This is a tough mindset shift for some businesses, however this is the same message I deliver to many of my clients when developing Customer Experience and/ or Complaints Management programmes for them. The business should be looking to actively encourage complaints. Not only to come up with new ideas, but also find out the truth.

Some people are surprised when I suggest this. They ask “why would we want to encourage customers to talk about their gripes?”. They are worried that by encouraging complaints, they might put customers in the wrong frame of mind. The reality of the situation and what they are actually worried about, however, is being put in a difficult awkward or potentially embarrassing situation themselves.

Customers typically won’t just complain about nothing. Okay – well some particularly negative-minded people might, but they are very much in the minority. Most people will only complain if they have a genuine reason to. The reality however (especially if you’re British, who can be particularly reserved about such things) is that most people won’t say anything at all when they are unhappy. They’ll simply not use the service again.

What would you rather have? An unhappy customer who stops using your product/ service and tells all of their friends and family how unhappy they are, or an unhappy customer who tells you why they are unhappy? With the latter, you at least have the opportunity to resolve the issue.

“To err is human”. Everyone makes mistakes and your business is no exception to this rule. The customer usually understands that things go wrong. What really matters is how you address the mistake once it has happened. There is a very strong argument to suggest that customers will be more loyal to a company that makes a mistake and resolves it quickly than they will a company that makes no mistakes at all. It is unproven as to whether this theory is correct or not, however there is a logic to it. Making a mistake shows a human side to the business that we might not otherwise see; and people like dealing with human beings.

However, don’t be fooled – if you don’t resolve the issue once is has been voiced, then the customer may not give you a second chance. This can be seen with Customer Satisfaction surveys the world over. If we go about asking the customer their view and then do nothing with this information, this can be worse than not asking for the information at all.

So beware! Don’t ask for complaints unless you are genuinely interested in and empowered to resolve them!

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Having been a enormous advocate of First Direct bank since I became a customer of theirs in 1994, you might expect me to be a fan of self-service. With First Direct, that certainly is the case. However in the past ten years, I have had some very bad experiences with self-service too.

The self-service revolution has come about for a number of reasons. In today’s 24/ 7 society, self-service has provided people with the facility to gain access to certain services on an almost constant basis. On the whole, people nowadays have more disposable income than they have had before, but also less time in which to spend it, leading to the widespread use of the phrase “time-rich, time-poor” to describe some of the more affluent sectors of our society.

It is now quite amusing for us to think back to episodes of Tomorrow’s World from the 60′s & 70′s that suggested that technology would revolutionise the way we live by creating a “leisure culture” in which machines would do all the work. As we all now appreciate, technology has, in fact, had quite the opposite effect. It has made human beings more productive than they have ever been before. In order for us to remain competitive in a now global business environment, having constant access to the internet makes many people feel almost compelled to work around the clock. For these people, having access to services in the middle of the night is almost a necessity. Who wants to queue up for a meeting with their bank manager on a Saturday morning, especially if they can arrange a mortgage in the middle of the night via a browser?

Self service can, however, be massively advantageous for a business too. Depending on exactly how much control the business is prepared to hand over to the customer, the implementation of self service can be seen as an enormous cost-saving exercise. Ostensibly, the business is getting the customer to do their work for them… and the customers love it!!

Not only do we have less time than we’ve ever had before, but this lack of time has turned us consumers into control freaks who are not satisfied that a job has been done completely and/ or properly unless we have done it ourselves! However this also raises an interesting question. Has service, on the whole, been so bad in our lifetimes that the only way we can rely on “getting it right” is by doing it ourselves? If this is the case, then growth in popularity of self-service might also be viewed as being a sad indictment of the state of the service industry over the past fifty years.

As many of us have already experienced, self-service can go horribly wrong as well. Many organisations that have found themselves “behind the curve” relative to the competition have almost had their hand forced into quickly developing self-service technologies for their customers.

What made it so easy for First Direct to successfully provide self-service was that it was a natural progression from their existing agent-based call centre technology. It was almost as simple as creating a browser interface to give customers similar access to the systems that agents were already utilising.

However for banks that operate around a more traditional branch-based business model, the creation of self-service technologies has not been so straightforward. In addition to First Direct, I have used three other more traditional banks’ online self-service systems, all of which were extremely disappointing and not a scratch on the service provided by First Direct.

When self-service goes wrong, not only does the customer feel that they have lost control over what they are doing, but they also feel far more distant from the business than they did previously. When a computer-based system doesn’t work properly, not only is the apology is far less genuine, but the requirement for us to find human support as an alternative can leave some of us feeling like we’ve been wasting our time in the first instance.

