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?

CCF was originally formed by Janette Menday and Francis Brookes (now Fish) when they realised there was a big education gap as res centres became call centres and more industries started to adopt them. They were passionate about this and left their ops jobs in American Airlines to set up Call Centre Focus. I remember meeting Janette and Fran at the very first Call Centre Conference I spoke at (that’ll be about 400 ago…) and was taken by their passion and knowledge for the subject and the people in the industry. Anyway the rest as they say is history. When they started the Awards, Janette and I poured over endless presentations to find that Halifax Direct was a clear winner – where is Mike Riley and his guitar now? We quickly realised we needed to see the sites, so to speak, and a great crew of judges was co-opted by Janette to take part, some of whom are still involved today. Then after Fran left, Louise Chuter and Emma Brown took up the challenge to develop the awards dinner, and brilliant bashes they were and are. Janette sold on to CMP and retired down to Devon to run holiday cottages, Fran is running SOH and Louise is running Contact Centre Link

So a little bit of recognition to those who set those events in motion. Well done, the industry grew up, but the parties are still great fun!

Booking was simple, apart from the fact that you had to say ‘no’ rather than ‘yes’ to additional services and if you were not careful they were automatically added on to the final cost. The web design leads you to sign up for services you probably don’t require unless you book really carefully. 

But that was not the main problem; it was when I came to pay. I entered all my details using my maestro card, (paying a £1.75 charge!) to be routed to a secure payment process asking me to re-enter details from my card and home postcode, which I duly did, only to be rejected.

Tried again, waited, rejected. Went back to beginning of whole booking process, entered everything again, rejected. Telephone number given in case of difficulties, tried to call, message tells me office hours are 8 am to 9 pm – what use is that to me at, by now, 11.30 at night! Overall an extremely frustrating experience but from which some simple messages are clear for Easy Jet to take on board (no pun intended) 

• Web sites should show charges for services clearly and simply. Design that can confuse gives a low value experience and create cynical customers with low loyalty
• Present the true cost of booking. Show charges simply and clearly. Being told that by paying in a certain method it’s going to cost more is annoying. From my perspective if the cost had been bundled into the overall flight charge I would not have noticed        
• Think of your customer experience when using your site. Offering help, then not being able to get it, e.g. no 24 hour cover, is extremely frustrating. It’s great having total security but not when it drives customers away to an easier to access competitor

I finally managed to sort the payment out the following day, but not without a lot of hassle.  Is it me? or have others experienced the same problems?  I’d be interested in anyone who has experienced similar frustrations on airline web sites, not just Easy Jet. As the travel market gets tougher what makes you, as a customer, really frustrated about how the service providers are reacting? What do you think as customers should be happening? If you have the time, please blog our web site with details of your experiences and I’ll collate these for publication.  You never know it just might make the airlines interested enough to listen.

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.

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!

It can also apply in other contexts. Consider an administration overhaul at a hospital clinic, such that the number of patients treated by each doctor per day is increased. In each pair, which improvement would free up the most doctors to go and work elsewhere?
a) Each day 11 patients treated per doctor instead of 5.
b) Each day, 8 patients treated per doctor instead of 4.
a) Each day, 8 patients treated per doctor instead of 4.
b) Each day, 16 patients treated per doctor instead of 7.

Svenson again found that her participants consistently applied the Ratio Rule, so that most of them said erroneously that option (a) was more time saving for the first pair, and that option (b) was more time saving for the second pair.
So why do we always apply the Ratio Rule if it consistently leads to the wrong judgement? Svenson said the Ratio Rule works when both options start from the same point (e.g. the same speed, or the same number of patients treated). This may then lead it to become a reinforced and favoured rule applied in real-life experiences.

According to Svenson, this bias in the way we compare time saving options has real-world implications. For example, people who are already driving fast will overestimate the time saved by driving even faster. Meanwhile, politicians may be prone to improving an already fast operation, rather than making improvements to a slower operation with more time-saving potential.

SVENSON, O. (2008), Decisions among time saving options: When intuition is strong and wrong. Acta Psychologica, 127(2), 501-509, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2007.09.003 Author weblink: http://www2.psychology.su.se/staff/osn/

Jonathan Wilson

In the 1930s, GM was in deep trouble as the Century’s worst recession devastated demand and profitability.They were on the verge of closing Cadillac.  But Nicholas Dreystadt said he had a plan to make Cadillac profitable in eighteen months, Depression or no Depression. The first part of his plan resulted from an observation he had made travelling around the country to the service departments of Cadillac dealerships. Cadillac was after the “prestige market,” and part of its strategy to capture that market was its refusal to sell to blacks. Despite this official discrimination, Dreystadt had noted that an astonishing number of customers at the service departments consisted of members of the nation’s tiny black elite: the boxers, singers, doctors, and lawyers who earned large incomes despite the flourishing Jim Crow atmosphere of the 1930s. Most status symbols were not available to these people. They couldn’t live in fancy neighborhoods or patronize fancy nightclubs. But getting around Cadillac’s policy of refusing to sell was easy: They just paid white men to front for them.

Dreystadt urged the executive committee to go after this market. Why should a bunch of white front men get several hundred dollars each when that profit could flow to General Motors? The board bought his reasoning, and in 1934 Cadillac sales increased by 70 percent, and the division actually broke even. In June 1934 Nick Dreystadt was made head of the Cadillac Division.

He proceeded to revolutionize the way luxury cars were made. “Quality is design and tooling,” he said, “inspection and service; it is not inefficiency.” He was willing to spend money on superior design and better machine tools. He was willing to spend even more on quality control and top-notch service departments. He was not willing to spend money on production itself.

“Nick made us look closely at everything,” one Cadillac executive remembered. “If someone else made a part for two dollars, why did ours have to cost three or four?” In less than three years of this attitude at the top, Cadillac’s production costs were no higher, per unit, than those of General Motors’ low-end Chevrolets.

And because Cadillac still sold for luxury prices despite its drastically reduced production costs, it had become General Motors’ most profitable car per unit. In still-depressed 1937 more Cadillacs were sold than in roaring 1928. 

Jonathan Wilson

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!

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?

1) They let management 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