Archive for the 'queue' Category

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

What a pleasure when everything works. Having woken up to sunrise over Monaco and shirt sleeve weather at dawn, it really feels like spring has arrived – even in London. When transport works its such a pleasure to travel. Taxi on time, no traffic, no queues at the airport, allowed to take my case on the plane (well done BA) and out of Heathrow before you can say boo. Maybe I could make that 10.30 meeting after all.

But what’s this? – a 100m queue for taxis at Paddington. Whoops. But then like magic, I was whisked to the front to “taxi share”. Alas you have to wait til they can fill the taxi with people going where you’re going, or not as the case maybe. The taxi stand being occupied with one cab, whilst all this goes on. Poor people in the queue just never seemed to move forward, despite 3 of 6 taxi stops being for them and 3 for taxi share. Luckily I was first stop of 5 in my taxi. God help the poor guys in my cab going to the City after I was dropped in Victoria. With traffic moving at the speed of a speeding bullet, not, that was a major time delay for some very expensive money men. But quicker than waiting 100m. And cheaper with a fixed fare of £6 in my case, and £30 per taxi driver for one journey across London so he wins too.

An improvement or not from before? If you measure in financial terms, yes. In terms of the number of taxis driving out of Paddington – well yes and no. There are fewer taxis only because very few leave the place whilst they get filled with 5 passengers. Are there fewer cabs on the road? No, they all have to go somewhere, but maybe over time. Not in time terms. Nor in branding, setting up London as a chaotic place to enter. Mumbai just has rows of taxis and you get in one and off you go. Come to think of it so does Paddington, tucked round the corner trying to get into the station.

It’s a great example of the “Viz” consultants (Viz is an anarchic mag for those of you who havent seen it) going in and trying to improve, only to complicate and make worse (don’t get me started on the Viz consultants working on the medical profession and how it recruits !)

Was there something else they could have done? Yes nothing. In fact less than nothing. They could have removed the whole process.

There are no shortage of taxis sitting outside Paddington trying to get in. There are a finite two lanes to drive into the station. But there is at least 200m (x2) of kerb on the edge of those lanes once into the station. So what if there was “no” system. No queuing, no set 6 pick up points bottle necking the two lanes, no one directing traffic etc etc. Taxis allowed to pick up at any point along the kerb. People allowed to flag a cab at any point along the 200m. Would there be a queue? Let’s assume we treat it like a formula 1 pit lane and only allow stopping in one lane, the other being used to drive in and out. With 200m of kerb to use, I doubt it.

As we say, the best service is no (need for) service. Maybe this is a case of ‘The best system is no (Viz designed) system’.

queue, viz consultants | No Comments