And that is if we can find any human support at all. A number of incredibly poor interactions with one paid service, which would only provide me with online access to a so-called intelligent FAQ support system, led me to cancelling my service subscription altogether. I would have been happy to have paid for service support, however that wasn’t even an option!

So, it is probably fair to say that self-service hasn’t got all of the answers. In the UK, Metro Bank has sprung up in the last few years promising to provide customers with a completely new and improved face-to-face customer service experience, offering longer opening times and a more vibrant almost ‘shop-like’ banking environment. They have chosen to use the phrase ‘stores’ rather than the more traditional ‘branches’ to describe their outlets, which signals a more informal, customer-orientated approach to customer management.

It would be very interesting to understand the reasoning behind the creation of this new bank. Is this a direct response to the poor service provided by traditional branch-based banks, or might it be in response to the poor service offered by poorly implemented self-service systems? If the latter were the case, it would mean that the industry has gone full circle – self-service introduced as replacement for poor face-to-face service, followed by face-to-face service introduced as a replacement for poor self-service!

Either way, it will be very interesting to not only observe the performance of Metro bank over the next few years, but also the reaction of consumers to the increasing importance of self-service too. One thing is for sure – getting it wrong might be altogether worse than not doing it at all.

If my friends in the world of User Experience have anything to say about this, then self-service will and can only get better and better….

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Customer Experience has grown enormously in popularity over the past decade. It makes perfect sense that businesses should put customers right at the very heart of everything they do. After all, it is the customer who pays our wages! Yet, despite all of this, the customer remains largely misunderstood in most organisations. In order to unravel this issue, there are two key questions that need to be answered, namely:

• When the customer looks at our business, what do they see?
• Who within our business owns the overall customer experience?

Let’s attempt to answer each of these questions in order.

The question “When the customer looks at our business, what do they see?” seem like quite an odd question, but perfectly relevant. When we think about our own organisations from within, we tend to describe them in the same way that we might describe an organisational chart – very much in terms of functions and levels, rather like the image below:

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http://www.fastcompany.com/1810674/culture-eats-strategy-for-lunch

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So – am I serious?

Deadly.

Now, of course, we can argue for a year and a day as to what makes marketing & customer experience different, however I think a lot of this comes down to what a person’s definition of marketing is. This is the key to the problem. Marketing is the most misunderstood of all business activities.

If you walked down the high street and stopped every person you met and asked them what marketing was, you would be more than likely to get a different answer from each one. The majority of them would tell you something that bore some resemblance to the truth, however you would be highly unlikely to get a truly accurate answer from any of them. Some might get it completely wrong. Some might give you the partial truth, along the lines of:

“It’s something to do with advertising isn’t it?”

or even…

“It’s like selling isn’t it?”

Someone with a little bit of knowledge or training might stretch as far as to say:

“It’s all about the 4/ 7 P’s isn’t it?”

Now, to be fair, none of these are completely inaccurate. They are, however, incomplete and as such, partially inaccurate. The best definition that I have heard to date comes from the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) in the UK, that defines Marketing as:

“The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.”

Now, how we achieve all of the above is, of course, through the use of sales, advertising, the 4 P’s, etc., hence me saying that all of the earlier potential responses held partial truth. However if we take a very long, hard look at this definition, I would argue that it is very hard, if not impossible, to differentiate between this and any definition that we might be able to come up with to accurately describe customer experience.

Now there are some (possibly many) people who would argue that customer experience isn’t just about making a profit. Of course, there are many decisions taken from a customer experience perspective that have no short-term impact on the profit position. However could the same not be said for brand advertising too? If an organisation is carrying out customer experience practices, it aims to make the customer happy; and if the customer is happy, the longer they remain a customer; and the longer they remain a customer, the greater the amount of profit the company makes.

So why not call ‘Customer Experience’ Marketing instead then?

For years I worked in Marketing for a number of different organisations and when I told lay people what I did for a living, most of them thought I made adverts, or I was a salesman or did copy writing. Now, I have, of course, done all three of those things in my time, however as time evolved, my role naturally became more strategic in nature.

When I became an independent consultant, I found that describing myself as a marketer often gave people completely the wrong impression of what I was about and what it was that I wanted to do. The last few years of my career in corporate had been more focused on the customer experience/ retention/ loyalty end of marketing and I quickly came to realise that this was the best way to consider marketing – from the perspective of the customer – as per the CIM definition of Marketing.

