Customer Experience OurScore – Page 17 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

November 24, 2020

Tell me what’s happening

I’ve been ordering a lot online lately. Not primarily because of Covid, but because we’re kitting out the extension. I’ve had no problems at all, everyone has been well set up for online sales, and everything has worked exactly as I expected.

Until this last week.

Last Monday, I ordered some coir matting. Ordering was more or less straightforward (once I’d understood the pricing), and I received confirmation by email, setting my expectation for when I might hear more about how my order was progressing. So far, so good.

A few days later, I haven’t heard anything. I call the number in the email. It rings and rings. “It’s late, maybe they’ve left for the day. I’ll try again tomorrow.” The next day I call again. It rings and rings, until finally, the call is cut off. I try again. Again, no answer. “It’s Saturday, maybe lockdown has meant they can’t be there as usual. I’ll try again on Monday.”

On Monday, I call again. Again, no answer. Twice. Three times. I send an email. No reply – not even an automated response.

Now I’m beginning to mildly panic. “What if they aren’t a real business? Should I cancel the order? How will I get my money back? Should I be ringing my credit card company?”

I look them up on Companies House and Endole. All seems OK. “But what if they’ve gone bust? Or can’t fulfill orders because of lockdown?”

I try the head office number on the website. A young lady answers. “I’ll have to give you another number, we don’t handle online sales.” It is of course, the number I’ve been calling. I explain the situation – including my fears. She laughs, “Of course we’re real! But we’re not as big a company as we look online. We’ve been really busy and it’s been a struggle to keep up. I’ll get a message over to the warehouse and get them to call you.”

Sure enough, an email arrives shortly afterwards – “Your order’s on the lorry, and should be with you tomorrow. Let us know if it hasn’t arrived by Wednesday.”

And sure enough, it arrived this morning. Phew!

There are a couple of simple things even a small business can do to prevent this kind of misunderstanding, even if you’re taken by surprise by a surge in demand:

First, immediately, have a message on the warehouse phone that lets people know they have come through to the right place.

Include in your message that if there is no answer it’s because you’re busy. Genuinely busy. Explain why. If you can’t have more than 5 people in at a time, let people know. If you’re short-staffed, let people know, and let them know what you’re doing about it. People are very understanding if you are honest with them.

Second, as soon as you possibly can, make sure the phone gets answered by a real person.

Transfer the warehouse phone to the shop, or use a pay as you go phone answering service. Even if they can’t track the order, they can at least take a message, answer frequently asked questions, and reassure your clients that the business is real, and their money is in safe hands. Messages can be dealt with asynchronously, perhaps at the end of the day when the warehouse has more time.

These two simple, cheap and relatively easy actions will also reduce the number of incoming calls (e.g. my 7 calls would go down to 1), removing the incentive for harried warehouse people to ignore the phone.

The ultimate aim is of course, to make the communication of what’s happening with my order a side-effect of the fulfillment, but don’t wait until that’s in place – if you don’t tell me, your remote client, the real story, I’ll make up my own, and it might be wild.

Online, communicating what’s happening to an order is as important is actually fulfilling it.

November 17, 2020

See what I mean?

As it happens, I didn’t have to wait long for a lovely illustration for yesterday’s principle: “a good service works in a way that’s familiar.”.

Last night, we made the final decision on the flooring for our new extension. A metre of coconut matting in front of the big outside doors, with the bamboo flooring starting after that and flowing through to the library.

I went online to shop around for the matting. It came in 2 widths, lots of colours (black of course!) and could be cut to size. Everywhere I looked it seemed to be around the same reasonable price of £18 – £20, yet every time I entered my desired dimensions, the price jumped to anywhere between £125 to £450. What was going on? I couldn’t work it out. So I asked a chat line.

This morning the answer came “The price is £18 for 0.25 metres – how much do you need?”.

Doh!

I was expecting to buy this flooring the way I buy every other kind of flooring – by the square metre.

I can sort of see where this convention came from (many people only need .25 or .5 of a metre for a doormat), and why with online shopping, every seller adopted it.

But I bet nobody has thought through what effect it has on sales. First, it feels like you are doing something wrong, then it feels a little bit like a rip-off, because the price you see is nowhere near the price you actually pay. I nearly gave up on the idea altogether.

The answer is simple. Make it work like everything else, then let me know how it’s different. In this case, that I can buy less than a metre if I need to.

November 13, 2020

Handrails

Handrails, like good processes, are there to provide stability or support, and prevent injurious falls.

