Archive for the 'Voice of the Customer' Category

Posted by: David Naylor | 14.01.2008

I got these quotes from a colleague who’s recently been reading Jeanne Bliss’s book on the Chief Customer Officer. I think these can apply in many walks of life, in and out of work.

• “Think small”
• “Worry about being better; bigger will take care of itself”
• “Think one customer at a time, and take care of each one the best way you can.”

How often do we try to build strategies from the top down and without the real customer context, needs and frustrations in mind? Starting at the frontline, listening to staff and listening to the individual customers is such a powerful way of collecting the most meaningful data on what you need to do next.
There will always be someone willing to put forward the next big thing but how will you know it will make a difference to the little things?

CCO, Strategy, Voice of the Customer, customer experience, listening | No Comments

Posted by: Ian Morton | 30.10.2007

Having recently joined Budd I wanted to transfer my mobile account from my previous business account, held by Vodafone, into Budd’s business telephone account, also held by Vodafone. Thinking this would be a one call fix, as I was not taking anything away from Vodafone, just changing billing details, I called expecting it to be a simple action. How wrong can you be!

A very polite lady advised me that they would have to send me the PAC number, I asked could it be given over the phone, no, I was told, I had to request the PAC number in writing, an email would do, but it could not be given immediately. She went on to tell me that once Vodafone received my email they could then send me a letter with the PAC number. Could I not receive this information by email I asked?, apologies, but no, this was not the process.

On receiving the letter I was advised, I would then have to send the detail to our internal admin team, who could then call Vodafone, who would then transfer the account billing details. Why, I asked cannot you do this now. Explanation given was that they were on different databases and could not transfer my details but had to go through an internal administrative process to enable another section within Vodafone to handle.

So from a simple request to transfer billing details internally within Vodafone we will generate at least 2 calls and 1 email to Vodafone, 2 internal calls to/from my admin dept, I have received 3 emails so far telling me the PAC number was coming, I have also received a letter from Vodafone with the PAC number and, I think, but I am losing track, there is another letter going to Budd’s admin dept to tell them what to do with it.

By my count that’s around 10 interactions for a piece of internal administration. Why?Surely with the number of people moving between business accounts this process should have been refined by now. Even if the databases do not talk the customer should not see the problem. I understand the need for security, but nothing was said they had to do it this way due to security issues.

So, I’m left a frustrated customer, dreading the day when something really goes wrong. On a high note however, everyone you talk to in Vodafone business team is always friendly and seems to be doing their best. So well done Vodafone business team, just please look at this process and consider how many other processes are frustrating to your customers. Might be time to actually listen to what the customer is saying?

Customer satisfaction, Voice of the Customer, process improvement, reduction in contacts | No Comments

Posted by: Marion Howard-Healy | 17.10.2007

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

Posted by: Peter Massey | 12.08.2007

Wow, getting my holiday blogs out of sync here…..This one’s about getting as far as New York but I forgot to publish it!

Spending my Virgin airmiles to go to New York. This is meant to be a reward for spending shed loads of money - so much going to Australia that we got enough to do New York for free.

It didn’t feel like a reward. Too many Virgin basics aren’t working. Time for some redesign of the basic experience I think. Otherwise why would Virgin think I’d spend a fortune with Virgin, next time I go business class

Here’s a few examples of how my time was wasted and their brand damaged from this one trip:
1) You cant share Virgin miles with close relatives even if you paid for the flight they earned them on

2) You can’t book airmiles and non airmiles travellers together via the website. The extras on a miles ticket is half the cost of a real ticket - hmmmm, call me sceptical

3) It took 65 minutes to book the 3 tickets manually

4) By the time they’d been booked the price on the site moved - upwards of course

5) Despite escalation during the call and after the call, no one at Virgin would talk to me about the price of the ticket that changed mid booking

6)The booking reference, cut and pasted from the reminder email, wouldn’t work so we couldn’t get access to the site to give US visa information or change seats or check in, resulting in 3 calls

7)The nice people in the Indian call centre couldn’t take a passport number of 8 digits in less than three attempts

8)At check in there are still monster queues all the time - so no one is scheduling staff to meet demand. This is highly predicatble and very frustrating

9) We got to use a member card to get us into the short queue on the premium line. It had one agent and we waited forever anyway. The lady next to us in the queue said this happens to her every time.

10)She told the supervisory types - 3 of them. Not one went and opened a desk or said they’d do something about it for next time. They just made placatory remarks, which of course wind you up up at the third time of listening to ‘there are more people coming’ - and there clearly aren’t.

11) Having a huddle of 4 supervisors talk to each other is not the same as having 4 supervisors open 4 lines to shift the problem

12) Asking to sit further forward in the plane, not an upgrade, got us moved a bit with the usual line of “the flight is full”. When we got on the plane it was a lie. The bulkhead row in front was empty. Many rows were half full or empty.

13) But apart from that its just like most airlines: indifferent

I’d love to talk to anyone at Virgin who’d like to talk about saving shed loads of money on frustrated marketing, frustrated staff and frustrated customers: peter.massey@budd.uk.com

I offered feedback to the supervisor at the airport but he was too busy dealing with the problems……obviously

Virgin, Voice of the Customer, customer experience design | No Comments

Posted by: Peter Massey | 3.05.2007

Someone sent me a great email today. He’d heard me tell the Amazon story of the customer’s chair last week at the PPF conference. Jeff Bezos used to insist on an empty chair in every meeting - for the customer to be sat in every meeting. If the customer would be bored, disagree with what you decide or not understand what you’re talking about - change it there and then!!

The great email? - He’d cc’d “Customer” on his mail. A great way to check if your email diatribes would bore the customer and if he or she would agree with your decisions!!

Voice of the Customer | No Comments

Posted by: David Naylor | 28.02.2007

So you may have heard that Dell set up a website called IdeaStorm on 16 Feb and it looks like that’s just what it has created. Unfortunately, just like the UK government’s recent online petition, you only get one side of the story. In this case, the storm came from the leading edge users who wanted Dell to ditch Windows and adopt Linux. Less radical but still a popular idea was replacing Internet Explorer with the leading alternative browser, Firefox.

Clearly, Michael Dell needs to think about the direction of the company. Embrace the tech heads with leading edge products (which they would find hard to support) or pander to the conservative mass market, Microsoft led world. Who did they think would respond on IdeaStorm?!

It’s just another example of an ill thought through customer feedback ‘campaign’ that generates a lot of the wrong publicity by giving Dell so much that they are unable to act on. It would be far better if they listen to everyone on a continuous basis – both staff and customers – about how they can improve the basics rather than looking the wow factor.

Read the full article in Business Week at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2007/tc20070226_415604.htm?link_position=link1

Dell, Voice of the Customer | 2 Comments