The Budd Blog

Posted by: Ian Mapp | 15.10.2009

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

Posted by: Ian Mapp | 18.09.2009

We talk a lot about the customer experience, but relatively little about the employee (or agent) experience. This is tightly wrapped up with that of the customer since often the two interact directly with each other.

More than simply sterile discussions and weasel words about employee engagement, a genuine shift of responsibility and leadership to the frontline employees leads to improved employee satisfaction – which will in turn be reflected in the levels of customer satisfaction. Dealing with an employee that can actually take responsibility for problems and get them solved is a refreshing experience!

Middle and senior management are often loathe to give up their power and perceived control – but wake up, those days are gone and there is a fundamental shift in the operating model and the way successful organisations are managing themselves.

Budd has long been a proponent of this culture of trust, through its WOCAS (What Our Customers Are Saying) processes and tools. So, it was good to read this article by Louise Druce at MyCustomer.com. Okay, it is only an introductory piece, trailing an event later in the year, but is a useful two minute introduction to the topic.

WOCAS, agent experience, customer experience, fast+simple | No Comments

Posted by: Sue Cooke | 11.09.2009

Everyone in the contact centre would agree that wiki/ intranet is an exceptionally useful tool, but there are still boulders to trip over.
A call centre I visited recently had a lovely intranet wiki very easy to use until THEYYYY changed it! What followed was soul destroying to see, previously nicely ironed out brows became knitted, heart rendering sobs, desperate sighs and irritated customers asked to hold for a minute or 2,3,4 utter confusion, frustration, well complete chaos really.
The cause as always was simple; of course the business told the users they were changing the wiki and they even very generously gave them a quick 5 minutes off the phone to demonstrate the changes but what they failed to understand was that people learn at different speeds so some bright sparks got it, but those of us who take longer to learn or learn by use didn’t get it and had to struggle in front of the customer, how embarrassing and unnecessary. I will let you sum up the effect on the brand and reputation of that business!

wikis | No Comments

Posted by: Peter Massey | 17.08.2009

3 examples of possibly genuine companies affecting their brand trust & creating lots of avoidable contact.

I received a letter the other day. It was from a company called PCN Debt Recovery and Prosecution Service. It said I’d had a parking ticket in March at my local station and I owed them £90. Send your bank details and sign here. It smelled like the typical email from a prince in Africa asking me to claim my lottery winnings…… Phishing.

Nevertheless being a conscientious and curious person, I rang the non geographic number for payments several times. Each time it transfered to a foreign ring tone and was never answered. Eventually I rang Southeastern rail enquiries to see if it was a genuine company. They didn’t know of it and knew a company called Meteor run the car parks, not PCN. So it was probably a scam? They’d check it out and come back to me.

Meanwhile I finally got through to PCN so it existed at least. They couldn’t identify themselves as genuine. They had no process for this. They had no data to prove it. DVLA had given them my details based on my car registration number. Interesting who DVLA will give my private data to.

Anyway, they had no record of the ticket anyway and suggested it be dropped but I send them a note so it wouldn’t bite me later.

This morning I got a letter from Dan Westlake at Southeastern confirming nothing. It just referred me to Meteor. They obviously weren’t listening as they got my name wrong and answered a different question to the one I asked.

So is PCN a genuine company or a scam? I still don’t know. Do I trust Southeastern more or less than before?

I’ve had the same thing earlier in the year with a company called Assets Reunited apparently working for Aviva. It even had their logo on it. Their “phishing” letter said they were working for Aviva and had found £3000 that Aviva owed me. Just fill in your bank details and sign here.  Hmmmm – would you? It has a number but a professional phisher would. I tried 2 routes to prove their id. I sent an email from the Aviva website form. They never replied. I emailed a contact in Aviva Life. They didn’t reply.

Is Assets Reunited a genuine company or a scam? I still don’t know. Do I trust Aviva more or less than before?

But the third example is different. HMRC sent me a letter saying we had our own business address wrong – doh talk about a dumb letter. It asked for all my details including bank accounts and a signature. Hmmm phishing? I phoned the number, got through and asked the lady to ID&V HMRC. Not in the least thrown by the question, she answered my address and last payments questions and we sorted it out. I asked my standard question of “what would you do if I gave you feedback?”. Instead of the usual “derrrrr” or “we don’t do that, send it to the website” she said she had a process with her team leader and would pass on my comments about looking like a phishing letter.

Do I trust HMRC more or less than before?

