Trust is like … well many things. Think of it in the context of your friends. Try this question: “I only spend time with people who…..?”
“I respect? I like? Are passionate about shopping/football/etc? Are like me? Not like me?” I expect “who I trust?” must come in up for most people. So why would it be any different for any company/consumer – trust is there, but what does it mean?
If your friend says “I am fantastic” what do you think? Even if he/she is fantastic…. Would you trust them?
If another friend says someone else if fantastic – then it’s different. If you trust that friend, their belief carries to the someone else. Unless that someone else proves to not be fantastic. And then both friends become less trusted.
On the other hand if that someone else backs it up in their actions then you believe it. And you trust the first friend even more.
So to business. Companies stand up and shout “I’m fantastic”. It may or may not be true. If you try them once and they are, you may carry on. If you try their product or service and it’s less than they say – the trust is broken. It may still be excellent, but if isn’t what they promised then the trust is broken.
If companies don’t shout from the rooftops but their customers do, the same applies – when you try it, it’d better be as good as they say. Otherwise trust is broken and trust in their advocates is also broken.
This is why:
a) Advertising only works if something is good. Advertising something that isn’t as good as the promise, results in people finding that out faster. And telling their friends sooner.
b) Advocacy only works if its genuine. False friendship breaks is spotted very quickly and trust is broken.
c) Trust is about what happens when a customer does something. It isn’t marketing. Marketing has to check out what the business is capable of and make the advertising fit the truth.
d) Trust is every contact in every way – this is why customers value consistency very highly.
Trust is………”trust is like virginity – you can only lose it once!”
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?
I spent a couple of days this week presenting to a large financial services business and encouraging them to learn some lessons from social businesses.
One of the major chords was about the values of the business: being open, transparent and honest and in public. I was using 3 examples of ”crowdsourcng” and “crowdservicing”: Mini showing its customer ratings for sales and for service on its dealer sites, first direct ( happy 21st!) sharing customers good and bad commentary and giffgaff(happy 1st birthday yesterday ! ).
giffgaff works with its customers on all facets of the business – product development, sales, marketing and service. to be able to do this it has to transparent, open and honest. How many telcos would publicise their network outages?
Look at what first direct is doing next – inviting customers to join their Beta Lab to help them develop their products. A step too far for your business? Or just a step back into history if you are an IT company who have been doing this successfully for ages.
Back at the events, we were discussing how that could work for a financial services company. Just imagine sharing your internal customer feedback and customer data on your website. Publish your NPS scores and verbatims for example?. Publish your quarterly customer research?
Let’s face it, very few people in your business get to read it, let alone act on it. So what if the tables were turned and executives had to explain to customers what they were doing about the experiences represented in the data. The pressure would really be on to show the public audience that you are serious about customers.
Today, it might look like a very brave step indeed. But imagine if in a year’s time all your competitors were doing this and you were still afraid to do it. How would that look?
Oh and by the way, whether you like it or not, customers are already sharing their feedback and data anyway. Do you think they don’t know? Your job is to help them know more and do something about it – not hide the data.
Today, corporates are allowed to be not open, not transparent. At some point soon that will become very difficult without looking dishonest.
Dare you share your customer data on your website? Discuss
I mentioned in the last blog that we’ve been scratching our heads harder on being social as opposed to using social media. Similar stuff, changed point of view. Tim Kitchin is a treasure chest of thinking who I first worked with back in his Ogilvy days, knew through his Glasshouse adventures and he’s the reason we’re in Charlotte St. Tim’s a member of our advisory board and director of stakeholder relations at CropLife.
Below is his commentary. Read it all the way through, its valuable. I’ve added Charles Leadbeater’s ANIMATION that resonates with his thinking at the bottom.
“Peter
I agree with your direction.
To build on it, today’s organisations run, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, on institutional cynicism. ‘Everybody’ knows that current structures, processes and management systems don’t work. They don’t prevent bad decisions, and they don’t manage positive outcomes and they don’t make people happy.
