If you’ve got competing demands for constrained budget how do you decide which ‘horse-to-back’?
Case study findings show that having great agents who listen to customers in order to determine appropriate interventions in real-time can deliver equivalent business outcomes to that of more costly change programmes but the payback from empowering your people is quicker and it requires little or no capex to get started.
‘Up close and personal” can be downloaded free from BuddLife at www.budd.uk.com
Sally is a volunteer treasurer for a small local charity, and is trying to report the year-end information to HMRC for tax purposes (they employ a few people). There is a £75 incentive to submit online this year and that would be extremely useful for a small charity.
There are two ways of doing this – one with offline preparation, followed by submission and the other fully online. Sally had the Employers CD-ROM and so started by trying to install the application onto her computer. The installation failed part way through for some unexplained reason (after investigation, it may be related to anti-virus software interference). The problem was compounded by the fact that the partly-installed application could not be uninstalled .. .as clearly the un-installation component is the last piece to be installed – only after everything else has been successfully installed. This is not a fail-safe design!
Sally tried repeatedly to contact the help desk over 3 days before she finally got through on the phone. Okay, it’s a busy time of year but that shouldn’t be a surprise, and the additional workload of lots of people wanting to file online should also have been anticipated. The answer she got was that her computer was too old for the CD-ROM (it is 4 years old and more than meets the minimum requirements) and she should register for the fully online service instead!
This she did, or at least tried. But the process seems unnecessarily complex and it failed part-way through. Not once, but three times – leaving her with 3 partially created accounts on the Govt. Gateway … and no nearer to filing the year-end tax return. She will also now get three activation codes in the post – adding to the costs for HMRC and only reminding her of her frustration. She sought help from the local Tax office who confirmed that she was putting in the correct information, but could not understand why the registration process was failing.
Sally had heard the in-queue announcements on the help desk phone system a number of times – one part invited callers to submit an email query as an alternative channel. The actual e-mail address was hard to decipher from the announcement, but Sally is nothing if not persistent and she tracked it down on the website. Imagine her delight and expectation when she actually got a reasonably prompt reply. But her hopes were soon dashed when she read the content…
“ … For security reason we cannot verify USER ID’s via email. Please contact
the helpdesk below who will try and help you further….”
… she is now filling out the forms by hand and will put them in the post!
Got a classic call from NOP on behalf of Autoglass last night. Would I mind answering a few questions about my recently replaced windscreen? Sure. On a scale of one to ten, would you rate you r experience as excellent, good…. STOP!!! I’m willing to give you my feedback but I’m not willing to answer bland questions – is there a free form comments box so you can write them in? No. If I just tell you can you record it? No, we just ask the questions we’re given. But how can I tell you what I thought of your service then? You cant, we can only ask you the questions. If I give you feedback about your process can you give it someone. No. Your supervisor? Well…
You get the jist. A dumb process that damages NOP and Autoglass’ brands and the experience of doing business with them, avoids learning anything useful and costs loads of money. If you recognise this process in your business and want to do something about it – get in touch
For the record my feedback would have been:
Replacement process was great, guy was friendly, paperwork all pre done – fab
Booking process interesting. Must have involved maybe a dozen calls as the call centre, Ashford and Tonbridge sorted out who did what, I cancelled one visit, they cancelled one. I could go into detail and give you the fixes if anyone at Autoglass is interested in my feedback?
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!
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?
”What our customers are saying” (wocas) processes do 3 things
1) They let m
anagement know what customers and frontline staff know is obvious.
It’s a bit like this weather stone. Management create lots of feedback mechanisms because they are in the cosy indoors and can’t feel the rain to tell them its raining.
2) They motivate frontline staff to collect insights because management act on them (thus making the agent sound much more intelligent and allowing smart people to use their brains)
3) The systematic action – the bit most companies can’t do but high performing companies do (see our 2008 F+S survey of 71 UK companies in Q1 2008 in the library. It shows how high performance companies collect the same types of feedback as lower performing ones – and that the difference comes from what they do with it
Let us know if you want an inhouse webinar on the topic or a private session just for you! – peter.massey@budd.uk.com
A journalist asked me why businesses are poor on email responses. The thought that went through my head was “why should they be?”
- Generation Y consumers don’t use much email so why develop it further
- It’s too late now! We’ve been trained, as consumers, that email doesnt work well when you send it most companies. Even if they respond at all, you don’t get any answers
- email is very good for getting things wrong, it’s a poor 2 way conversation. So it’s better to phone back. Seldom happens but a great wow if a company does.
- c2c communities are much more useful – insightful and supportive – if companies know how to foster them without interfering they are a great source of insight and support (Innocent is a good example) . Get in touch (peter.massey@budd.uk.com) if you want to talk more about how you can develop communities in c2c or b2b.
