Archive for the 'the best service is no service' Category

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

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

The contrast in use of tax payers resources, the politics and the bigger system and the good news….

Is my tax £ being well spent?

I love Jeremy Clarkson’s idea that the police shouldn’t be allowed to fine you for car parking until they return your stolen goods!I was struck by the contrasting use of resources around Soho Square as I walked into work yesterday. In Greek St, there was a police cordon around a bar. Uh oh must have been a murder. Two officers, once taking photos of the scene. At the opposite end of the square, parked opposite Soho St, was a Smart car with CCTV on the roof. It was aimed up the one way street from the wrong end. Presumably to catch cyclists going the wrong way up the street, since cars cant turn into the street the wrong way easily given the shape of the traffic islands on Oxford St – itself a street only for buses and taxis so unlikely to generate much “driving” crime. There were two guys sat in the Smart car reading the Sun.

The contrasting focus of manpower is striking in a time of newspaper headlines about knife crime, rising prices and taxes.

The wider system

Not only do cameras everywhere make me feel less safe, but they make me aware of government. It strikes me that everything that is government charged, privatised and vaguely regulated (and I use the two words specifically), or is an effective monopoly is just going through the roof. Parking fines rising to £120, gas going up 35%, my station car parking going up 17%, fuel rising to £1.34 – but more noticeably the gap between unleaded and diesel jumping from circa 6p to 14p. Yet the money raised doesnt seem to make any difference to the services offered.

It seems that an economic downturn is a great excuse to screw customers. Does the government thing that people don’t see the connection between the way government governs and regulates, the way business works and the way investors invest. 

Maybe Mr Brown would be better trying to make the adjustments in pricing happen in the stockmarket, not in the high street. Centrica and British Gas is a great case in point. Poor old British Gas has to hike prices whilst Centrica raises its dividend to shareholders, claiming poor old pensioners need the money from their pension funds. Doesnt matter, its still the customers who fork out more to investors via a business and weak regualtion/competition. It feels like we are just paying for the fact that the government sold all the family silver years ago and can no longer control large multinational players, many foreign owned, who will do what they need to do to keep their shareholders happy overseas as funding gets harder to raise.

So Mr Brown – go find a better lever to pull – talk to the analysts and investors. Unless they expect and accept that profits will suffer as markets restructure, without sacking CEOs or ransacking share prices, the CEOs will continue to pump customers for short term gain.

But what about the good news?

The good news is that there are richer pickings for CEOs and government to be made from removing waste than even pumping customers for money they dont want to give. The Cabinet Office agenda is to save 50% of “avoidable contact” with citizens from every goverement department. Not to sack people and save money, but to free people up to do more valuable things (than catching cyclists….). Now this I get. If CEOs set the same challenge to remove 50% of unncessary contact then there would be real change in the customer experience. At the moment there’s a lot of pussyfooting around with cost savings, not fundamental change.

Why is contact rate so important to the experience and the economics? Take for example, last week I had to get my divorce papers done. I really dont like paperwork, but 8 years hanging around is ridiculous. But heh it’s easy – I managed the hard bits easily with only 2 contacts. (Dont let that give you ideas!).

A visit to directgov led to all the forms and how to fill them in. A copy of the marriage certificate within 24 hours all done online. The only contact was to check the fee to pay – it looked like the figure it was, but it didnt say “divorce” on it, so I called to check – all details being quickly available to do that too. The other contact? Meet with the ex to sign the forms too, of course. Job nearly done. A great experience, very little work for me or anyone else, for a complex task.

Then there was splitting a pension. I shall keep the innocent unnamed since they were very helpful. But suffice to say, after looking at the website and even starting with a personal contact, it took several people to get involved to clearly establish what needed to happen. No action has been taken yet, but I can see why their SLA is 4 months to act! I havent counted the calls or emails but it must have been a dozen. Must have cost them a fortune.

So maybe the goverment’s transformation agenda is working better than we notice. Maybe private business can learn a thing or two. Certainly government is giving The Best Service Is No Service serious attention. And we’re going to try and help with an event on the 29th September – a goverment summit we’re running with Contact Centre Clinic in Liverpool. The Cabinet Office will be speaking along with several top public and private companies. But mainly we’ll be causing people to talk to each other and take back specific actions they can take in their government department, police force, NHS body or local authority. And of course private companies are welcome to learn too. Get in touch with joanne.sparkes@budd.uk.com for more details. PS and its £250 – good experiences are always less expensive to give than dumb ones!