But the most elegant way to descend a staircase is to do so without needing the handrail; the hand lightly skimming it as you go, or if you’re really good, twirling a cane while you dance your way down.

Sometimes, its enough to know that the rail is there, like that blade of grass you cling to when descending a steep, rough hill. It’s not going to hold you up, but it gives you the psychological courage to move.

Good processes, like handrails, support an interesting journey in the right direction, they don’t force you into a single track.

Enable outcomes

The systems and processes we build in our businesses are geared towards the outcomes we seek. All too often, those outcomes revolve around the boss, the board, or the shareholders – making targets, preparing reports, increasing share prices. The real purpose of the business – to make and keep promises for clients – gets lost, even though this is how the internal outcomes actually get achieved.

When you build a business of any size, you need to work through others, and you need to be able to trust that they can deliver as you would, without having to stand over them. I believe the best way to achieve that is to build systems and processes that support people to manage themselves.

In this mini-series, I’m exploring how you can use Service Design ideas to help you do that, using the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as my starting point. Let me stress, this is not a re-hash of the book, but an exploration of how it fits with my ideas for turning a business into a system for making and keeping promises. The book is well worth buying for yourself!

A service is a process that helps a user to do something. Your team wants to share and deliver your promise on your behalf. That makes them users of the services you build.

Principle number 4 is simple, but surprisingly deep. “A good service enables a user to complete the outcome they set out to do.” Even if that outcome is bigger than your service.

The thing to remember here is that your service may be only a step towards the outcome the user is trying to achieve. We humans tend to arrive at a business with tactics: “I need social media support”, or “I need a large screen TV“, keeping the strategy behind it to ourselves “I want to launch a new product“, “I’m building a home cinema.“. Even a large service can be a tactic “I want an extension to my house.” could be a step on the way to “I’m growing my family“, or “I’m sorting my house out before we retire“, or “I’m building a property portfolio as my pension.“

Finding out more about the strategy behind the service your client has requested is key to unlocking more value for them and for you. You know you can help your client achieve the tactical outcome – that’s why they came to you. If you help them move even further towards their strategic objective, you’ll exceed your own promise to them And that creates loyalty and advocacy – even if you never make a sale.

Let me illustrate this with a story. Many years ago, I came across a young woman selling chocolate-related treats from a converted vintage ice-cream van. The treats were cold in summer, hot in winter. They were quirky and delightful, and me being me, I asked her if she’d considered franchising it. She had, and we agreed to discuss it. At the time, I was working with my friend Barnaby Wynter, and I knew he should be involved, so we both sat down with this young entrepreneur to talk about what she wanted to achieve and how we could help.

We talked for two, maybe three hours. We got her life story, her hopes, her dreams and her vision for a new kind of street life, centered around food, fairness and culture. All three of us agreed that franchising the ice-cream van wasn’t the right service for her. We could have done it. It would have been successful, but it wasn’t the outcome she was really looking for. I’m not sure even she knew that before we started our conversation, but she did by the end. That young woman went on to found KERB.

So what does this mean in practice for designing services to support your team?

First off, make sure you include a step right at the beginning of your Share Promise service that enables a team member to uncover a prospect’s overall objectives. This may be as simple as asking “What do you want to use it for?”, or “Why do you need that?”, or it may be a longer and deeper conversation, along the lines covered by a Dale Carnegie sales training course.

Next, cultivate ways to meet more of those discovered objectives yourself. That might mean adding new products or services to your offering, or it might mean building a network of trusted co-providers you can refer someone to. People in this network should be willing and able to return the favour when they are the point of entry for the client. In fact, if you start to recognise that a particular strategic objective is common, you could even create a consortium or eco-system of fellow businesses to deliver the whole package.

The outcome your users (your team) seek is to share your business’s promise, and to keep or exceed it for the people who sign up. That means that the services you design must be focused on the client, and the outcomes they are really looking for.

By enabling your team to enable your clients to achieve their larger objectives, your business will easily hit its targets, have interesting stuff to report to the board, and if that’s your thing, improve your share price.

November 11, 2020

Set Expectations

How many times have you run out of page writing a notice? Or got halfway through a recipe before realising you were missing a vital ingredient? Or partway through a task before realising that you simply don’t have time to complete it?

When you build a business that works through others you have to find a way of enabling them to work autonomously and responsibly. I believe the best way to achieve that is to help people to manage themselves.

