Archive for the 'fast+simple' Category

My decision to join the Sunday Times Wine Club some years ago was fuelled in equal part by laziness and greed. I enjoy a glass of wine – especially red wine and even more especially good, red wine. But, I do not enjoy having to carry the bottles (I daren’t put ‘cases’ there, even if it is true) back from the shops.

The combination of decent wines, home delivery and a special introductory offer at that time proved irresistible! And I have to say that their customer service, on the odd occasion when I have not been satisfied, has been pretty much exemplary. I have also taken advantage of a couple of their so-called ‘wine plans’ – most recently to try   some Spanish wines – which provide regular deliveries of mixed cases, and a good introduction to a new region. But, I was reaching a point where something different was in order.

Generally I use the website to place orders and have done so successfully throughout my membership. But, on one occasion recently, I was unable to get the website to recognise a voucher that I had to use. I was forced to use the phone to contact them! I say ‘forced’, but it has always been a pleasant and enjoyable experience in the past. There was a longer delay than normal before the phone was answered, and my heart began to sink, but once through my order was handled quickly an efficiently.

Whilst on the phone, I took the opportunity to cancel my wine plan subscription. The adviser asked why I was leaving and tried to retain my business – without being pushy about it. I was left with the feeling of an efficiently executed process and confidence that everything had been done. As an aside, also a professional recognition of good practice in capturing reasons for defection! Happy, I thought that would be the end of the story.

Imagine my surprise when I received a letter a little while later. A letter signed by a senior wine buyer (fascinating choice of job role to author such a letter) expressing his regret that I had decided to cancel and reminding me of all the other ways that I could continue to buy from them. Enclosed with the letter was a card folder with a cartoon on the front, including the words “wish you were here” and a person holding a glass of wine. Inside was a voucher for £10 as an additional incentive – in their words “to nudge me” back in their direction.

The tone of the letter and the lightness of touch hint at a thoroughly well thought-through customer journey and a deep attention to detail. The voucher, a random act of generosity, suggests a genuine desire to retain my business.

Well done Laithwaites (who are the organisation behind the Sunday Times branding)! Now, have you sorted out that website glitch on processing vouchers yet?

brilliant basics, broken websites, customer experience, customer experience design, fast+simple, quality, self service | 2 Comments

One of the core Best Service Is No Service principles is that a company should be proactive in its dealings with customers – taking the initiative as a strategy to prevent problems and unnecessary contacts; thus improving the customer experience.

Well, it happened to me today and I have to say I was very, very impressed – not least because it was totally unexpected.

I am currently spending a lot of time on a client site and using taxis regularly to travel between hotel, airport and two client office locations. A taxi had been booked to take me from the hotel to the office that is my ‘base’ in the morning and another one to return me back to the hotel at the end of the day.

Due to the schedule of meetings, I changed the morning journey to drop me (and two colleagues) at the other office. Whilst we were still en-route, the taxi firm(Edinburgh City Private Hire) called to check whether they should alter the return journey to be a pickup from the second office.

Wow!

Simple, but powerful.

Common sense and obvious you might say, but certainly not a common experience. This kind of joined-up thinking is all too rare – so well done to them.  If you find yourself in Edinburgh, I recommend you call 0131 477 4000 when you need a taxi – and tell them a happy customer sent you.

Now, if they only had online bookings – they could deflect a whole lot of calls to self-service!

brilliant basics, customer experience, customer experience design, fast+simple, good things, taxis, the best service is no service | No Comments

We talk a lot about the customer experience, but relatively little about the employee (or agent) experience. This is tightly wrapped up with that of the customer since often the two interact directly with each other.

More than simply sterile discussions and weasel words about employee engagement, a genuine shift of responsibility and leadership to the frontline employees leads to improved employee satisfaction – which will in turn be reflected in the levels of customer satisfaction. Dealing with an employee that can actually take responsibility for problems and get them solved is a refreshing experience!

Middle and senior management are often loathe to give up their power and perceived control – but wake up, those days are gone and there is a fundamental shift in the operating model and the way successful organisations are managing themselves.

Budd has long been a proponent of this culture of trust, through its WOCAS (What Our Customers Are Saying) processes and tools. So, it was good to read this article by Louise Druce at MyCustomer.com. Okay, it is only an introductory piece, trailing an event later in the year, but is a useful two minute introduction to the topic.

WOCAS, agent experience, customer experience, fast+simple | No Comments

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

Customer Managed Relationships put the customer in control. Like many of the theories of the last 5 years it builds on the potential that customers now have to tender for services they want, search the web for best deals and control who and how gets to see your personal information. If you want to read more about the theory, Alan Mitchell has been running a website called Right Side Up and the Buyer Centric Forum for a few years now. He spoke at a great Budd networking evening recently.