All are great examples of avoidable contact but let’s not start on that just now? Would your company pass an ID&V test? Would your outsourcers pass your ID&V test? Let me know your thoughts….

Customer satisfaction, customer experience, data protection, dumb things, phishing | 1 Comment

Posted by: Ian Mapp | 17.08.2009

… the “smart thing” won by several days, even though it gave the “dumb thing” several days head start.

I hope that hasn’t spoiled it for you, knowing the result right at the beginning! Truth be told, it was never going to be much of a race – but I didn’t know that at the beginning.

Recently, I was told a story a company, a large and well-known company, with a recently discovered supply chain issue. The issue had been hidden and overlooked as a result of working in silos; and a process that was designed from the inside-out – without understanding the impact on the overall customer experience. They had set a customer expectation of acknowledging correspondence within five days, and were very pleased to be working to an internal service level of two days.

Ignore for a moment the potential cost implication of resourcing to deliver a service level significantly better than the customer expectation or whether a customer would think five days turnaround a great service in these days of ‘instant’ messaging, and consider how pleased with themselves they were at exceeding the expectations on a routine basis.

Sadly, the customers were not so pleased as the correspondence was not being received even in five days, much less two! And what was the root cause? Well, the “dumb thing” was a contract with an outsourced fulfilment company which included a seven day service level for despatch of correspondence – ouch!

Bill Price and David Jaffe in their book The Best Service Is No Service talk about the idea of ‘stapling’ yourself to an issue when looking at customer journeys. Actually following the route through the (extended) organisation to fully understand the end-to-end customer experience. Clearly, this had not been done when this process was designed.

That story started last week and the poor customer is probably still waiting for their acknowledgement!

Contrast that with a phone call today to Axa Sun Life today. I needed a form to report the loss of a policy document. I got through immediately, was transferred promptly after the initial triage of my call and was answered immediately again!

The agent immediately understood what was needed and offered, yes offered, to email the form to me – and it arrived promptly. The whole experience took about five minutes.

Simple, well-designed, smart service – a winner every time!

brilliant basics, customer experience, dumb things, financial services | No Comments

Posted by: Peter Massey | 29.07.2009

Being back with O2 on my own phone after leaving Vodafone, it’s interesting to see what’s the same and what’s different. Professionally it’s reputed that 02 is pulling ahead on Netpromoter scores .

I have no inside knowledge on this but the stories suggest they may even be as high as +30, whereas others are between 0 and +10. Can anyone correct me there?

However as a customer I can see great attempts but no real difference. In the first month:

• Apple Store set it up well
• Internet tethering to use my iPhone as a dongle, paid for but not working – in fact the option has “impossibly” disappeared from my iphone
• Complete voice outage last Monday, caused missed work
• Signal outage again this weekend
• First ebill reminder came through – but my user name and password didn’t work, although I knew what they were. The fallback process failed as it had the wrong answer to my reminder question.
• So I had to call. Well done, I got through very quickly on a Sunday afternoon. The agent reset very quickly and told me how to reset back to my desired names. Obviously does this a lot….
• Tried to reset to what I can remember easily, but the choice was restricted. Tried again and it wants me to use my email address – too weak for me and it wouldn’t let me choose the name/password I associate with all my Apple stuff. I gave up so I’ll ring next time.
• Next time will be soon as my first bill is twice what I was expecting.

During all this, for professional interest I tried the website for everything. I couldn’t use the iphone as there was no signal…. Nothing to help in the c2c forum (presented oldest first – why?) and search was very sales orientated. The “announcements” just take you back to the support page with no announcements.

Come on O2, I reckon you can live your brand better. Share whatever your known pain points are with us customers. An open and honest set of announcements about known network problems. Maybe even a proactive text when it’s been fixed. Take part in the c2c forum, keep it up to date. Help make the topics relevant to the top reasons for contact. See, we’d be better connected to each other then.

Send me your views on the best customer forums and on 02

O2, customer forums | No Comments

Posted by: Ian Mapp | 29.07.2009

My heart sank as I entered the check-in hall at Luton airport – a massive queue for the Dortmund flight desks. Not sure why I was surprised as I have had this experience before, but I was. Also a bit angry at the anticipated waste of time. And waste of time it almost was.

Standing in the queue, brain in neutral, I was idly thinking that I hadn’t looked at Twitter for several days, and I pulled out my phone to check the latest messages. Somehow, the trivial nature of Twitter content seemed a soothing prospect.