In this mini-series, I’m exploring how you can use some of the principles of Service Design to help you do that, using the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as my starting point. Let me stress, this is not a re-hash of the book, but an exploration of how it fits with my ideas for turning a business into a system for makeing and keeping promises. The book is well worth buying for yourself!

A service helps a user to do something. You want your team to share and deliver your promise on your behalf. So treat them as your users and build them services that help them to do that.

The third principle Lou gives is that ‘a service sets the expectations of the user’.

Setting expectations is about making sure that kind of thing doesn’t happen. That’s why easy-to-follow recipes start with the oven temperature, prep time and cooking time, then the list of ingredients. So you can be prepared before you start cooking.

It’s possible to do the same for services, whether they are for your clients or your team to use:

Give people an idea of how long it will take – it could even be a range: “30 minutes the first time you do it, 15 minutes once you’re experienced“. Setting a time expectation doesn’t just help people prepare, it also helps them spot an exception when it’s happening: “If it takes longer than 10 minutes something isn’t right.”
Tell them what props they need to assemble before they start. Include everything they will need, both physical and electronic. This is an especially good idea where the activity involves assembling a collection before traveling off to deliver the service somewhere else. A checklist really helps. You can use the same list to assemble them again after completion. Even surgeons ‘count out’ swabs, forceps and other bits and pieces.

If you build this into the definition of your service, you’ll save false starts, repeated steps and interruptions, and help everyone feel more in control.

November 10, 2020

Easy to find

When you build a business that works through others you have to find a way of enabling them to work autonomously and responsibly.

The traditional way of doing that was to build a hierarchy of management above those doing the work, to supervise, check and adjust how things get done. The problem with that approach is that it’s unresponsive, expensive and actually makes it harder for people to work autonomously and responsibly. And if you are a small business owner trying to do all of that yourself, it can nearly kill you and the business.

The alternative is to help people to manage themselves. For that, they need a framework that supports them, but doesn’t stifle their ability to respond creatively and humanely to emergent scenarios. There are lots of familiar models and analogies for this kind of framework – a map, a blueprint, a screenplay, for example. My preferred analogy is a musical score – what I call your Customer Experience Score – that describes what has to happen and when to deliver the experience you want your clients to have when they deal with you – but leaves the how to the talented musicians you employ.

But how do you create that score?

In this mini-series, I’m exploring how you can use some of the principles of Service Design to help you create a Customer Experience Score that works well, using the principles outlined in this brilliant book by Lou Downe “Good Services” as my starting point. Let me stress, this is not a re-hash of the book, but an exploration of how it fits with my ideas for turning a business into a system for makeing and keeping promises. The book is well worth buying for yourself!

The basic idea is simple. A service helps a user to do something. You want your team to share and deliver your promise on your behalf. So treat them as your users and build them services that help them to do that.

The first principle is that ‘a service should be easy to find’ – even when you don’t know what it is.

Imagine you’re a newbie to your business. How do you find out what you’re supposed to do in your job? Where do you look? What do you look for? As a newbie, on probation, eager to impress, you want to be productive from day one. All too often that means asking someone who is already busy.

So the first thing that might help make services easy to find is to put them all in one place. You could call it an operations manual, but nowadays it’s more likely to be online, and searchable in more varied ways than a physical folder or file. What’s key is that:

everyone knows where to look for it
there is only one place to look for it
there is only one version of it (apart from backups)
it is kept up to date
people can find what they need in it

How can you help your team find the service they need?

The name is a good place to start. Ask yourself: What do clients usually call this service? What do we normally call it? What do experts call it? Are those names the same? If not, what are your options?

A service should primarily be known by one name. Preferably one taken from the client’s perspective. This helps to remind everyone why this service exists – to help the client get the outcome they want – especially if it’s really part of a larger service for the client. You might call it ‘VAT reporting’, but the real service to the client might be ‘Meet Statutory Obligations’. You might call it ‘Management Accounting’, but the real service to the client is ‘Control My Business’.

This highlights another important aspect of naming. A service is an activity that helps someone do something. So it’s a good idea to name the activity to reflect what gets done when it works. This name is usually made up of two parts – a verb that describes what happens, followed by a noun that describes the thing it happens to e.g. ‘Draft VAT Return’.

This works at all levels of granularity, from the lowest level – ‘Draft VAT Return’, ‘Approve VAT Return’ or ‘File VAT Return’, up to ‘Report VAT’, ‘Meet Statutory Obligations’ and finally ‘Keep Promise’. The name should tell you exactly where you get to after you’ve completed the activity successfully. You’re there or you’re not, and if you’re not, you haven’t actually completed the activity.

