Archive for the 'WOCAS' Category

Gareth Kirkwood and David Noyes at BA made the papers in a way that any operations or customer services director would prefer not to. Terminal 5’s launch may have been a disaster, but could it have been avoided? What could they have done differently?

Yes, listen to what your staff are saying – according to the papers.

It appears that many staff were saying they weren’t trained, rehearsed or just plain didn’t know their way round. And they had told management so. Then with a feeling of lack of transparency growing, customers and the newspapers went to town on the issues.

Backed up by word of mouth, a whirlwind developed. I only know 2 people who got held up or lost bags or both. But interestingly my daughter said there was nowhere to sit, too many shops (and that’s a first for her…) and many shops didn’t have stock – that being 2 weeks after launch.

As a customer, evidently it isn’t part of BA’s culture to listen. I’ve tried giving feedback a couple of times at the airport. The staff direct you to the website. When I say I don’t get a response that way, they have no options or alternatives.

And if you’re from Virgin, don’t feel smug. They’ll take the feedback but it doesn’t change anything e.g. the staffing of desks for self service check in or premium economy haven’t changed over time.

So the incoming replacements may want to consider how they can implement systematic listening as a process…..cue what our customers are saying

BA, Virgin, WOCAS, airlines | No Comments

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

Uncategorized, WOCAS, first direct, listening, word of mouth | No Comments

ISPs frustrate me. First, the IT support process requires you to quote usernames and passwords (which are a non-configurable jumble of letters and numbers) in every email you send to them. Why would I want to contact Fasthosts if they weren’t my service provider? I think 99.9999% of us have better things to do than get assistance from another ISP - which is bound to be technically flawed anyway.

Second, several of us in Budd are now using Blackberry’s and judging by the numbers of people sending email on the train this morning, so is half the business world. So why does Fasthost insist on not supporting them? My support question this morning asked why they didn’t, when they would and should I take my business elsewhere? The response was pilot but completely missed the point. “We have no plans to support Blackberry but contact us if you need anything else”. No I don’t need anything else, I want Blackberry support!!!

This sensitivity to the situation is often missing from the customer experience process. How often do you end up being told “sorry we can’t do that here, you’ll have to call another number” or similar, and then be asked “but is there anything else I can help you with today?”, is a ludicrous and blindingly stupid approach to the customer experience.

Awareness of and sensitivity towards the customer frustrations have been squeezed out of many call centres by performance management approaches. We see this more and more as we implement WOCAS and train the front line. We spend more time on the awareness part than we do on using the tools and need to support for them for some time afterwards to embed the habit of spotting the frustrations (and logging them).

As ever, changing behaviours is far more critical than just changing the process or tools.

WOCAS, customer experience design, success factors | No Comments