The point of this is that there is now a new service available from a company called fonolo in Canada that offers two things:

1. You can visually navigate a company’s IVR menu system to access the option you want before dialling. When you’re connected, the system will connect you. The menus have been transcribed by clever speech recognition and a bit of human intervention. That’s great and especially useful in the mobile phone world where listening to menus and pressing buttons are quite hard to do at the same time. Ok, not exactly CMR but perhaps the mapping of menu structure might help some companies to see how complex they make things for the customer and at least lead to simplification. For one, I know that most companies couldn’t tell you exactly what their menu structure actually looks like so that information is highly valuable!
2. The CMR application is the ability to track all your conversations with the company. With my ’stop doing dumb things to customers’ hat on, you should avoid the need for a long series of interactions by fixing issues first time or avoiding them at all. But reality for now means that a customer could find very useful the ability to have a history log of all their interactions, plus a recording of all the conversations.

Here’s a screenshot of the website in action. This is a highly innovative idea and a practical way of putting the customer in control.

What makes this application even more impressive is that the code is all open source and they are encouraging developers to extend the applications. There must be other great examples of CMR coming to life out there with Fast+Simple solutions for customers.

Customer Managed Relationships, IVR, customer experience design, fast+simple, queue, self service | No Comments

This is just a straight forward example of service recovery.

I ordered a black toner cartridge last week which was delivered as expected. Unfortunately they sent a blue one.

I emailed the company www.cartridgesave.co.uk and had a reply within 20 minutes from Danielle (who provided a direct email address – in my book, the right thing to do). “A black one will be on its way today and we’ll collect the blue one”. A bit of a  hassle returning the blue one I thought but their problem.

10 minutes later another email:

“Unfortunately we are unable to despatch the correct Remanufactured Samsung Black Toner Cartridge as stated in my previous email since this item is currently out of stock until the 20th May. So that we do not inconvenience you any further I will be despatching you today a Genuine Samsung Black Toner instead and Cartridge Save will cover the difference in cost. Additionally we would like you to keep the incorrect blue cartridge that you have received.”

Almost perfect recovery, except for the unnecessary first email that could have been avoided by checking stock first. Not bad for a low value consumer product. Here I am telling you all about it. That’s worth it isn’t it?

brilliant basics, customer experience, fast+simple, word of mouth | No Comments

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

A quick one for a Friday morning.

Halifax have come up with a great way to retain customers and propsects. Make it impossible to unsubscribe from their marketing. Ok, it might be a glitch but as I went through the double confirmation process to unsubscribe from their share dealing marketing material – yes I know the tax year is about to end and no I don’t want your ISA – I was presented with this screen…

 Nice one Halifax. Let’s hope the rest of your online experience is superior to this.

broken websites, dumb things, fast+simple, financial services, junk mail | No Comments

I stood in the pouring rain on tuesday evening at the railway station car park waiting to pay for ticket. Nothing unusual about that other than the fact that 2 weeks ago I wouldn’t have had to do it – stand in the rain that is. In their infinte wisdom, GNER have installed new paystations. All three of these are positioned low for disabled use with keypads and screens angled so that 99% of people have to bend right down to see where the card goes and read the screen. Of course, there should be disabled access machines but do we need 3? Probably, since there’s a good chance that 2 will be frequently out of order.

As a result of this and the PIN checking process, the average time to pay for your car park ticket has doubled and the receipt is now the length of one you’re likely to get at Tescos the week before Christmas so they quickly fill up your wallet (when the machine hasn’t run out of paper that is).

Ok, so I sound like a grumpy old man. Well, call me that if you wish but I just thought technology should be here to make our lives easier. Barclays are introducing their new OnePulse card for cashless transactions of £10 – simply wave the card. GNER have introduced new chip and PIN machines to make paying £10 harder and slower.

Who’s getting it right??

Barclays, GNER, brilliant basics, fast+simple | No Comments

Finally gave in (again) to the mid life crisis and bought an iPod. Apple’s Regent St store wins hands down for a shopping experience.

It’s got loads of room, loads of demo items, loads of staff who know what they’re doing. Easy therefore to get the right thing for my daughter and for me!

Loads of queues for the till though. But a little magic means the staff spot the predicament and join you in the queue to take your order and bring you the goodies. So you leave before you even move down the queue.

Final touch: no paper receipts, just one waiting in your inbox along side the csat scoring request.

Fast+Simple shopping done simply well.

fast+simple | No Comments