Archive for the 'feedback' Category

One of our ‘truths’ is that customers and staff that interact directly with customers already know a lot about issues and problems … and often how to solve them. Listening to their stories is often inspiring. The following was inspired by a customer advisor on a recent client engagement.

View from the front

Voice of the Customer, agent experience, culture, customer experience, feedback, listening, process improvement, reduction in contacts | No Comments

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

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

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

Yet again the 8.51 National Express from Peterborough to Kings Cross evades me. Not that I was late. The car park that is supposed to open to non-season ticket holders at 8.45, yet again fails to open until 8.50 as the train is making its way into the station with one of those ‘I’m on time’ smiles across the face of the driver (I imagine).

The story of the new car parking system is one that any regular will talk to you about. It’s a blog or ten in itself. I know it’s no use complaining about the whole system but decide to test the customer service response about the car park opening.“We’ve asked for a new part but been told we can’t have it” says the customer service representative on the station.

“We go out there every morning usually to reset the clock but you can’t do it before 8.30, and sometimes we forget” he continues.“Most times” I add. “To be fair, yes”, he says

“So when do you expect it to be replaced” I continue. “Not sure, as I say we not able to get the part” he repeats with a broad smile and friendly open hand guesture that says ‘love to but…not my problem’

So I leave with a sideswipe at the whole car parking system. “Rip the whole lot out while you’re at it” – which gets a hearty laugh of agreement. I walk away feeling I’ve lost the battle. (Is it a war?)

I use the next 35 minutes before the next train arrives to write this blog. I then use my 3G datacard to post it before getting on the train. Why is the on-train WiFi free? Because it never bloody works!I feel better…until tomorrow morning at 8.45.

National Express, accountability, feedback, train | No Comments

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

A piece on unified communications caught my attention today. Findings from research commissioned by Siemens Communications Inc. was reported byTMCnet, its focus was on the techie side of unified systems, workflows, and communication process in customer-facing enterprises. Unsurprisingly, the findings show that large organisations waste a huge amount of money compensating for poor communications between staff. Eg enterprise of 1,000 people with average 62% in customer service and sales could be losing as much as $13million every year in lost productivity and avoidable expenses. Whilst all this is relevant and measurable, there is another waste going on in customer-facing organisations which often goes completely unnoticed. Namely, great nuggets of wisdom piling up on the frontline – I’m talking all those bits of realtime, qualitative feedback from customers via front line agents that if consistently collected, analysed – and then something done about them by the business – would enable companies to truly begin delighting their customers and bringing in revenues – not just plugging the leaks. Of course, you need a process and tools in place to do that – but often that’s not as complex as you think. Sometimes, it just requires managers to reassess what ‘thinking customer’ means in terms of sustaining feedback from the frontline – and start panning for gold. That way companies will get to hear what customers are really telling them, not just findings of a post call IVR survey – which rarely ask the type of questions that fundamentally make the difference to us, the customers.

Voice of the Customer, feedback, frontline agents | No Comments