Now, there are bound to be a few marketers and customer services professionals who may argue with this post, how I would ascertain that it’s because they might be looking at their role with too narrow a focus. Let battle commence…

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Time always runs away with you doesn’t it? I’ve been meaning to write a blog entry for some time now, however being too busy always seems to take over doesn’t it? I have a list of subjects that I’ve compiled, ready for me to put virtual pen to virtual paper. I keep on telling myself that when work slows down, I’ll find the time.

However yesterday changed something for me. Yesterday I had a very bad, although, in some ways, very funny customer experience. And when humor grabs me by the throat, I really can’t help myself. I needed to share this before I forgot the details.

I was in London for the day, working from a client’s premises just off Baker Street, and had just had a very busy yet very productive morning. There was a lot to achieve in the afternoon, so it was agreed that we would only take half an hour for lunch. However during this half an hour, I had to fetch my lunch, eat my lunch and post a rather important letter. I decided I’d better post the letter first.

When I got into the Post Office it was great news. Six counters were open and I was number two in the queue. I’d be in and out in a flash! That was the plan anyway. The counters appeared to be open and there were lots of people on the other side of the glass screen milling about, but only one person was serving a customer.

Two or three minutes passed and I started to grow a little bit impatient. I turned around to notice that, in addition to the one person in front of me, there were now eight people behind me in the queue. All ten of us were starting to get a little bit irate, with tuts and tapping fingers audible all around. However there was still only one person serving.

From right at the far end of the counters, close to the door where I had come in, there could suddenly be heard raucous laughter coming from the foreign exchange counter. A punter appeared to be chatting with two members of staff on the other side of the glass and all three seemed to be really enjoying themselves. About six minutes had passed by this stage and I was still not being served.

I continued to stand there observing at least half a dozen people behind the glass, all milling about at what appeared to be extremely slow speeds. The most amazing thing was that all of these people seemed to be completely oblivious to the now fourteen of us standing in the queue. I heard another laugh coming from the foreign exchange counter then I overheard the punter mention that he would be back in bright and early tomorrow morning. The two people on the other side of the glass said goodbye to this guy by his first name and then he walked off. No transaction had been undertaken. The only assumptions I could make were that, at best this was a regular who had come in on a social call, or at worst he was an off-duty member of staff having a laugh with his colleagues.

Once he had gone, the foreign exchange counter was opened to serve the person in front of me (when nobody is specifically waiting for foreign exchange, that counter becomes available for regular customers) and then another counter became available for me. By this stage I had been waiting for ten minutes.

I quickly made my way down to the counter to find myself faced with one of the two members of staff who had been chatting with the ‘punter’. I made my request and the transaction began. I knew I couldn’t hold back.

Me: “Excuse me, I just have to mention something to you”

Counter clerk: BLANK STARE

Me: “I’ve been standing in line now for about ten minutes, six counters were open, loads of people were milling around behind the glass, but only one person was serving. I just thought I’d mention it as I only have half an hour for lunch.”

Counter clerk: “I’m terribly sorry sir, but a few people have phoned in sick and we are four people down today.”

Me: “To be honest with you though, the problem didn’t appear to be lack of staff, but just that people seemed to be completely oblivious to customers waiting in the queue. When I arrived there were two people in the queue and now there are about fifteen. And it didn’t help that all of us had to listen to loud laughter between colleagues at the foreign exchange counter.”

Counter clerk: “Well I can assure you sir that this wasn’t anything to do with me.”

He was avoiding eye contact with me. At this stage, I’m not sure what was worse. The fact that he was absolving himself of his contribution towards the collective customer service responsibility of the Post Office, or the fact that he was telling me a blatent lie. I knew he had been one of the three.

Me: “Well, first of all, I don’t really care who it was. This was a Post Office issue and if I can’t talk to you about it, then who can I? And second, I know that what you’ve just said is not true as I saw you having a laugh.”

Steely silence. He turned his head towards me, looked me straight in the eye and said:

“That’ll be one pound and nineteen pence please sir”

I couldn’t really believe the bare-faced arrogance of the man, but on reflection, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Despite increased competition from the private sector over the past 15 years or so, the Post Office is still pretty much a monopoly. The Royal Mail has felt the squeeze from the private sector, however it would appear that it hasn’t been quite as tough for the Post Office yet. Certainly doesn’t seem to have hit home at this branch yet anyway.

Although I was clearly very annoyed at the time, I now think about the whole thing with a grin on my face. A Customer Experience consultant’s dream. Maybe one day the Post Office will face private competition. Maybe one day, this counter clerk will wonder if his job will be on the line and start focusing on the people who really pay his salary. The customers.

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Well, I think Google have messed it up…again. Despite them having some great innovations, in the past few years, they have had some major league screw-ups too, especially in the social media field, including Orkut, Buzz & Wave. I fear that G+ will fair no better.