Naturally, my frustration with standing in the queue led to a tweet: “easyJet check-in queue not moving at all”. To be completely truthful, it took two tweets as the predictive text on my phone managed to put ‘doping’ instead of ‘moving’ the first time. I later discovered that the input language was set to German – I guess we will never know if it was my mistake, or over-eagerness by a super-intelligent phone, as I stood queuing for a flight to Germany!

I felt no better having sent the message and so resorted to talking to those around me, who were equally unhappy at the mystifying delay. I finally checked in after a one hour wait and the rest of the journey was completed perfectly satisfactorily.

At some point, it occurred to me that I had heard someone from easyJet was active on Twitter and so the next morning, with a few minutes to spare before a meeting, I opened up my laptop and logged back in.

Sure enough, there was a reply from @easyJetCare: “easyJetCare @imptwo I will pass your feedback on to Liz our airport manager for Luton. Usually they move pretty quickly. Hope you had a good flight ^PH”.

A Wow! moment. Direct customer engagement from easyJet, I was genuinely impressed. I had to test how far this would go and so responded: “imptwo @easyJetCare thanks for replying – others around me were unhappy with the 1 hour wait too. It’s raining here – can u fix that too? ”.

Again a reply – in a couple of hours: “easyJetCare@imptwo I will follow up, it is essential that you are informed about your delays. I wish I could fix the rain but I’m not that good ^PH”. This exchange now had a real human feel about it, and, curiously, just getting a response did make me feel better.

Nothing had actually changed and I am pretty sure the experience will be repeated. And the defence that a low-prices means low standards only goes so far; there are minimum standards of treatment and respect to which everyone is entitled.

But, a simple human contact (albeit technology-mediated), tempered with a little humour and I am prepared to forgive – which I guess makes me the very epitome of a loyal easyJet customer. Do you think I should worry about myself?

What it does demonstrate is the powerful principle that delivering a service of any kind is a person-to-person transaction, and don’t ever forget it when designing customer experiences. Now, if only easyJet were to send me a “you said, we did” message to let me know what has changed as a result of my feedback, that would be a great end to the story ….

Customer satisfaction, complaint, customer experience, customer experience design, fast+simple, feedback, humour, listening | No Comments

Posted by: Peter Massey | 24.07.2009

I recently had to take my car into London, it was a very expensive trip. Apart from the 40p per 5 minutes to park near the office and drop stuff off, I forgot to pay the congestion charge. I discovered the very interesting “data protection” notice on the website before paying:

Transport for London (TfL) and its agents will process your information for the operation of the Congestion Charging Scheme. Processing will include the use of cameras to record data. Your information may be disclosed to, or requested from, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), local authorities, law enforcement agencies and other organisations for the administration (including verification of discount entitlement) and enforcement of the scheme; the prevention and detection of crime and protection of public funds. TfL randomly selects and monitors vehicles subject to a discount to identify possible fraudulent use. If you persistently fail to pay congestion charges due or attempt to defraud the scheme, TfL may record your vehicle’s movements and may disclose relevant details to local authorities and/or law enforcement agencies, to assist in tracing persistent evaders and those committing fraud.

By pressing ‘Accept’ I confirm that I am aware of the data protection information above
2 things. You can’t pay without accepting (but you can if you use the phone). And its pretty much carte blanch to do what they want with your pictures.

Why is it called ‘data protection’ – surely they’re open to being sued under the trade descriptions act!

congestion charge, data protection, transport for london | No Comments

Posted by: Peter Massey | 23.07.2009

I’ve recently made the transition from the Microsoft world to the Apple world. A rich vein for blogging but luckily for you, dear reader, I fell out of the habit of blogging as I twittered succinctly instead. Well now to make up for it….

Not just Microsoft was to be left behind. I moved from the rest of the world, as I got rid of Nokia and Dell at the same time. No offence to the Nokia world, I loved my old Nokia engine that only did simple things simply – but a waiter in Kashmir is dining out on the proceeds of our cash, phones and ipods stolen from the hotel rooms on our “LimeBridge goes trekking” global get together in June.

Digressing for a moment….did I tell you about seeing a snow leopard! Here it is! I’ll come back to that later

Any offence to Dell? I don’t know, I never tried to get help for daily crashes or a battery on their machine that struggled to make the 1 hour  journey into London. Or a shoulder ache from the weight. Ok, when my last machine gave up the ghost in the middle of a seriously hot project in the Cabinet Office I had to rush out and buy the highest spec machine I could. So its my fault I bought a dog. It’s my fault I should have read the blogs in more detail, I only got as far as Dell delivery delays but found a high spec, very reasonably priced one in PC World in a hurry.