More fundamentally email off cues from websites are usually a substitute for really giving customers the answers they want, how they want them and where they want them. That’s because most companies:
Read about how Amazon does some of these processes in the Skyline and “what our customers are saying” sections of our site or take a look at some of the papers in the library
On Sunday 25th May, Penny Hicks of Budd and Elspeth Ryan will run hard and hopefully complete the Edinburgh marathon. At the same time they are raising money for the British Red Cross, helping people in crisis all over the world. The British Red Cross has launched an appeal to help tens of thousands of people affected by the major earthquake in China.
The following is an account of the earthquake that has been sent to us from someone teaching in Chengdu:
“I have been living in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, for a year and a half now. Sichuan, a comparatively poor and densely populated province in Western China, whose mountains slowly rise to join the Tibetan Plateau. Sichuan has a reputation for delicious food and a relaxed and leisurely attitude to life, and I’ve really enjoyed living here. The students I’ve taught at primary and middle schools, as well as at university have all impressed me deeply with their friendliness, intelligence and hard-working nature. So you can imagine the deep sorrow I feel when I think of all those bright young students cruelly robbed of their futures when their school buildings and lives collapsed down on top of them. A loss of any one of these children is a loss to us all.
I was at University teaching when the earthquake happened. At first I thought it was a plane or large truck going past. That might explain the crashing, banging and rumbling. I looked at the words on the projector screen jumping around. Then a student stood up and shouted ‘earthquake!’. We all ran out of the building. We didn’t know that’s not what you’re supposed to do; none of us had experienced an earthquake before. Fortunately we were lucky. Cracks appeared in buildings but very few fell down. At a friends school, two dormitory buildings collapsed (most students in China board at their schools) but the students were in class at the time. It wasn’t until I returned to my swaying 9th floor flat on Monday evening that the full horror of the situation emerged. The next day was awful; the heavy rain was non-stop and wall-to-wall TV coverage of silent, crushed bodies and wailing students clinging on to life was harrowing. The worst thought was that there were thousands more at that point that had yet to be reached by rescue teams. I couldn’t stop shaking, and I was never sure if it was the ground of me. In fact, nothing seems certain or sure anymore. In Chengdu, people are still so frightened that they are sleeping on the streets, sometimes with just a bamboo mat to keep themselves clean. Any open area or patch of grass currently resembles a campsite.
A week later, and people are still living in fear, even in Chengdu. The aftershocks happen nearly everyday, reminding people that this still isn’t over. Rumours bounce around the city in minutes. “The water is contaminated” and sure enough, minutes later in the shops, the bottled water and milk is disappearing fast. Irate customers are shouting at the sales girls that they need all that they’re buying. “There will be a big aftershock in 20 minutes: run outside!” My friends moan that it’s raining, its rumour, but we all still feel nervous and unsettled. Last night we receive another rumour – “in the next 3 days, there will be an earthquake of 6 to 7 magnitude; it was on the news”. We listen to the streets fill with cars beeping at each other, in a race to get out of the city. We think it’s another rumour, but we turn on the TV anyway. I’m surprised, there is a government warning of another big aftershock. The panic and fear infects me, and I cycle through the gridlocked streets to join my friends in the park. I takes me half an hour to find them among the thousands of other’s bedded down there. We give a mattress to a solitary elderly lady, sitting on a small chair in the mud. Dawn breaks, it’s all OK. But all of the schools are closed for another week. The banks shut at random times. Hundreds of people are queuing to buy tents, because it will rain tonight and people don’t dare to stay indoors. Even in Chengdu, life is not back to normal. But for those living in the refugee camps, in the mountains and near devastated towns, there is no hope of normality for months and probably years.
My students tell me of their hometowns. They say that where there were two mountains, there is now only one; whole villages have been buried by the landslides. Towns the size of Newbury have lost 3-5000 souls. Those that survived are now homeless (there are an estimated 5 million who now have no place to live), the children, orphaned. There are many tales of heroism and hope however. Those of us in Chengdu are organising donations of cash and supplies that are immediately sent out to the affected areas; many of my university students are volunteering in local hospitals and in the disaster zone. However, given the scale of the destruction, more help is still needed. Basics like rubber gloves for medics are in short supply; children’s shoes and other essentials like camp beds are urgently required, as well as basic medicines, tents and food and drink. The people of Sichuan have always been incredibly generous and warm-hearted in welcoming me into their lives. They now need others to show the same generosity to help them rebuild their lives and their futures.”
