Archive for the 'feedback' Category

Customer effort, brilliant basics, customer experience, feedback | No Comments

This isn’t a complaint ( it will be if Avis take money from my credit card). It’s feedback to help Avis improve

It relates to this Tuesday 12th July Belfast City Airport

Buying
a) I tried to book a same day before I left for the airport ( a last minute flight to spend a short surprise evening for my better half’s birthday !!) – the website froze when getting to the car choice/before offering prices. You could click on the car but nothing would happen. Tried several ways and couldn’t get past it. It was either a technical problem or the agent later suggested it was because it was a same day booking which the website cant do – if so then please add that message rather than just “hanging” on me!

b) During this and other recent searches I was getting frequent webchat prompts – its really annoying. If you are doing this during “dwell” times – why not spend the time improving the layout and presentation of your website as a better avoidance of the need for service, rather than adding an additional customer effort and cost to you. If you are going to offer webchat why not put a clear button on the pages so I can choose when to use it ( and a clear phone offer button too)

c) When I did use the webchat the agent told me I’d have to phone as he couldn’t book – surely if the chat is there to improve conversion you need to give them that function? He (“James”)  gave me the number and then “hung up” on me – ie he closed the conversation before I could ask anything else. I suggest you improve your training on conversation etiquette

d) I phoned on the way to the airport and got straight through. The agent had trouble hearing me – mobiles aren’t ideal – but considerably hindered by the background noise in the call centre. It didn’t sound like Manchester or Barcelona – have you outsourced?

e) I made the booking including my wizard number and credit card – he handled it quickly and well ( it seemed…)

Pick up
f) First off the flight and straight through – only one guy in front of me at the desk but it must have been a complex one and there was only one member of staff. A couple of guys behind the screen behind the desk as I walked up were perhaps going off shift as it was 3.47 and a bank holiday in Belfast. I know the time as I texted as I walked up and checked it ten mins later when I saw the stop watches on the counter saying £20 voucher if you wait more than 3 minutes – I didn’t bother picking one up and I never got offered a £20 voucher

g) The lady ( Sandra) apologised for delay when she’d finished ( about 5 past 4) and said she’d not been able to have keys ready as my credit card had failed. I asked the digits and they weren’t recognisable. She said that was what was recorded with my wizard number when I first registered it online – I said it couldn’t be. (Mystery solved later). We used my credit card – all fine. Signed the bits and went to car.

h) Off to car park and found car. Doh – scratches not marked on the sheet. This happens a lot. Avis car park cabin isn’t occupied – drat. Wondering whether to bother going back to the terminal when I notice the paperwork is not in my name – ah that explains the credit card issue. It’s a booking for 5 days, not 14 hours, so I can start to imagine the future credit card bill I’ll no doubt get to sort out. I look for a phone number on the paperwork to ring the desk – not there, so off I trek back to the terminal

i) No queue and we sort out the credit card and another car in short order.  The car has 5 dings marked on the paperwork – this doesn’t bode well as I’m betting there’s more. Why is that car in service? I ask for a phone number and Sandra offers to ring me in 5 mins to check with me

j) I go back out to the cars and guess what – the car has some dings missing and some additional ones. Final straw is the tank isn’t on the full marker. I’m outta here. Sandra rings and I am not happy. I walk back and insist on her sorting out the credit card here and now as I’m going elsewhere. She can’t – I have to ring…… I ring and hand her my phone while I go the next desk and get a car “with no dings in it please”. It takes 2 mins, is bigger for the same price and has no dings. I retrieve my phone and take the desk phone number and Sandra’s name in case the bill becomes a problem. She’s “not allowed” to give out her surname – what’s that about !  Maybe the sign for disgruntled customers on an Avis call centre door in Oklahoma gives a clue  

Its now an hour after I came to the desk first time. That’s one hour out of an evening and a mood that isn’t fit to take to a birthday surprise visit!!  I take my time on the 30 min drive and wonder why I didn’t just phone a cab

Post event
k) At 5.30 next morning I drop the car back and tweeted a question using #avis . I’ve seen no response

l) Today I’m booking again – shall I use Avis? There isn’t anywhere to give suggestions on your website.  The “we try harder” site now looks corporate rather than a forum to give feedback – I couldn’t find anywhere obvious to post. I can only find the complaints email address.

m) I write this journey down in an email – but haven’t sent it yet. Why go to the effort? Avis used to be a really nice client 10 years ago and I’ve used them ever since. I love Angie Court’s passion – is she being missed in Avis UK?

This example shows a typical multichannel customer journey and I can use it as an example. It’s a useful lesson on how the different channels don’t hang together and how some upstream decisions affect the experience eg car condition policy before fixing them, eg resourcing for staff in car park and at desk to do the job fully eg better sound deadening/ microphones in call centre. In isolation some are minor issues, some major – but the real issue is how they add up. This is typical of what causes complaints – no one thing.

More importantly it shows how customer effort can creep into every step. Avis is normally a great example of “The Best Service Is No Service” with very little customer effort – go online, book, pick up key, drop car.

n) The good news ( so far …) is that Avis haven’t taken anything off my credit card

The bottom line
Avis just lost my two bookings for Italy in August – one cost £700+ and the other cost £300.

Have they lost me forever? It depends what happens next. I wont send by email yet, I’ll tweet this and see what happens.