Is G+ superior to FB? Well yes…and no! From a technological design perspective it is better. Once it gets people on there, it allows them to do things that neither Twitter or Facebook can do. “Hang-outs” and “Circles” are a case in point. So that means that they will steal lots of market share from Facebook, right? Sure, they’ll steal some, but I’m not sure how much. Of course, geeks, techies and innovators (Diffusion of Innovation model) will open an account, but will they and others migrate? Here’s why I think not:

Firstly, stop with the soft launches Google! Beta testing is all well and good – it worked for gMail – but we can see what happened with Wave. A brilliant piece of technology that nobody used. Why? It was a functionally brilliant piece of social media software…but it was anti-social. Once you got on, there, it was impossible to find anyone else. I remember going onto Facebook to ask people who was on Wave!! Once I found someone who was, we decided to stay on Facebook to chat anyway! Crazy.

So then, in a blind panic – Google had invested millions of dollars into Wave – they then decided to launch Buzz to everyone with a Google account (probably to gain some leverage for Wave) and ended up breaking every single data privacy rule in the book. Using people’s data to give them something they have not asked for – even for free – is a big no-no! So, back to the drawing board…and along came G+…

Secondly, whereas Google seem to understand technology brilliantly, they don’t seem to understand people. From the design of G+, you can see that they simply expected people to “jump” straight off Twitter and Facebook onto G+ overnight. Nuh hu! Ain’t gonna happen. Why? Social media is all about connectivity. On Facebook, I’m connected. Google+ would allow me to do more cool things with my “friends” than Facebook would, but nobody is on there! I sent out loads of invites to connect on G+ and very few of my contacts took it up. And those who did opened an account, used it for a few days, and then finding that none of their friends were on there went back to Facebook.

Let me explain a little more what I mean about connectivity. Google+ allows people to post updates on Google+ that will appear in Twitter and on Facebook. Great! However, it currently doesn’t allow Twitter and Facebook posts to appear automatically on G+. Boooo! People are not going to automatically switch their allegiances overnight and start posting on G+ because their friends are not on there. The people at Twitter and Facebook understood this, which is why they allowed full two-way integration between their two platforms. But at the moment, whereas G+ are quite happy to open this up one-way (utilising Twitter and Facebook’s open APIs), they are not (currently) opening up the other way.

Social Media – rather like successful communication – is all about openness. If G+ were completely open, then people who are fans of Facebook and Twitter would fully integrate their platforms with G+ and, over time – when they slowly work out that G+ is superior – would migrate their time onto G+.

People are creatures of habit, hence all of the uproar about the new Facebook design. You are not going to get them to switch their behaviour onto a new platform overnight, especially if their friends are elsewhere. You are going to have to slowly coax and encourage them. Full integration is, in my opinion, the only way that is going to happen.

Will G+ work? Well, it may do, but I think the good people at Google are going to have to work this one out first.

Slowly, slowly, catchy Monkey…

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httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iskB7aDK9M

What this guy is saying is absolutely true. Unfortunately, I too have come across this on many occasions, with some organisations still applying “Tayloristic” scientific management principles to the operations of a business; and attempting to pass it off as “Customer Experience”. At all of the networking events and exhibitions for the call centre industry, for example, I hear talk about Customer Experience Management; however in the vast majority of instances, it is just IT companies simply attempting to sell in some kind of magical solution that will somehow, overnight, solve all of their client’s woes. The reality is usually as far from that as you can get.

Despite there being many millions of pounds spent each year on CRM systems, Predictive Diallers & IVR technology; for many consumers, the Customer Experience is sadly just as bad as it ever was!

I’m not suggesting that, if used properly, IT solutions cannot help create a good customer experience – First Direct Bank is a case in point as to how technology can be used properly to help create a great customer experience . It is, however, the word “help” that is key here.

In many cases, a new system or process is seen as the solution rather than a means to an end. A system should, of course, never be seen as more than just a tool to help create a customer experience. It is not the tool itself, but how it is used that determines exactly how good an experience is achieved.

The main problem with Customer Experience is that most people who claim to work in this area forget the starting point, which, of course, should be the customer. Customer Experience, put in the most simple of terms, is about seeing things from the customer’s perspective; and then trying to make changes to the way that you do business in order that you can both improve the customer’s experience and maximise the business’ profitability.

If it is a new system that helps you to change the way you do business for the positive to both meet the customer’s expectations and improve your profitability, then the tool is being utilised properly. However, in many (if not most) instances, they are not.

Rather than an organisation putting their hand in their pocket to fork out on an expensive IT solution, maybe they should just spend a little time walking in the shoes of their customer…

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