To help Penny and Elspeth raise money for the Red Cross please visit their justgiving page:
I feel like I’ve been a blog free zone this last month – travelling and conferences taking up the slack between work and play. So here are some highlights, in chronological order, that you might find useful from the last 3 weeks… Tell me which you’d like more on and I’ll write more.
1) LimeBridge’s 12th global gathering in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We missed the tornado a few miles south in Texas, but managed a European shopping competition since everything is so cheap. As Frederic said at the car hire desk (adopt cheesy french accent here…) “Surely we should take a driver with ze car at this price!” Given how cheap things are we did start a serious discussion about offshoring to America – it’s maybe not as daft as it sounds, at least in US brands or B2B.
We spent lots of talking about the book “The Best Service Is No Service” whch has now sold out in Australia and judging by the orders of 100+ at a time, will soon be in its second print run. Not bad after a month and a half.
But what shall we focus on in “book 2”? Suggestions on a postcard please. We’re thinking about “The complete systems model of how the customer experience and contact points drive economics in a business model” – maybe with a shorter title!
2) GOC – the Global Operating Council, alias the US CCO Forum, but focused on outsourcing and offshoring since that’s the biggest part of the US model. This was also the 12th meeting they’d had and ably hosted at the Avis centre in Tulsa. We giggled at the sign on the door saying “No fireams or dangerous weapons allowed on these premises” but apparently people sometimes forget and bring them in…… We had an excellent visit to Direct TV (think the US version of Sky) as well. The big take aways?
• The Philippines are already as saturated as India for voice. Some very interesting insights shared on which outsourcers are performing or not.
• Performance management, environment, coaching , work force management and lifestyle are still underutilized weapons of mass employment in the US. These were good companies but you’d be sacked in the UK for the lowest of the attrition levels being achieved
3) From the US it was straight into the Professional Planning Forum Annual Conference in Manchester. Apart from the best way to run a packed conference of 350 people in many streams and have a party too, there were fabulous shared case studies from all the Award finalists. The final Innovation award went to EDF for their work on contact elimination. We launched the 2008 F+S Research, which was carried out in conjunction with PPF. You can download the paper from our library. Another blog is called for on this striking work!
4) Madrid was the next stop for an in-house conference, a format that many of our clients use. Whilst we have designed and facilitated some, this one was just the key note speaker role again. With countries from all over Europe represented, it is noticeable how similar the issues are and how enormous are the opportunities to avoid reinventing wheels by learning from each other.
5) Finally to this week’s ECMW conference in London with about 500 in the audience and Richard Branson headlining. In fact the interview with him was rather tame, yet intriguing. Chairing so many conferences, one starts to feel like there are no new things out there. And at the same time so many things to learn.
The highlight for me was Daniel Pink, an author and former speech writer for Al Gore. Before his “green” film that would have not have been something you’d talk about. Anyway, he got my best speaker rating, and I loved his use of “levity, brevity and repetition” to get his messages across. What was the message? That Abundance, Asia and Automation are taking over. And in that environment its really important to develop right brain creative skills to compete.
Given he followed one of the most painful speakers I’ve seen in a long while – and I see a few – arguing for lots of maths and analysis, he was on a winner from the start. His technique was “scream, preach and shout” – and nope it didn’t work.
Other highlights? Fred Reicheld was masterful in his arguments for how he developed the Netpromoter scoring system after listening to very simple work at Enterprise (car hire not space ships) and Ritz Carlton and others. They had all talked about the Golden Rule – do to others what you’d like to have done to you – and from this came the referral question. Personally I still think saying you intend to recommend when asked is verydifferent from having recommended but lots not lose sight of the bigger prize – getting the board to balance finance and customer issues.
Willie Walsh of BA getting the best airline results but not taking his fat bonus in light of the debacle at Terminal 5 is a good case of recognising when the balance isn’t right.
Let me know your thoughts and what you want more on at peter.massey@budd.uk.com
first direct’s withdrawal of mortgages to new customers took the news by storm yesterday. It wasn’t a surprise. As we reported on the 11th of Feb blog entry, it was evident the product was selling “too well”.
So how come it took til now to do something? Why did it have to reach crisis point? I wonder who’s getting what blame?
But they did get brave and do the right thing. Look after the existing customers and the ones who already applied and stop taking more business that couldn’t be handled properly.
Bravo!
Listening to customers it must have been evident it had to happen. I wonder why they didnt just up the rates a bit in February and take more business at a higher margin, avoiding the negative publicity and “first rock” factor?
It’s interesting that there’s now a BBC Today programme on Saturdays that’s designed to do exactly this. Pick up the stories from the customers before the journalists can.
What our customers are saying is in the public domain. Shouldn’t you be picking it up in your business first?
Talk to us about the “what our customers are saying” process
Press CTRL to open in a new window