But I didnt try to contact Dell or read a Dell site. Interesting.

I did try to contact the PC World site abut the battery and the crashing but they didn’t return their nicely formatted emails. I could have gone to the store but I’d got better things to do.

I did try making sure I had the latest updates from MS and I tried their forums but crashes just seem to be an expectation with Vista. 2 or 3 times a day was becoming unbearable. Put that with slow performance on a high spec machine and the loss of an hour a day isnt tenable. Just opening the machine could take me two train stops in the morning. You could make the tea, whilst saving a 2003 compatible file. I blame MS – whether or not it’s their fault I don’t know.

The other reason MS get the blame is what they did to their standard office products in upgrading from 2003 to 2007, the other “upgrade” I experienced, alongside Vista. No new functionality, is just you cant find any of it !!! After 3 months, I’ve got used to it. But why did they do that?

When I looked at my daughter’s Mac, I realised. They were training me to think Mac!!

So back to Kashmir and the stolen phone and ipod. I’ll save the insurance story for another blog, but of course I asked my PA on the emergency call to get them to redirect voice mail (can’t do that..) and get a new phone, sim and dongle. Now call me old fashioned but every bit of customer experience work we did with telcos in the 90s said the key churn point was a lost phone.  So I kinda expected this to be a slick process.

Whoops not at Vodafone. Call centre says you need a letters in writing to take to the shop. Shop says you didn’t need that letter for the phone. Whilst I’m there, can they replace my stolen dongle. Not without a written letter. But its £2 of plastic memory stick. No. I’m thinking of moving all our business account away. No. Very well then.

Off I go to the Apple store to replace my ipod. And that’s where it got expensive. Greeted as I entered by enthusiastic Apple fans, shown the tempting wares, I walked out with a ipod touch, the thing I came for. And a MacBook Air with no moving hard drive, endless  battery life and the sexiest touch this side of …….well anyway. And no Microsoft stuff to crash. To date a month in, it hasn’t crashed.

The only reason I didnt walk out with an iPhone was that they can’t sell a business account, only to individuals. So off I trot to the O2 store.

Then I meet the very ordinary environment and endless queue and the business prevention officers again. Everything in writing in triplicate bla bla. I give up.

And walk back to the Apple store and buy an iphone privately there. A very chatty lady from Oklahoma configured it and set it up and showed me all about it. In fairness to O2, I bought another iphone for daughter no.3 who was out of contract this weekend in Maidstone and they’re trying very hard to copy the Apple model. Much better, but no emotion.

So you get I’m an Apple fan now? Thoroughly

You get I’m a Vodafone, O2, PC World, Dell ‘neutral’. You get I’m a Microsoft ‘detractor’ -  or rather a Windows detractor. in fact I like Microsoft – they have great people, great ethos – just a lousy product that doesn’t work and they forgot the user interface was a key asset.

You can probably guess my 1-10 Netpromoter scores. Yes, a 9 for Apple and 3 or 4 for the others, I bet I can guess the companies’ Netpromoter scores, without knowing them.

But wait, it’s not that simple. I bet you can’t guess how many problems Ive had with the Mac and the iphone. Just as many as I had with the Dell and more than with my old phone. In fact the Mac wont sync with the mail server so I can’t use it fully. I can only get my old email history across if I give them both my machines for 48 hours. It turns out the solution is a mod to the operating system in September called, wait for it….. snow leopard! The bluetooth worked but now it doesn’t and the internet link option to the Mac has, impossibly, disappeared from the iphone. The gurus in store don’t know everything so refer to the c2c site (which is good) and although the call centre answers the phone, it’s very average.

Yet I’m still a raving fan – why? As a consumer, I haven’t worked it out.  But as a professional what I know is it’s crucial to understand the calibration of the drivers of netpromoter scores. Brand, price, product, service relative to segment. These are all elements of the ‘customer experience’ that are being scored. And what drives each element in detail is relevant if one wants to change the promotional activity by customers on customers. And this is a really interesting example.

An example, other companies cannot simply copy parts of, without understanding the whole. The Apple experience design.

So combining my consumer and professional hats, here are a few thoughts on why I’m an actual promoter despite what has happened

1. Brand
I was pretty neutral about the brand. Loved how my classic ipod made my music accessible, loved the New York store where I bought it ( blogged Aug 07). Loved the London store on the odd occasion I’d been in professionally examining. But really, was I a geek or a media person or a designer…..not as cool as that I’m afraid.