Government, Healthcare, Uncategorized, contact rate, customer experience, the best service is no service | No Comments

Our LimeBridge colleagues Bill Price and David Jaffe couldn’t join us for the Best Service is No Service book launch event we held recently. We all (except Jonathan!) demonstrated our extraordinary skill of balancing books and smiling at the same time. We practiced for a least 10 seconds and prefected the art. If you want to read the book then you can ask us (nicely) for a review copy or help to make David and Bill happy by buying a copy from Amazon.com!

events, journalism, people, the best service is no service | No Comments

A customer on my train spent 50 minutes this morning arguing with the guard. The guard’s credit card machine had taken his transaction twice according to the receipts. The guard “knew” it hadn’t because it made this error before.

The customer wanted confirmation that it hadn’t taken his money twice. The guard couldn’t do that but asked the customer to write in. Naturally the customer did not want to waste his time when it wasn’t his fault. Both were locked in an impasse.

The supervisor was called by phone. The conversation was not understood by the supervisor. Several times the customer asked the supervisor not to talk over him. He eventually told him (“Jim”) that he did not believe that Jim “understood what I’m saying” since he hadn’t listened to him.

My point isn’t better training for the ticket man or the supervisor. It’s two questions:

Why didn’t the machine get fixed when the conductor knew it was broken?

How much time was wasted and how much damage done to SouthEastern’s brand?

Uncategorized, complaint, customer experience, the best service is no service, train | No Comments

Having a great time in Tulsa. Tornado warnings apart. Apparently they can suck you out of your cellar if the doors aren’t strong enough. The locals take them seriously!

As they do their guns – a lovely sign on the main entrance to Avis’ call centre asks you politely not to bring guns in. We had a little joke about it, but our host said with a straight face “we’re hunting people and sometimes we forget…”. Maybe she said “hunting-people” but who knows.

Service is of course prompt, peremptory and American. We’ve had t-shirts made up saying “yes we are ok, and no we dont need anything since you last asked 63 seconds ago”. And sweatshirts saying “please turn the aircon off”.

On the upside, Delta Airlines now has service before and on its flights. New planes but no seat back TVs or headrests that keep your head up yet, but heh it was cheap. Hotels, shops and restaurants all have assistants who try to help and heh it’s really cheap. And the TV is plastered with democratic primaries and heh they’re really not cheap.

LimeBridge colleagues are all in great form at our 12th global gathering. Integrated voice of customer is the next big thing (ask me peter.massey@budd.uk.com ) and it’s great to see just how far the book has come – Amazon stock being sold out if a hot topic.

Tomorrow is our US Forum with 25 major companies – can’t wait. What a way to spend St George’s Day. Must fish out that Henry V quote – it’s also Shakespeare’s 444th birthday.

Not many people in Tulsa know that. Still, only 24 hours til…..it’s over (A small joke for music fiends!)

airlines, the best service is no service | 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

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

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of sharing a stage with Alan Hinkes. We were talking about “world class” with a client organisation. An entertaining subject

Alan is the only Englishman and one of only a dozen people in the world, to have climbed all 14 of the world’s highest mountains. All are over 8000m. Apparently Everest isnt the hardest, K2 is. It took him 17 years to do them all, 3 attempts being on K2. The first time, he turned back when close to the summit because of avalanche risk. People died in an avalanche the following day. The second time when 500m from the summit, after a 5 month trip, he turned back to bring an exhausted climber down. When finally climbed in 1995, 13 people attempted the summit that year, 8 died.

Kinda makes you think, what have you done that’s world class? Skipping rapidly on…….

The angle on world class I like is this. It took Rolls-Royce 4 years from the formation of the company until they made the world’s best automobile, a further 3 years before they were recognised world wide as the best car in the world. Skype was founded in Sept 2002, launched in August 2003, sold to eBay for £1.6bn in October 2005 and reached 100million subscribers in April 2006. And still, many telco audiences dont recognise them as competition! So it doesn’t take long to be a world class business.

The common factor? A saying by Henry Royce: ” Whatever is rightly done, however small, is noble”.

Roughly translated: “the best service is no need for service”. Get it right by attending to the minutiae of what it takes to remove all the hassle for a customer and you will a) grow and b) be recognised.

I also like Alan’s defintion of success. “Reaching the summit isnt success. Reaching the summit and getting down without losing a digit is success.”

So sometimes the goal of being world class isn’t the right goal. That’s about who you are. That’s just getting to the summit. You have to get down the other side. Doing the very best you can do for customers is what it takes to be truly world class.

the best service is no service, world class | No Comments

“There’s no service like no service
it’s the best service we know
Everything about it is appealing
Everything about it is a wow
Customers can get that happy feeling
And we can show you how!”

Send us your songs (peter.massey@budd.uk.com ) or publish them yourself under the comments !!!

fun, the best service is no service | No Comments