By naming a service or activity in this way, you’ve also met the second principle, which is that ‘a service should clearly explain its purpose’.

Once you’ve arrived at this kind of name, you can make sure it’s findable by any of the other names you identified at the beginning.

With a clearly explained purpose and a customer-focused name, findable by familiar alternatives, you’ll help you newbies get up to productive speed much faster – by themselves. Which should make both of you much happier.

October 23, 2020

Watching other people work

I must confess to having a bit of a thing about phone answering services. Not because I dislike them, but because I think they are one of those things that can really enhance the customer experience when done well.

You can always tell when someone is using an answering service, because you get asked more questions that you often would, and you can tell there’s a process going on. That’s a good thing, something more businesses that answer their own phones should learn to do. It would save a lot of miscommunication.

When someone providing this service does it really well, I have a genuine conversation. I am allowed to ramble a little about why I’m calling (the person I want to speak to knows I’m due to call and why), but they still get from me (not necessarily by asking me) the information they need to pass on the message – my name (including how to spell it), my business name, why I’m calling and who I want to speak to, and finally how they can get hold of me.

I can even have a separate conversation about the fact that they provide the service, which is how I found out who they were.

Its a pleasure to participate in someone doing their job with commitment intelligence and humanity. Its an enjoyable experience for me as customer, prospect or supplier as well as for the person doing it.

That’s why your Customer Experience Score^TM needs to cover everything.

PS the company was Take My Calls. When my current credit runs out, I’ll be switching to them.

October 22, 2020

Playing A Role

I’d heard of ‘The Method’ – a way of acting designed to help actors deliver more ‘authentic’ performances by mining their own emotions – “to plumb past trauma, joy, grief, euphoria, and relive those feeling states each night on the stage.”

Until yesterday, when I read this article by William Justice Bruehl, I hadn’t heard of the person who originally came up with it – Constantin Stanislavski – and certainly hadn’t heard that he revised his ideas in later life.

His new idea was much less emotionally draining for actors. Simply put, the idea is to “study the text and articulate what their character struggles to achieve – the character’s ‘objective’ – throughout the whole play, in every scene, and then to simply note what the character should feel along the way.” In other words, to put yourself in the character’s shoes, and follow the logic of the story they are telling themselves. Different interpretations of the character’s underlying objective will lead to different interpretations in performance – even though the words stay the same.

This seems to me to be a useful and doable approach for non-actors playing a customer-facing role too. A combination of discipline (the text) and freedom (to divine the ‘objective’ of the person in front of me right now), that makes for a more fulfilling experience for both sides.

You need a text though, otherwise nobody makes sense.

PS I recommend Psyche as a source of interesting things to read.

October 9, 2020

What if it works?

What happens if it works?

Every improvement we make to our business doesn’t just change the business. It changes us too. And that is a truly scary thought. What if we don’t like our future selves? What if other people don’t like them either?

We forget of course, that our self has changed with every improvement we’ve ever made, and yet we are the same person we’ve always been.

Composing your Customer Experience Score won’t make you a different person. It will simply enable more of the real you to come out.

And by bringing your whole self to bear on composing it, you’ll do the same for everyone that plays it, and everyone that experiences it.

October 8, 2020

I’d lose control

The only way to scale a business that is built around you is to embed the ‘you’ into the way the business works, so that everything about it reminds your prospects and clients of you, even when you are not in the room.

That means enabling and empowering other people to do what you do, as well as or better than you do it. That isn’t losing control, it’s just putting the control in a different place – into the fabric of the business, instead of one or more people’s heads.

Perhaps what’s really behind the worry of ‘losing control’ is the fear of becoming less important to the business. After all, if it can get on perfectly well without you, where does that leave you, the founder, the originator of the vision? The irony is of course, that the more you dig your actual self into the business, the less able it will be to survive without you. All too often, an amazing little business fizzles out with the life of its founder. To my mind, it’s almost criminal to let that happen.

Done well, composing your Customer Experience Score puts you right where you belong – embedded into the heart and soul of the business, without actually having to be present day to day. It’s not just your prospects and clients that will be reminded of you every time they interact with your business, your people will be reminded too. Even those who haven’t joined yet.

Dale Carnegie has been dead a long while, but the business he founded carries on as world-wide empire, with his vision and philosophy firmly ensconced at its heart.

Isn’t that something worth giving up hands-on control for?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Customer Experience OurScore