2. Price
Had looked before and decided it was very expensive compared to laptops, despite what fans said. Would have to buy more MS software on top because at work we only have licences for PCS.

3. Product
Yes they looked sexy, but once I’d played with the iTouch, the iPhone Mac Air I was wowed. This is what did it in conjunction with parts of the other factors. The swish of your fingers to do things….. Dont ask me why. Let me try harder to look:
a.  It’s very thin and very light – practicality. And the power lead is very light with light cable too so the total effect is a bag you don’t have to hump around.
b. Because there’s no moving hard drive, there’s v little heat to cool, so no fans, less power consumption and so endless battery – 7 hours showing at the moment.
c. Switching it on and off. It takes less than 2 secs to sleep and 1 second to be available when you open the lid. I just timed it mid sentence! This changes stuff. You can look up stuff on internet whenever you want. You can work on a tube. You can do the little things when you think of them, rather than putting them on a bit of paper.
d. The design is fab. The finish and surfaces are so great, the tiny magnetic power connector, the closing lid to the ports. The way the mouse pad feels
e. The touch functionaility. If I tap once, twice, three times, different things happen. I f I tap or swipe with two fingers. If I swipe up or down or across with four fingers, everything on screen whoooshes around so I can see them. If I press f8, I can see my 4 spaces – I have four screens to put different projects in so my desktop is huge. And the most basic thing, the keys are lovely.
f. The applications stay open when you ‘close’ them so they’re back in a jiff if you need them
g. The compatibility so far has been very high for files brought across or sent- the key thing I checked with other ‘promoters’ – Mac users. In fact, all bar one, all users were promoters.
h. The functionality of the core programmes is great and actually only took a few hours of playing with every function to learn. Having been in ‘confused’ mode with MS2007 must have helped. I would certainly have found it harder had I still been using the 2003 formats I know so well. Its certainly not perfect with about 3 controls needed to switch a bullet point off and on. I struggle to control the presentations full screen. Even when I use my iPhone as a remote control – so cool! But I bet there’s a control somewhere I haven’t learned yet.
i. Most of all, it just doesn’t stall, crash, or need a reboot. I have managed  to fox the USB port a couple of times by extracting without ejecting!
So yes the product itself is a big bit of my promoter score.

4. The service – design first and then experience
The key element of design has been putting the face to face retail experience at the heart of things. And recognising that face to face retail experience is drab to non existent in most places, or posh and snotty in others. Either way it puts you off. Retail seems to be at the heart of getting the brand passion across. It starts in the store design and completes by having  more than enough people all the time. All the stores I’ve visited are fully staffed with enthusiasts. People who really love Apple products and love working for Apple. You get approached for help in most stores, and even when its busy you can get help. The genius bar is available to book on line and get lessons or support as you wish. Just going back to the store, or different stores, a few times, you start to feel part of it.  When geniuses consult each other for help you feel part of the conversation. You learn how to get the most out of the Mac and iPhone and as a result you engage emotionally with it. The c2c site seems to be at the heart of what geniuses and the web support is about – again its being part of something. Less said about the call centres in comparison, it feels like a.n.other company.

The service experience is challenging. I’ve always seen that resolution is the the top driver of satisfaction, followed by helpful, knowledgeable staff. In this case I still lack a lot of resolution for certain things but haven’t (yet) become dissatisfied. I can’t yet give away my Dell until I see if Snow leopard stops my exchange sync. Check back in Septemeber and see….

Meanwhile, I’ll start to plot more scientifically the drivers tree for netpromotion.

Get in touch, if you want to share your thoughts on how Apple’s netpromotion works and how you’re calibrating spend against netpromotion, emotional engagement and the design of the experience.

Apple, Dell, O2, customer experience, netpromoter, vodafone | 2 Comments

Posted by: Peter Massey | 22.07.2009

I found this whilst clearing rubbish and thought it worth sharing !

• Don’t – unless you need to
• Never negotiate with yourself
• Never accept the first offer
• Never make the first offer
• Listen more and talk less
• No free gifts
• Watch the salami and the jelly fish
• Don’t fall for rookies regret
• Always avoid the quick deal
• Never reveal what your bottom line is or was

The 4 rules locked in my head from way back when are:

• Don’t negotiate until the selling is finished
• Always bear the whole package in mind (don’t negotiate bit by bit)
• Trade on all the variables
• Both sides need to win; you can’t win if it’s not clear what you want

Anyone any tips to share?

negotiation | No Comments