Because organisations have no conviction, they have no courage.
Because they have no honesty, they build no trust.
Because they are disjointed, they cannot improve.
Because they are too complex, there can be no accountability
This will only get worse. Markets are not factoring in the gigantic hidden risks of this fundamental loss of control, enabled and accelerated by information technology and management consultancy. Stakeholders cannot engage actively with organisations, because they have no meaningful or viable point of traction or leverage.
I suspect:
That (almost) all organisations underestimate the role of emotion and human inertia in innovation and transformation.
That (almost) all organisations are driven by what they feel compelled to do, rather than what they are inspired to do.
That (almost) all organisations fail to anticipate their own irrelevance/obsolescence.
That (almost) all individuals in any corporation are operating way below their personal potential.
That (almost) all organisations underestimate the importance of delivery to generate customer loyalty.
These frictions in the deep structure of the organisations create a tangible loss of opportunities and profit, through productivity-erosion, customer disloyalty, and regulatory handcuffs. These are the outwardly visible signs of a fundamental internal conflict between extrinsic goals and intrinsic capabilities.
In future, organisations will fail even more often and more profoundly as a result of this cynicism. Just as shareholders are entitled to ask whether free cashflow is better returned to shareholders, so stakeholders are entitled to ask whether free energy could be better employed in a different direction.
Tomorrow, because organisations are now too big to change, they will ultimately learn to live without control and instead function like political leaders. They will need to learn build stable and consensual structures from the bottom up and shore up existing processes through investment in soft skills of sensing and listening. Responsiveness and ‘followership’ will be key.
Instead of spending all their time trying to correct for failure, future organisations will experiment more and learn to build on, and celebrate small successes.
Six sigma and other quality thinking drives a negatively-framed control process – to reduce deviation from the norm.
The challenge of an organisation should be positively-framed, to raise the norm.
The role of consultants in this context is to offer plan B, and a plan C…based on an analysis of genuine competence to and a mapping stakeholder/market demand, rather than to refine and re-refine plan A, which may well be doomed to obsolescence – Microsoft? Nokia?
The scale and style of this intervention will be nano-scale consulting. Teeny nudges with unpredictable consequences.
Faced with this reality, organisations should use consultants to:
1. Pre-empt the business’s own demise, by starting anti-businesses
2. Use consultants’ freedom to move like oil within the structure of organisational culture, to allow them to cajole and inspire learning
3. Spot and address underutilisation of free energy
4. Encourage self-service/buyer-centricity, inside the corporation.
I envision a transition from matrix structures to community and corporo-political systems, with infrastructure, amenities, retail and services. All stakeholders are member of the community. Instead of titles and hierarchies, social credit buys goodwill and participation across the community.
In a world of cynicism, the only reliable weapon is innocence…nurturing the honest corporation.
Free-flow over. ;-)
Tim
Tim Kitchin”
Charles Leadbeater’s site We-think is another mine of information. Take a look at the animation. It reflects the context and challenge to traditional businesses and organisations. Succinctly.
Radio 4′s “Thinking Allowed” was talking about “emotional work” this afternoon – alas I only caught a 2 min clip and listen again is not allowed because of rights issues and the link is to a paid access to the paper which the programme was based on. Hmmm – a lot of work and emotional disappointment
Whether the research is any good or not I can’t therefore comment, but the idea of “emotional work” struck a chord with the work we’ve been doing on “customer effort“. The paper being discussed was called “When it pays to be friendly: employment relationships and emotional labour in hairstyling” by Rachel Cohen at Warwick University.
A quick bit of googling shows that “emotional work” (or for the Americans “emotional labor”) as a concept was invented by sociologist Arlie Hochschild as “management of feeling to create a publicly facial and bodily display”. For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor .
There are a lovely couple of concepts called surface acting and deep acting. Surface acting involves “painting on” affective displays, or faking it; Surface acting involves an employee presenting emotions on his or her “surface” without actually feeling them. The employee in this case puts on a facade as if the emotions are felt. Deep acting is where an employee modifies their inner feelings to match the emotion expressions the organization requires.
I’m sure this concept of emotional work might help explain several areas that lead to personal stress and affect performance. You can put in a lot of emotion without doing any emotional work – how? Zero gap between what people feel and what an organisation wants. Zero gap between what brands promise and deliver. Or you can imagine a ton of emotional work in doing very simple things that you don’t believe in. Giving excuses, saying you’ll help when you know your boss won’t let you.
Transparency, veracity, purpose and passion – the things you want in your people, your brand and your customer experience – could all be measured by the amount of emotional work your business causes your people and customers. Emotional work is one component of customer effort. The physical and emotional dimensions of any customer experience are recognised as equally valuable.
We’ll be shortly publishing a couple more blogs on the dimeniosn of customer effort and emotional work, some great video blogs on passion at our workplace and a white paper we’re publishing next week on the dimensions of a customer effort index.
Aviva’s Big Picture campaign is a great piece of marketing. Lots of the latest thinking in marketing brought together: emotion, engagement, story telling, charity, change the world, word of mouth.
You’re asked to send in your picture and story and if chosen you may get your picture on a large building somewhere in the world. And a £1 will get donated to a worthy cause – cue pictures of school children and third world underprivileged on behalf of Save The Children. The web site shows a huge picture on the side of Sea Containers House by the Thames – this picture strangely applies in Paris, Singapore and Warsaw, Delhi and Mumbai links as well – obviously didn’t get that far yet. Multiple full pages in the London papers I’ve noticed over the past few days too.
But when you look at it more carefully, is there something missing from this brilliant marketing campaign?
£250,000 in donations in total. against what must be tens of millions on the campaign? The balance of interest is evident.
Save The Children don’t mention the campaign on their site. Was anyone thinking about them, or just about Aviva?
The “rules” page says “This page has been created for a wide audience and although we’re an insurance company, that isn’t intended to be the focus here.” The language is interesting – audience vs community.
You can’t post comments at the website, only vetted posts. The Facebook page doesn’t let you comment unless you’ve posted a picture, neatly filtering the dialogue. Is there any genuine interaction going on here. The posts are sooo complimentary. The site is at pains to say its not about Aviva, But how can Aviva hear its customers talking to each other about the issues of Save The Children?
Maybe one or two features of great marketing are missing – transparency and a genuine interest beyond the brand
What would this campaign look like if Innocent or Ben & Jerry ran it? Give the tens of millions to the charity and spend £250k letting people make videos of what it does. Give the wall space to Save The Children and let them spread their message with a small cred for Innocent in the corner. Get the same impact without spending the millions and concentrate on making a better return from their pensioners rather than their shareholders?
Here’s a link sent from our LimeBridge US colleagues showing one of hundreds of slams against former airline star JetBlue which stranded customers on the tarmac during fierce snow and ice storms in the US on Valetines night.
This is already turning into “lessons learned” for handling bad PR, IT fixes needed, reservations centre capacity during bad weather, and a lot more. JetBlue’s blue-in-face CEO/Founder has said that he will double res agents, all at home, a daunting task among many other changes they need to make. But as the article says, at least he’s been honest about the cock ups.
One of his gaffes, our LimeBridge colleagues thought, was stating that “only 10,000 customers” were affected out of a much larger number who’ve been using JetBlue – “only”!!
It will be fascinating to see if they survive the talk show jokes (such as “the free ticket that JetBlue will give the folks who spent 10 hours on the runway in New York will let them spend 10 hours on the runway in Miami”, stuff like that)
#humap what if 360 reviews said "how I feel as a result of working with u" rather than "what I think of u"08:01:25 PM February 02, 2012from web
don't you just hate turning up the airport early for a flight that doesn't exist.... And apols to those I'm missing today due to deadlines08:57:52 AM February 02, 2012from web
