 questions about contact centres for a website recently and I thought I’d share them with you:

1)         What was the biggest challenge facing the contact centre industry in the last 12 months and how did they overcome it?

Whilst there are sexy new things we’re doing like customer help customer, analytics and new ways of knowledge sharing, its really about  the same old challenges to brilliant operating basics that should be the focus for managers who are making big strides.

TOP OF THE LONG LIST OF INTERACTING BASICS ARE :

• a) Why customers have to contact you at all
• b) How the business model changes to focus on removing unnecessary contact, driving excellence in self service and engaging the whole business in removing root causes of frustrations and listening to feedback and intelligence from the contact points
• c) Operating effectively to meet demand
• d) Understanding what knowledge the website and staff need to answer customer needs
• e) the role of contact centres in providing feedback and intelligence to the rest of the business; and how to get the mountains of customer feedback gathered around the business to be useful

 2)         What are the key issues you expect the industry to be tackling in the next 12-18 months?

• a) Embedding new business wide processes that remove at least 20% of unit costs every year  by using feedback and what front line staff know to drive change
• b) The move to customer help customer model causing the role of contact centres to change rapidly
• c) The same ones as before on brilliant basics of running contact centres and self service channels

 3)         Could you give us some insights on how companies can stop doing stupid things to their customers and the benefits it is bringing to their organisations?

Our mission is “How do we stop doing dumb things to our customers and our people?” so we have lots to say on this topic. If I can paraphrase the question – the most successful businesses are removing things systematically by installing and embedding new company-wide management processes based on a different kind of data. The least successful businesses keep kicking off analysis and then generating projects to fix things: we call this “it’s raining projects”. The least successful businesses are swamped with the feedback they request from customers, but don’t act on. For more contact peter.massey@budd.uk.com or take a look at www.budd.uk.com

Customer satisfaction, Voice of the Customer, customer experience, feedback, listening, mission, self service, the best service is no service | No Comments