Customer effort, brilliant basics, broken websites, complaint, customer experience, europcar, feedback, listening | 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

What’s the most basic service requirement a customer wants from their mobile phone company? An accurate bill? A call centre that answers the phone? No – making and receiving phone calls would be the most basic thing. And it’s become a challenge. The best service is no service has been taken too literally!

I’m old enough to remember when MF tone dialling replaced pulse tone dialling – what does that mean? The phone at the other end started ringing the millisecond you pressed the last digit on the phone. Oh how I wish I could get that on my mobile phone. Some days, working in Soho as we do, I just wish I could make a call after any length of delay. Or just receive a call rather than picking up delayed voicemails on the way home.

It’s not a problem of reception or signal strength, just network congestion. Too many customers doing too many things.

My dilemmas as a customer are simple: Buy out of the contract and move. Or not. I dont have a common sense option of being let out of contract to get a service that works where & when I work.

The dilemmas as a business are slightly different. At a customer by customer level: let the customer out of the contract so they can get service from someone else. Or keep them locked in and take the money. “Bad profits” as Don Peppers calls it. At an investment level: spend many millions ahead of the growth curve to give good access to the services sold. Or slow down products going to market so the network always works. Or keep selling services and don’t worry about it.

So let me sit in the CEO’s chair: What data would I need to answer the question and do the right thing, or at least optimise the outcome? If I am CEO what do I do?

The first issue would be “How will I judge my success?” : Revenue lost/not lost over the next 12 months? Lifetime value of a customer lost times the number of customers lost versus the investment costs in the network? Or just living our values and doing the right thing? With any of these criteria surely it should be an easy decision.

But what about shareholder expectations? Do they want the best answer for this quarter, for this year or the next 5 years? Do they want anything other than a financial or customer head count? Can they judge the future financial value of the change in a short term retention figure? Will they judge your dip in growth of customers, or your long term revenue prospects?

And what if you only run marketing, or only new sales, or only retentions, or only revenues  or only service? How much do you need to optimise the overall success of the business vs your target or result?

These problems surface all over the business. The staff you talk to as a customer live with it everyday. They tell you so. People in store, in contact centres dealing with queries about network congestion which they cannot resolve. They become numb to it. There’s nothing they can do to change it.

Or is there?

As CEO or agent or silo head or customer, I can look on the customer forum and see that 83229 customers from 110078 have viewed a tech support entry called “calls go straight to voicemail”. Its the biggest issue. By far. And its been running from 2008 til now. And the manufacturer is getting a dirty name as their phone is being blamed.

Reading the original thread,  I can see the problem explained “I have a 3g {phone} and am having some problems. The fault is intermitant but happens on a frequent basis. When people call me the call goes straight to voicemail. If they leave a message it can take up to 2 hrs to come through. Also text message are arriving upto the same period after people send them. Sometimes it can take upto 30 secs to connect a call. I have been speaking to second line support at {telco} but they have thus far no answer. I am on my 3rd {phone} and second sim card. I am begining to think I may not be destined for a {phone}. If this continues will they change the handset for a different model ?”

You don’t have to read many posts to realise that customers, collectively, have eliminated all the options and some have worked out its not the phone or the sim – there’s a problem of congestion on the network. Yet tons of resource is still going into swapping phones and sims out.

In fact looking at all the forums there’s only one bigger issue with 153k reads – “Network down”. In fact that runs since 2008.

So maybe the network investment deserves some attention?

But as CEO, or silo head, I need real data to size the problem. This is where our WOCAS processes come in. They can help size the problem, rate the impact problem, root cause the problem, investigate the commercial opportunities around it and put it into a prioritisation framework. And if acted on, track & communicate those actions, transparently. If management wants to do this we know how to do this.

At the moment this provider seems not to be seeing the most basic service problem and no amount of sticking plaster or great measurement system or recovery care service will help that. No amount of “score me” post call feedback is going to help them see it.

Only if they start to talk about the problem openly will staff feel optimism, the investment get to the top of the agenda and customers think differently of them.

If giffgaff ran this network – how would it look then? What data would be published about network performance? What would be done about it? How much more money would it generate by doing the right thing?

And that’s the issue that faces CEOs everywhere – there’s no hiding place in the social world. if you are not open and transparent you face two problems. Customers know anyway and have the tools to share that knowledge. Staff know and if they can’t do anything about it then how do they feel?

I’m off to search the other communities to see who has least congestion problems. Apart from the company that locked me in for a year when they had no network coverage 21 years ago ( thats about £50k of revenue they have missed out on so far ) and the one that didnt want to help me 2 years ago when my phone was stolen and I needed a new phone straight away.

Customers have long memories when it comes to “doing the right thing”. I have a memory of pressing a button and the phone ringing immediately at the other end.  Have phones gone backward since 1976? Or from when they were invented: March 10th 1876?

Crowdsourcong & crowdservicing, Voice of the Customer, WOCAS, brilliant basics, customer experience, feedback, honesty, listening, social media | No Comments

Our values are:

• Passion & enthusiasm ( energy/commitment / care )
• Open & honest
• Stop & think (helping you do that)
• Changing behaviours
• Pragmatic and easy to work with
• Listening & dialogue

Please can you share your feedback on your dealings with Budd, as people, the website, in any which way you interact with us. How do we live up to our values? How don’t we? Add a public comment below or email me if you don’t want your thoughts in the public domain.

feedback | No Comments

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

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